Ille Liscinski was born in Estonia, but her high school education in her mother tongue had to be cut short, first due to war, then due to immigration from a D.P camp in Germany to Australia, 1948. She already had started to write poetry in her early teens and when she arrived in Australia she had a manuscript of about one hundred poems and two plays in her suitcase. She settled in Brisbane, where she finished a night school course in English. She married a Polish fellow, and raised a family of four. After that, she decided to master the English language fully, and earned a BA degree from the University of Queensland in 1975. For several years she was the media representative of the Ethnic Communities Council of Queensland. She also kept contributing to the Sydney Estonian language newspaper.
To date she has published a poetry book -"Reflexions in Blue" (2002), a children’s book - "Jeff's Best Friend and Other Animal Stories", and a novel -“Gypsy Tap". Her poems in Estonian are unpublished in collection form. She wrote to me that "I still have quite a few of them and I have tried to submit them to three Estonian Publishing Houses in Estonia but nobody has been interested." So the same old syndrome that existed previously here in exile, as well in the old homeland, is still going on. Particularly the stuff that isn't slanted to the Editor-in-Chief’s tastes.
Ille Liscinski's poetry book "Frozen Memories" delivers a clear message. "It's time that the ethnic cleaners // are brought to court // and stamped out" , “... we have as much right to life // as any other old nation // to strive for perfections and enjoy democratic freedom".
We all know that between the Russian Revolution (1917) and the disintegration of the Soviet Union (1991) sixty six million human beings perished in Stalin's Gulags. Likewise, it's known that during the Third Reich (1933-1945) six million Jews were gassed to death in concentration camps. As well, already in the old Tsarist Russia regular pogroms against Jewish people were nothing unusual.
That was the world into which the poet Ille Liscinski was born. She can write an elegy for it and at the same time "present an indictment against the historic wrongs // and cry like Hebrews // did on the banks of Babylon // for their kin and country // with harp and song.” Ille also knows that only the stubborn will helps the Estonians survive. For herself she has a handful of frozen memories left from the kin who were blown all over the globe. She still can remember the queer cargo trains, filled with human beings rolling east toward Siberia.
Her powerful poetry revolves around the injustices of the past. She writes about Stalin, who stamped almost anybody as his enemy, even his former allies. For example the stage director Meyerheld, talented writers like Isaac Babel and Mikhail Bulgakov. He ordered his NKVD men to assassinate Leon Trotsky as late as 1940 in Mexico.
The poet recites "History is bunk, said Henry Ford // Disraeli advised, read no history". It certainly isn't the first time when crimes against mankind have been committed. Anno 1915 the Turks slaughtered one and a half million Armenians who were civilized people. There was rioting in Egypt in Emperor Theodosis’ time, between Pagans and Christians. The historians have estimated "that over nine million slaves // died from heat and suffocation on American slaveships."
Grandeur is a quality that all warlords have chased after and Stalin was no exception. He did it when he massacred 10,000 Polish officers in the forests of Katyn. This item should have been heard of at the Nuremberg Trials, but was hardly mentioned. In many encyclopedias and dictionaries the name Katyn is still taboo, but not in Ille Liscinski’s poetry book. As it is a very memorable poem, I reproduce it here in its entirety:
When Xenophon marched his Ten Thousand Greeks
from Cunaxa to the Hellespont in 401 B.C.
then he saved them from the destruction by the Asians. When the Russians marched the Ten Thousand
Polish officers from the Kozelsk prison camp /
then they were not saved by their fellow Slavs /
but shot near Smolensk in the Forest of Katyn,
I cannot see the historical, or otherwise,
necessity for such an obscene, bloody slaughter?
I forget that Marxists are self destructive predators
who prey on their own kind.
Ille Liscinski knows of the slavic conflict between the Russians and the Polish. So one of her poems is dedicated to Fredric Chopin, who was the true Polish patriot and a figurehead and source of inspiration during the great Resurrection of 1863. She imagines how Russian soldiers, who raided the house of Chopin’s sister, in their ignorance hurled his piano from the second floor down to the pavement.
She writes about others both famous and not, who suffered under Russians. The simple people are not forgotten; the prominent ones are used to make an emphatic point. One such poem is titled “The Wallenberg case”.
Raoul Gustav Wallenberg was a Swede with a trace of Jewish blood in his veins. He was the only one who dared to do something openly about the plight of Hungarian Jews. Dealing directly with the Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler at the very end of the WW II in 1945, he managed to move a few hundred Jews over to Sweden. It happened at the time when the Russians arrived in Budapest and Wallenberg was arrested and sent to Russia. First the Russians denied it, But then, two years late, they declared him dead. Even almost 60 years later nobody knows what actually happened to Wallenberg. It remains the most closesly guarded secret of the former Soviet Union.
This a poetry collection of emotional depth and intellectual passion, addressing the topics of good and of evil, the effects of them on the human spirit, all sparked by the poet’s heightened awareness of our existence in the noumenal world.