My Mother, a War and Me

December 1942. A snowfield behind the Soviet lines in WW II. This is where my Ukrainian mother gave birth to me. She was a nurse in the Red Army back then. She never talked about the war. ”Leave me alone”, she used to say. Two years before she died, however, we began to talk in front of the camera. I took this footage when I went back to Ukraine, along with many questions. What was it like to be a young woman, then mother, in the Soviet Army?