Helene Lauenburger
During her school years in Bremerhaven, Helene Schira (now Lauenburger) was regarded as a Russian; nowadays, many of her colleagues know little about her background. However, Helene herself has no memories of her time in the small town of Alexandrowskij near Novosibirsk in Russia. In 1992, at the age of three, she came to Germany with two older siblings, her parents, and her grandparents. Her aunt, who had traveled some time earlier, was already living there with her family. After a short stay in Schöneburg, the family was accommodated in an empty barracks in Bremerhaven. They were then assigned a temporary apartment in a house measuring 130 square meters, sharing it with two other families, and eventually were allowed to move into their own apartment on Ferdinand-Lassalle-Strasse, where many “late settlers” from the former USSR live. Helene’s grandmother attends events aimed at ethnic Germans at the Lukaskirche congregation, and her father works in assembly. Helene attends secondary school in Bremerhaven, completes her vocational baccalaureate, and subsequently starts working at the district court in Bremerhaven-Lehe. Helene, who was still called Lena in Russia, gradually learns her Siberian-Russian-German family history. Her grandparents were deported from the Volga region to Siberia. Her grandfather was placed in a Kazakh family when his mother was imprisoned for stealing kolkhoz food for her starving children and spoke fluent Kazakh in addition to German and Russian. Helene’s parents place great importance on learning the German language in Germany and try to refrain from speaking Russian at home. Today, Helene speaks German without an accent, but only fragmented Russian. Nevertheless, reminders of Russia still linger in the family: Not only does she cook Russian dishes, but the Evangelical family also celebrates Christmas on January 7 according to the Julian calendar, which is observed in many Orthodox churches, in addition to Western Christmas and New Year’s. Her two children, aged six and three, love to watch “multiki” – as cartoons are called in Russian – at their grandparents’ home. Their favorite is the hare-wolf series “Nu pogodi,” the Soviet answer to “Tom & Jerry.” Russian is not the only language that Helene’s children know in their everyday life alongside German. Their father, whom Helene has known since seventh grade, is a Sinto. With him and his grandparents, they are learning Romani. Helene has visited her hometown twice. For her, it was a trip to another world, where one could ride real horses, but also had to pour extra boiled water into a bathtub for a full bath, as there is no water supply. A portrait of Helene Lauenburger is one of the faces on the facade of the new German Emigration Center since June 2021.
