Northeast Minneapolis woman who survived two genocides in Ukraine sees history repeating

Nina Jablonsky, 90 years old but still in the tidy northeast Minneapolis home where she's lived for half a century, is sitting on her living room couch. On her left side, her daughter clasps her hand. On her right side, her granddaughter holds a stack of old photos. All three wear beautifully embroidered Ukrainian blouses, called vyshyvankas.

It is only now — with the emotional cushion of time, the assistance of her granddaughter and the jarring news that continues to emerge from her Ukrainian homeland — that Jablonsky can fully piece together her life's journey. And for Jablonsky and her family, it feels like an especially poignant time, with Ukrainians again under existential threat, to revisit the horrors of her childhood.

"It's hard to understand," she said quietly, in Ukrainian-inflected English, "why that would happen."

By "that," she means any of the three genocides that have shaped her life. She still cannot imagine why humans would do such things to fellow humans.

First was the Holodomor, the Josef Stalin-induced famine that killed millions of Ukrainians around the time Jablonsky was born in a village in eastern Ukraine. It is a miracle, her family says, that a baby survived that time. In school, she got in trouble for defacing a photograph of Stalin, an almost unfathomable act of childhood defiance.

Then came the Holocaust. When Jablonsky was 8, Nazi invaders burned her village's buildings and houses, rounded up her family and took them to work camps in the Dachau concentration camp system, even though they were Christian, not Jewish. Her mother was forced to work at an armament factory. Her father was sent elsewhere, presumed dead. The family survived the Holocaust and the Allied bombing campaign, lived five years at a refugee camp in Munich, then immigrated to the United States and, eventually, Minnesota. Her dad survived, too, although Jablonsky didn't learn this until years later, after her mother remarried.

Now, half a world away, Jablonsky mourns Ukraine's newest devastation: Russia's invasion that some observers — from President Joe Biden to a bipartisan group of lawmakers — call a genocide. For a while, Jablonsky had a doormat adorned with Vladimir Putin's face that read, "WIPE YOUR FEET HERE." But she couldn't stand seeing Putin daily, so she gave it to her eponymous granddaughter, Nina Thueson, a 24-year-old law student at Mitchell Hamline School of Law.

Their Ukrainian heritage has always been important. Jablonsky and her husband built their home down the street from the Ukrainian American Community Center, where her daughters and granddaughters performed Ukrainian folk dances. Thueson loved her Baba's cooking: borscht, or beet soup, and verenyky, or Ukrainian pierogies, and paska, a raisin-studded Easter bread.

Last year at law school, with the war making her Ukrainian heritage seem even more relevant, Thueson took a class on genocide prevention taught by Ellen Kennedy, founder and director of World Without Genocide. Growing up, Thueson never heard details of her Baba's childhood: "You'd ask her about it, and she wouldn't want to talk about it: 'Those were horrible times, and life is good now.' I didn't want to make my Baba sad."

Her Baba mentioned Nazis taking her to Camp Laim, but when Thueson googled "Camp Laim," nothing came up.

Kennedy told her about an exhaustive database of Nazi victims called the Arolsen Archives, with millions of documents. Thueson was excited to fill the gaps in her family's history.

Jablonsky's traumatic childhood caused her to be an overly cautious person. She still doesn't answer the door to strangers, and she has always stockpiled food, fearing what tomorrow could bring. Thueson worried that digging up these memories might upset her.

When her Baba gave her a thumbs up, Thueson got to work.

"Her lifetime is a roadmap of the history of Ukraine, and I wanted to fill in the missing pieces," said Thueson, raised in Stillwater. "She'd been on the run, but the run has kind of stopped. She's safe. Her family is safe. So we can sit and talk about the past."

When she plugged her Baba's maiden name into the archive, Thueson burst into tears: "I found her!" Thueson said. "It said Camp Laim on it, exactly what she was saying."

Through documentation, Thueson was able to reconstruct her Baba's journey from eastern Ukraine, through Poland and into Germany. One document said she arrived in Germany in 1942 via "Sammel Transport," or mass transport. She found her Baba's name, along with 4,000 other pages of names, with a cover page that read, "These Russian nationals were taken to Dachau concentration camp by the Gestapo and executed there." Perhaps, Thueson guessed, the cover page didn't perfectly correlate with the lists.

In the archives, Thueson found her Baba's displaced person's card from Camp Laim in Munich. The camp had a school, a church and a Ukrainian artist who taught the kids; her Baba still displays three of his paintings in her house. Thueson even found a record of Jablonsky's passage to America through the Port of New Orleans; when she showed her Baba a photograph of the USS General W. C. Langfitt, the Navy transport ship on which she sailed to America, her Baba's face lit up with recognition.

Sitting in her sunny living room one recent afternoon — Christmas tree behind her, a 50-year-old Ukrainian folk instrument called a bandura nearby — Jablonsky snuggled between her daughter and granddaughter. They asked questions about a lifetime ago. Jablonsky's memories from Ukraine and from the Holocaust were scattered. She remembers the taste of watermelons from her cousins' farm. She remembers the man, a cattle rancher in Florida, who sponsored her family in the United States. She remembers getting seasick crossing the Atlantic. She remembers her first job in Minnesota, making 23 cents an hour working in the kitchen at the Curtis Hotel in downtown Minneapolis.

"I'm 90 — I don't remember much!" Jablonsky laughed.

Her family presumes she has long lived with post-traumatic stress; that's why she rarely spoke of her traumatic childhood. Reconstructing her Baba's story became a mission for Thueson. She wanted to learn, and she wanted to teach others.

"Stalin, Hitler, Putin — it's happening again," Thueson said. "She's living in her house, she's peaceful, she has us. And now she has to see this all happen again. It's been very hard."

"Our roots are still part of Ukraine," said Luba Thueson, Jablonsky's daughter and Nina Thueson's mother. "Keeping the story alive — it's just so important. You'd think that having people learn about it, that history won't repeat itself. Yet here we are."