Transnational therapeutic memories: Remembering forced migration in documentary film

Framing family histories as difficult knowledge

Several scholars have brought attention to the ways that Eastern European pasts have been told in museums and history books in ways that write difficulties out (for instance, Judt, 2004; Michlic, 2016). The two documentary films considered here diverge from such patterns, by consciously seeking for ways to open difficult pasts, their different facets and long-term operations. Hence, to analyse the particular framing of their topics and these filmmakers’ memory work in detail, I will mobilize the notion of ‘difficult knowledge’. ‘Difficult knowledge’ encompasses representations of social trauma as well as its reception and encounters with it, focusing on how learning happens through such encounters (Britzmann, 2000; Lehrer and Patterson, 2011; Simon, 2014). Originally developed in psychoanalysis and educational studies, its pedagogical operation has later been developed further in museum studies from where I introduce it to analyse film. This theoretical approach has particularly elaborated on the language of mediating difficult histories and how visual experiences can act as sites of pedagogy. Its starting point is the acknowledgement about the ways that learning happens in leaps that can be incited through transformative and affective encounters in the course of which previous understanding of a subject and one’s own subject position is profoundly changed. Canadian psychoanalyst Deborah Britzmann (2000: 37) suggests that the aim of such pedagogical imaginary lies in people learning to understand themselves as ethical subjects in relation to other ethical subjects. In museum studies, particularly the process of witnessing trauma and traumatic images has been at the heart of theorizing such encounters. The approach to films encompassing difficult knowledge assists me in unpacking, in particular, the way how such knowledge guides transformations in the films lead by the filmmakers, but also how it grows to involve people around them.

Both documentaries narratives evolve through conversations with family members and a broader engaged community. In Liebe Oma, these dialogues are held between two sisters and their mother Violeta, who present the main protagonists. The title – Liebe Oma, Guten Tag! – is a reference to the imaginary dialogue the protagonists hold simultaneously with their grandmother Ella, who disappears and reappears, leaves and returns in animated photographs that present a key visual trope in the film signalling her complex presence for the filmmakers. In Memory Is Our Homeland, the main dialogue is held between the grandson, his grandmother, Kazia Kolodziej (born Gerech), and grand aunt, Julia Maciejewski. In evoking the past, it uses archival footage and it is shot in the course of an extended period. With both films focusing on women’s lives narrated by their grandchildren, the films participate in revisiting the dominantly patriarchal perspectives on twentieth-century history, in particular, those related to war and forced migration.

Liebe Oma presents a dynamic quest by two sisters to find out more about their grandmother Ella Fink’s fate during and after the war. Several waves of refugees escaped from war and the Soviet occupation to safety in Germany and Sweden. After escaping to Germany, however, Ella decided to return from the German refugee camp to what had become the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, leaving behind her four siblings and her mother. Guided by a love story, she nevertheless fails to find her pre-war boyfriend after her return, which is briefly explained in the narrative by the exchange of citizens between the Soviet Union and Germany after the war. She settles, finds work and changes her name to a Lithuanianized version, Ella Finkytė. Although Ella goes on to establish a family with a colleague from her work and has two children, we gradually learn about the distress from her unhappy marriage, loneliness and the series of difficulties that her German identity posed in postwar Lithuania. The accumulation of unworked traumas consequently leads to her suicide, while the protagonists were still children. Within the family her suicide was silenced – it was presented as a heart-attack to the outside world and the children were strictly forbidden to talk about it. The sisters set out to fill this silence with information and facts, while they also encounter a series of unworked feelings from the past. I approach their narrative as a story of learning to speak about the uncomfortable and difficult subject of suicide and finding a language to do so in its absence, but also of facing unprocessed mourning from the past. Framed as such, the narrative tackles a widespread problem of silencing suicide. Such a task can be seen as particularly urgent in Lithuania, which has the highest suicide rates in Europe (Gailienė, 2018: 2).

However, when attempting to break the taboo of speaking about their grandmother’s suicide first with their mother, the protagonists encounter resistance and denial. In need of alternative sources, they take a trip to Germany to visit elderly relatives, from whom they unexpectedly learn about Ella’s father’s suicide. Although its exact circumstances remain unclear, he left his wife with much debt and the need to sustain a family of five children, many of whom consequently had to leave school to work. Based on their journey of remembrance-learning the Samulionytė’s are faced with the need to rethink the subject of suicide as a transgenerational problem that has affected their family as well as the difficult operation of German identity in postwar Lithuania. Their findings also urge the sisters to review their own conception of their German identity, in relation to their family’s experiences, which compared to their own experience of being ‘cool’ in 1990s Lithuania had involved being stigmatized as ‘fascist’ during the Soviet-era for their mother and uncle.

The narrative takes a further unexpected turn when the protagonists’ father commits suicide during filmmaking. This changes their position and perspective towards the subject of suicide in profound ways. Their research we encounter in the film consequently becomes a transformative force that leads the sisters to commit to a ‘pact of talking’ in their decision to communicate about their father’s death transparently and openly. This is manifested in the resolution of the film in which they agree to reach out for each other whenever faced with particularly heavy and depressive thoughts. Their reprocessing and remembering difficult knowledge turns the film into a story about coping, sisterhood and seeking for ways to communicate burdens that continue to affect the protagonists across the generations.

Although the narrative of Memory Is Our Homeland is framed differently in relation to the purpose of remembering, Durand, too, seeks to reconstruct his grandmother’s life story, tracing it through oral interviews, family and public archives. Living in the Polish territories annexed by the Soviet Union, their family of four siblings and parents was deported to a Siberian prison camp in 1939. When freed from the Gulag by Stalin’s decree 2 years later, they were first taken to Kazakhstan, then Iran and eventually Tanzania. This wave of forced migration involved 30,000 people who were housed in refugee camps in different African countries; later, they were scattered throughout North America, Australia and elsewhere. Whereas the Gulag experiences of this group were recorded in detail by the British government, their subsequent history as refugees remains little known. The story was shared within Durand’s family and within the emigre Polish community, but in Canada, where his grandmother consequently settled, their experience remains an incompatible memory, which lacks a social frame to render it understandable to others (Van Vree, 2013: 10). The reasons behind this absence and their lost ‘homeland’ remain the main crux of Durand’s narrative, which frames this long-term absence as a difficulty. He goes on to work with oral histories and archival records internationally to overcome it.

The narrative unfolds in a series of interviews realized by Durand with his grandmother and her four peers whose families shared a similar fate during the war, having been deported to Siberia as children they come to adulthood in African refugee camps. We follow the narrator’s quest as he seeks to make sense of their feelings of home and homelessness as well as their paradoxical Polish identity, whereby the territories of their origin no longer even belong to Poland. With the country’s border being moved between 2 and 300 km westwards, the local farmers’ land was confiscated, repopulated and turned into a part of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Durand goes on to look for memories and traces of his grandmother’s journey in Belarus and in Tanzania, and thus one of his challenges becomes finding a common language with the local family who now lives in the area of his grandmother’s farm and to see a future in this place of complex violent histories. The filmmaker unexpectedly loses his grandmother during the filming process, which compared to the previous focus on testimonies consequently turns Durand’s archival research about her life-story into more significant part of the film.

In summary, both films tackle problems whose history extends far beyond the films’ narratives with the filmmakers’ seeking to open different difficult knowledges related to regional history and its revision. Furthermore, both filmmakers understand and frame their family histories in ways that create generally accessible affective encounters and include moments of bringing ‘difficult knowledge’ from their stories to the fore. In doing so, both filmmakers open novel perspectives to their subjects that allow identification beyond regional histories.

Transnational and transcultural memory spaces

Both narratives involve transnational journeys, which are taken by their protagonists in the footsteps of their grandmothers and pursued with an interest in accounting for the long-term influences of these journeys. They return to several original sites in an attempt to find answers and seek either for confirmation of these memories in the case of Durand or for something that has remained missing from earlier perspectives in the case of the Samulionytės. The sisters having grown up in Lithuania have a relationship with most environments of their grandmother’s life, whereas for Durand, most of the memories of his grandmother in Poland, Iran and Tanzania have existed only as stories. In this Durand’s experience resembles what memory scholar Marianne Hirsch (2015) has termed ‘postmemory’ to discuss experiences of the second generation remembering ‘stories, images and behaviours among which they have grown up’ (p. 5). His narrative allows to extend such affective transmission that approximates memory in its ‘affective force and psychic effects’ to the third generation. As such the documentarists engage with the transnational and occasionally transcultural memories of the particular journeys of the two women and their families. I will now look further at how such memories are configured and brought to the fore from the third generations’ perspectives in course of the narratives.

The notion of transnational memory is often used in reference to practices or narratives of memory that extend across borders. It therefore requires the consideration of different contexts, if we are to adequately interpret such spaces, and the paying of close attention to the conflictual ways that such transfers and circulation happens, but also and importantly, it means looking at what does not translate and communicate due to the differing conceptual frames of memory (De Cesari and Rigney, 2014; Erll, 2011; Rothberg, 2009). Rothberg stresses the importance of considering the operation of power in such transnational encounters (Rothberg, 2019: 655), which in this case is particularly important for sketching the contribution the films make to articulating postwar memory politics on an international plane. Roma Sendyka, who has researched the sites of unacknowledged violence in relation to past genocides and people’s behaviour around such sites proposes the notion ‘non-sites of memory’. Whereas such sites do not share any physical characteristics, they are characterized by a lack of information, forms of commemoration and reparations as well as the continued presence of human remains that have not been neutralized by funerary rites (Sendyka, 2016: 700). Imagined and material memories interact in the postmemories of such transnational non-sites of memory and although in a smaller and more personal scale, it proves useful also for considering the spaces for which the location has remained the same, while communities of people and even countries as their markers have been violently changed. Created by forced migration or deportations, such spaces carry different transcultural layers and markers of memories left by their current and former inhabitants. Some of such spaces also remind me of what Philip Ther has proposed to call, ‘lands in between’. He suggests this notion, in reference to the areas that do not necessarily end at state borders, but transcend them and sometimes encompass areas on both sides, in which various influences meet and frequently mingle (Ther, 2012: 487).

A key space of transnational non-memory in such an in-between land in Memory Is Our Homeland is Durand’s grandmother’s home village of Ostrowek, in former Poland. In the course of his repeated search to locate the village, he learns that it has been renamed Astravok and has become a part of the territory of Belarus. Durand goes to visit the inhabitants in the neighbourhood of his grandmother’s family and with the help of an elder succeeds in identifying the location of the house, which is now covered by forest. As a sign of transcultural memory embedded on the site, he learns that the neighbours have continued to call this area in the forest ‘Gerech’, which used to be his grandmother’s family name. The lady who guides them through the forest acknowledges that she only found out about the reason for this name through his visit. Instead of understanding this as disinterest, Sendyka (2016: 691) proposes to understand such unconscious layers of memory as signs of acknowledging the missing past.

Durand’s film showcases how in the case of forcefully moved borders, earlier layers of memories, even those that have been subject to attempted erasure, remain intact in unconscious layers of memory carried on by language. When the filmmaker goes to visit this location, different previously separated memory worlds merge. Their conversations first with the help of a local translator and later in Durand’s own broken Belorussian, becomes a dialogue about the embedded memory of forced migration that are incited by shared spaces. The protagonist’s repeated visits become a source of solidarity and connection with the family of neighbours to Gerech, turning it into a space of exchange of different memories based on new understandings about violent pasts are created.

Durand finds another such complex memory space in village of Tengeru in Tanzania, where his grandmother’s family had been brought by the British government to settle in a community of 5000 refugees. Although the temporary houses built for refugees in Tengeru that their family inhabited have disappeared, the physical sites of transnational memory that embody his family’s experience become a source of new dialogues in the two existing memory sites he manages to find: the former hospital in which his grandmother was repeatedly hospitalized with malaria, and the Polish cemetery. Durand talks to several elders who share their memories of the refugee camp and the solidarity felt with the locals. These interviews are coupled with memories of women who spent their youth in the refugee camp, who share their warm feelings about this experience, especially recalling its ‘safety’ after their harsh experiences of 2 years in the Gulag.

The second memory site, the Polish cemetery, in which the Tengeru camp’s dead were buried, is maintained by a local guard, Joseph Simon, who has inherited his job from his father. The history of the community is kept present in the cemetery in wall texts that recount the refugees’ story. Catholics, Jews and Orthodox Christians have been buried together, testifying to the co-existence of different cultures and religious practices in the camps. This presents a rare occasion in the film in which transcultural memories are discussed and made visible. Elsewhere, the refugees’ Polish origin is presented as being relatively homogeneous, without nuance given to different ethnic identities. Based on her research, American historian Kathrine Jolluck (2001), who is also interviewed in the film, suggests that ‘Polish collectivity did not have room for the Jews, Belarusians and Ukrainians’ (p. 477). Although differences in language and religion introduced inequalities between people, according to Jolluck (2001: 477–478), there was a sense that people could still be considered Polish, based on their loyalty and patriotism.

The social dynamics in the visited sites are often given little attention in Memory is Our Homeland and this is repeated in the absence of Polish or Belarusian historians who could offer another side to the locations that Durand seeks to understand. This pattern is repeated through the absence of Tanzanian or South African historians when discussing the context of Polish refugee camps in Africa. The only historian explaining the processes is US historian Kathrine Jolluck. Another such occasion when historical diversity is touched upon, but not opened up further, is during Durand’s visit to the town of Ruzhany, where his grandmother Kasia had been baptized. In the voiceover narrative, he mentions that the town used to be two-thirds Jewish, the viewer encounters the remains of the synagogue and the Soviet monument on its central square, which is dedicated to the destruction of 51 villages in the area; yet, a further explanation remains missing. Durand’s focus on international politics and in particular on the ways that British television distorted the facts that were publicly communicated about the Polish refugees released from Siberia and its shelving away video footage made in the camp overshadows such dynamics. Restoring the buried and hidden history based on archival material becomes the main goal of the film.

In Liebe Oma, too, memories of forced migration converge in conversations with the protagonists’ mother and relatives in Germany. There are memories that are irretrievably gone due to forced Soviet-era revisions and the passing of a generation of witnesses including the filmmakers’ grandmother, Ella. The sisters visit different locations related to her life in hopes of uncovering new information about Ella’s life. For instance, when visiting a small collapsing house in the village of Bajoraičiai located near Lithuanian-Polish border where she grew up in a lower class family, they encounter many villages in this area left empty. The abandoned German cemetery, that we see the sisters visiting, prompted the idea of researching their family history. ³

Whereas in Memory Is Our Homeland, it is the misunderstood experience of Polish refugees that were managed by Western allies governments by the silencing of sources that guides the filmmakers’ quest, in Liebe Oma, it is the process of uncovering silences within the family that sustained unworked feelings of fear and pain that lead the protagonists back to their grandmother’s wartime escape from Germany. Owing to these differently positioned aims the relationship that the two films take to history-writing is different as well. In Memory Is Our Homeland, inserting the silenced history of the Polish refugees in Tanzania and understanding the reasons behind this silencing of existing historical records during and after the Second World War constitutes the main focus. In Liebe Oma, it is the means for explaining the main subject: maintaining the possibility of holding honest conversations about suicide when encountering taboos, while Lithuanian history itself is present only as a background to the narrative and it appears broadly simplified.

In the background to the Fink family’s fleeing of their home in Lithuania were Nazi Germany’s treaties with the Soviet Union and the Baltic States that allowed ethnic Germans to repatriate from these territories (Ther, 2001: 50). ⁴ However, they decided to flee only in 1944, when it was clear that Lithuania would be occupied by the Soviet Union. The health of this group of expellees raised concerns after their arrival in Germany, with thousands suffering from illness; according to Ther (2001), depression and suicide were not uncommon (p. 56). Although Ella’s decision to leave this reality is represented as being highly exceptional, in fact, nearly 9000 people were repatriated to the Soviet Union from the displaced persons camps between 1947 and 1952 (Fitzpatrick, 2018: 346). ⁵ Although the repatriation process was generally voluntary, oftentimes, the Soviet-run Repatriation Agency used propaganda in the Soviet Union as well as in refugee camps to convince people, accusing Western governments of modern slave-trading practices to provide cheap labour for capitalist countries, which historian Sheila Fitzpatrick (2018: 350) calls a common trope in postwar Soviet rhetoric.

Memory work as therapy

Echoing the work of other memory scholars, literary theorist Alexander Etkind has stipulated that 50 years or two cultural generations are needed to make the work of mourning culturally productive after catastrophic processes (Etkind, 2013: 3). In other words, only after a critical distance has passed from an experience of cultural traumatization that openly talking about trauma and its mourning becomes possible. The two contexts for such work that the films introduce, Lithuania and Canada, present very different sites for remembering the Second World War, but what connects the two stories are the protagonists’ search for answers about silences inherited from their families’ postwar traumas. Driven by curiosity and a will to know, as well as by being emotionally more distant from the earlier generations’ traumas, the authors seek to explain the rationales of these silences and the reasons behind their enduring nature. They broaden and deepen the discussion about the mechanisms of forgetting and remembering in the Cold War circumstances that were available to victims of forced migrations and deportations, in ways that through these individual stories personal and collective memories merge. By doing so, they also connect remembering and its lack with mental health and well-being, which I discuss in relation to the processes of transgenerational remembering in their stories in the following.

The main silence that Liebe Oma engages with is the silencing within the protagonists’ family; pierced with taboos, it is based on the silence of the sisters’ grandmother throughout the Soviet era, more specifically about her traumatic experiences that lead to her long-term depression. As fragments and tangible signs of this trauma that were accessible to the sisters as children, they recall Ella’s distress, which she tried to settle by humming or by circling her thumbs around one another with her fingers crossed while intensely thinking. Although the sisters manage to collect some reasons behind some of these feelings of depression, her life story nevertheless remains largely inaccessible, having disappeared with her death and the passing of her generation.

Instead, it is their search for a language in which to talk about suicide in the Catholic-dominated Lithuania that is the main theme in the film. The suicide rates in Lithuania have remained the highest in Europe, and both church and the Soviet government exerted their power in keeping the subject a taboo. Clinical psychologist Danutė Gailienė, who has researched suicide in Lithuania, connects the reasons for these high rates with the influence of the church and the consequent colonizations during the war when, particularly in partisan circles, suicide was a common tactic to avoid betrayal. These patterns in combination with romanticized depictions in the media, have, according to Gailienė (2018: 4), weakened the religious taboo on suicide, while an increase in atheism also contributed to it, despite the fact that many people returned to religious practices after the country regained independence in 1991 (Gailienė, 2018: 6). Liebe Oma shows how breaking that taboo is connected to bringing painful subjects into family conversations. In a scene in the beginning of the film in which the sisters challenge their mother’s silence, they lay bare the generational differences to difficult conversations between the second and third generation. In an attempt to hide her feelings of fear and pain, Violeta blocks the conversation by claiming that her daughters cannot understand and that she prefers to keep the subject taboo. Yet, it is in such difficult and challenging conversations that each other’s perspectives to difficult knowledge can be expressed and heard, and remembering the past anew is accomplished.

The meaning of identity also presents important generational differences in Liebe Oma. While for the sisters, their German identity has been a source of pride and status in their teenage years, when relatives in Germany used to send them clothes and sweets, for their parents’ generation it remained a source of othering due to Soviet propaganda, which has left trauma to their mother. Violeta starts to cry when recalling her fear as a child about her German identity being discovered; although their uncle Arvidas laughs about it, he, too, recalls the cruelty of children throwing stones and picking on him. These contradictory and uncomfortable memories set the sisters faced with the need to negotiate and nuance their understanding of this identity encompassing experiences of exclusion, persecution as well as to integrate the experience of family members as ‘unwanted refugees’ into their family history. One of the recurring images in the film is of the protagonists visiting graveyards in order to honour the memory of their ancestors, including their grandmother Ella, great-grandfather and finally their father. These visits are symbolic as a part of the process of reconciling with the past in grieving for their ancestors, but also making peace with their suicides. I understand their transnational memory work as therapeutic in that it involves the process of accepting their difficult family history that unfolds in transnational conversations they initiate as ‘their own’.

In articulating the memory politics and its enduring silences about the Polish refugee communities in East Africa, Durand’s film connects personal memories with international politics. His grandmother’s story of deportation remained uncomfortable for the Western allies’ governments for its potential to disturb the peaceful relations with Russia after the war and hence the British government decided to hide it. Archival records allow the filmmaker to detail the ways in which Western governments did indeed have access to detailed records about the Gulag experiences the British government had collected from Polish communities of survivors in Tehran. Nevertheless, it preferred to turn a blind eye to this knowledge, to shelve the video footage about refugees with shot in Tengeru away together with their uncomfortable story. The UNRRA assured refugees that they would not be returned to Soviet-controlled countries against their will and assisted their settlement in North America and elsewhere. When Durand interviews Irene Tomaszewski, the writer discusses the damaging effect that these distortions of history have left across generations. This places thousands of people in a position where their history was erased, with the constant need to situate and renegotiate one’s identity in the western world, where their version of the past remains irrelevant and frequently misunderstood. The title of the film, which refers to this community’s neglected homeland as residing only in ‘their memory’, is a reference to these misunderstandings. Changing this conception underlines Durand’s transnational memory work in the film in legitimizing the life story of a group based on his grandmother’s story for the whole community of descendants. Although Durand’s focus in the film lies on the identity struggle of the generation of his grandmother Kazia, especially with her passing, it touches upon his identity too and as a particular marker of this identity his name is introduced in the titles of the film as ‘Jonathan Kołodziej Durand’ with a Polish middle name of his grandmother.

Gendering the experience of forced migration is another important contribution of these films, as both narratives highlight the role of women in keeping difficult memories of migration alive. In the case of Durand, his conversations with his grandmother that initiate and lead the narrative of the film are cut short by her unexpected death during filming. Other contributors who share their families’ experiences of deportation and as refugees, are women too. The film offers an image of refugee communities’ lives and its organization by women, who keep family lives together and organize schooling for children in poor and difficult circumstances, but who are also willing to share uncomfortable stories about famine, illness and other suffering endured during their journeys from their homes to South Africa. Their memory work contributes to forming transnational ‘therapeutic memories’ and through this they contribute to the creation of new frames in public memory. The films bring to the fore that the processes of remembering in the scope they have undertaken it involve intense memory work and its simultaneous integration to their own life stories for filmmakers. Compared to Hirsch’s notion of ‘postmemory’ which focuses on the acts of transfering trauma to the second generation and particularly the role of images in such transfers and Michael Rothberg’s notion of ‘multidirectional memory’ (2009: 3) which sees memory as a subject of ongoing negotiation and cross-referencing, ‘therapeutic memories’ focuses on the creation of narratives of memory and history based on transnational connections where they do not exist prior to the filmmakers’ memorywork. In the context of both films such memories function as ‘therapeutic’ due to their path-breaking character for communities of people for whom the the Cold War cut away a possibilities of contact and exchange. By transnationalizing their family stories two generations later the narratives of the films maintain possibilities of functioning in ‘multiple directions’, allowing identification based on other forgotten stories that involve forced migration.

Gailienė and her colleagues who have realized many longitudinal studies on the transgenerational impacts of trauma in Lithuania suggest that people do not only pass on only across generations’ trauma and mental disorders, but that they also pass on resilience (Kazlauskas et al., 2017). They connect this in particular with a sense of coherence that the second generation creates about their lives and suggest that this may owe to a more adaptive parental style that the generation of victims used (Kazlauskas et al., 2017: 6). Although developed in a particular context taking into account second generation’s experience with third generations’ transnational memory work in mind their suggestion promises food for thought also for future memory studies for rethinking the role of traditions, familial settings and the particular cultural contexts from which such memory activism grows.

Conclusion

Although Liebe Oma and Memory is Our Homeland present stories of single families’ journeys as refugees they bring to the fore important new aspects about globally entangled histories of war, and its messy and unpredictable circumstances for postwar refugees. The films discuss the grave effects that Cold War silences and stigmas left to their families and communities in Lithuania and Polish diaspora in Canada, respectively; they take an active stance in the processes of their remembering. Whereas the transnational memory work in Liebe Oma contribute to talking about suicide in order to break a widespread public taboo in Lithuania, Memory is Our Homeland re-establishes the memory and history of a Polish community in Canada, which has remained unrecognized and little known in Canada as well in Poland. In this context, Durand’s narrative further unsettles the relationships between notions of ‘deportation’ and ‘forced migration’, which in Eastern European public memory are often understood to be mutually exclusive, since people either emigrated to the Western countries or were deported to the Gulag prison camps. His grandmother’s story that comprises both experiences, raises questions about the processes of institutional forgetting in order to maintain peace for the Western world in postwar circumstances.

The films contribute to historicizing refugee histories based on the aspects that remain little known. I have argued that the memories these films create are the transnational therapeutic memories that open up new perspectives to the understudied histories of these communities and point to the need for further analysis into entangled multicultural and multi-ethnic identities in Eastern European and Baltic regions of memory. As intimate journeys of transgenerational remembering the documentaries not only show what reconciling with traumatic family history could look like but they also bring to the fore its boundaries, especially with regard to language and cultural understanding. Read together these films narratives, however, present hopeful examples, in that they imagine a future where painful and silenced experiences can be shared and remembered.