My Mother, a War and Me

On the bitterly cold winter’s night of December 4, 1942, Tamara Trampe came into the world in spectacular fashion near Kharkov, then still part of the Soviet empire. In the blink of an eye she was born, right on the battlefront. Her mother was a nurse, a shy 22-year-old and one of the many women serving the Red Army. For this film, Tamara traveled through Ukraine with her German cameraman to visit her only living uncle and some of her mother’s colleagues, gradually picking loose the knots of her unusual history. None of the scenes in this film are staged or scripted. This approach has variable results, such as when we see a hand wiping the steamed-up lens, interviewees being repositioned while telling their story, and Uncle Vanya phoning a friend to enthusiastically exclaim, “They’ll be able to see me in Hitler Land!” He’s not the only one for whom time has stood still since the war. The former colleagues of Tamara's mother, all of them now in their late 80s, shuffle about in dark, rundown interiors. They’ve all kept their medal-festooned uniform jackets, but their economical responses reflect a harsh and loveless life. And just how did Tamara come to grow up in Germany, the sworn enemy of the Russian soldiers her mother tended to on the battlefront?