Maarika Sterling: Fear, Uncertainty, and Courage

Maarika Sterling

This is me with my grandmother. Watching the news the last few days, the refugees streaming out of Ukraine, mothers with their children – I keep thinking about my grandmother.
My uncle was the only one of her five children born in her native Estonia. The war broke out when he was a baby. My grandfather was fighting and she was alone with a baby when she got on the last ship leaving Estonia as the Russians advanced. She didn’t even know where it was going. Having my own children now, I can’t even fathom the fear and uncertainty she must have faced, but I’m also awestruck by her courage. She ended up in war-torn Germany, was outside the city when they were firebombing Dresden. She was eventually reunited with my grandfather in Germany where my father and my aunt were born in a refugee camp. My dad remembers playing in the rubble of bombed-out buildings. When he was five, they got on another boat and came to America.

I know gas prices are high, I know there are inconveniences that we are facing right now, inflation, supply chain issues, it’s frustrating – but it’s not getting on a boat with a baby to escape bombs kind of bad. And I’m not saying this to shame anyone who is bum-med about gas prices – I get that everyone is exhausted and tired and worn down from the last two years and that the sanctions we are putting on Russia are going to drive the price of gas up even higher. It does suck. But in the grand scheme of things, hug your spouses, your kids – because across the ocean, woman are leaving their husbands to fight, carrying their children from bus to bus with no idea of where they are going, where their next meal will be from, in the freezing winter.

My grandmother never saw any of her family again. And it certainly feels a lot like history repeating itself.