A strong young woman talks about life in the last remaining European dictatorship. Courage, pain and hope – the struggle for freedom in Belarus.
AUFGEWACHSEN IN DER LETZTEN DIKTATUR EUROPAS
(Grown Up in Europe’s Last Dictatorship)
by Viktoryia Andrukovič
Heyne/PRH Verlagsgruppe, May 2022
Viktoryia Andrukovič, the Belarusian human rights advocate and political activist, was born in 1994, the year that Lukashenko came to power. She knows her homeland only as a country under the yoke of an increasingly autocratic regime, and she spent her deprived and precarious adolescence there hoping for a better, freer future for her country. An opposition activist both before and after the 2020 presidential elections, she now works with Belarusian NGOs in exile.
In this book, she tells her story – the story of the generation of Belarusians who were born and grew up under the dictatorship, a story about fear, persecution and hope, and the story of the fight for a free Belarus, for human rights and democracy in the face of oppression and violence.
Viktoryia Andrukovič, born in 1994, is a Belarusian human rights activist. For many years, she has worked for Belarusian human rights organisations and NGOs promoting democracy, freedom and justice in her home country. She was involved in ZUBR, a platform established to monitor the presidential election process, has helped victims of police violence in Belarus, recorded human rights abuses for the Committee Investigating Torture in Belarus and engaged in protest movements. She currently helps various oppositional Belarusian NGOs in exile with their work.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41pjLPs2nXL._SX326_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
Travelling is simply wonderful – that joyful sensation of heading out into the big wide world to experience the wholly new, that feeling of freedom and openness to accidental encounters… and it’s not least the ideal chance to experience time, the world and yourself differently. Whether it’s the beauty of old pilgrims’ ways in Scandinavia or dark alleyways in Cairo, the effortlessness of the flip-flop-wearing guides to Guatemala’s Atitlán volcano, the dogs dozing idly in the Portuguese sun, nights in Blackpool or Tokyo …
It’s a given that, as far as work is concerned, nothing these days is a given. The Second Machine Age of self-teaching computers and robots will revolutionise not only the job market, but also redefine what ‘work’ is in the first place, and why we still do it. What happens when machines do so much of the work that economies no longer need to rely on human productivity? Without the old wage labour society of the First Machine Age, our conception of work as defined by the nineteenth century will become a mere appendix – useless and outdated. The big prize we aim for will no longer be full-time work, but self-realisation, and the raffle tickets will change accordingly: society will cease to think of employment as the be-all and end-all, and place greater value on high-quality jobs and workplace conditions.
Schleswig, 1872. Emma’s mother is furious when she turns down a proposal from an eligible bachelor. Rather than marry a man she doesn’t love, though, Emma boards the steamship Borussia and emigrates to California. In San Francisco, she accepts a position as companion to a wealthy widow, and soon falls in love with the likeable timber merchant Lars. They get married and plan to start a family, and Emma goes to live with him on Humbolt Bay. Yet their marriage remains childless, Lars is often away on business, and Emma is lonely. When Hans – owner of a shipyard, Lars’s closest friend and best man at their wedding – offers her a position in his office, the two of them develop deep feelings for each other. But there is a love that cannot be.
I’m all alone now, is Jule’s first thought when her mother dies. But when she goes to sort out her mother’s flat, Jule discovers documents that show she was adopted. Jule never felt properly close to her mother, and starts questioning her whole past: their sudden move to the West, losing contact with her father, her sister’s disappearance and her mother’s persistent silence… What would her life look like today, if she’d grown up with her biological family? Would she be happy? Jule knows that she has to find her birth mother to get answers. But she isn’t the only one who has been looking for them all these years…