AUDIOBOOK THE HEART OF ROSES. Chapter 5. The Nazi and Communist Trauma of Russia

At that time, in 1992, in the nascent Russian Federation, dollars were worth more than life, since university professors earned $20 (twenty US dollars a month), while in Ecuador the salary of a worker was $200, ( two hundred US dollars) per month. Traveling from Moscow to Volgograd by train, for 24 hours, was worth 3 dollars, a bottle of champagne, cognac or vodka, 1 dollar, a lunch or snack in the best restaurant or hotel 1 dollar. But getting food was a feat, you had to stand in endless queues. In one of those queues to buy bread, an old woman who was in line with Veronica and I began to talk to us. -We are lining up like in the war!!-she told us, and she continued, The great war against the Nazis was terrible!!. First they bombarded us with planes, then thousands of tanks, troops, cannons came, and the whole city was in ruins. We lived in the basements, there was nothing to eat! I lost my teeth, because I cooked my blood, so that my children would have something in their stomachs!!. That old woman showed us her teeth without a single tooth, while she told us about her adventures. -We couldn't escape from the city because the Nazis, or the Red Army, led by Nikita Khrushchev, killed us. Stalin ordered that no one back down and whoever backed down would be killed!!. That lasted for months and months, fighting from house to house, every day until finally the soldiers of our army arrived from Siberia. So we lived without seeing the sun because outside the rockets, the bullets, were everywhere. We had no bread, almost like now, so the bread was made half with flour and the other half with sawdust from the wood. After hearing that story, the Volgograd Polytechnic University, where we were going to study how to do business with the nascent Russian Federation, took us on a bus for a tour. The first place we visited was the monument to heroes, on a hill called "Mamaiev Kurgan". At the top there was a statue of liberty, represented by a woman with a torch on her breast as in the French Revolution. Under that monument, there was a building where the names of the thousands of Russians who died in the famous "Siege of Volgograd" were on the walls, where the Germans with their historical cruelty and savagery, since the times of the Germanic tribes, Attila, the Goths, Visigoths or Vandals, were angry with the Russians, until they hit them back. Then we visited the War Museum, near the Polytechnic University, where there was a photographic and documentary memory, and even examples of the weapons that were used. I was struck by the Nazi orders to buy female prisoners, for medical experiments at the HG laboratories that also worked in Ecuador, where they invented insecticides taken from plants such as pyrethrum, scopolamine or the truth drug, which they obtained from the glove, in addition The Nazis exploited rubber, tagua or vegetable ivory, used for uniform buttons, oils and soaps produced by the "Ales" factory, which means Germany Ecuador Society, and balsa, the lightest wood in the world. A few days before our arrival, Stalin's images, previously everywhere from classrooms to parks, his hideous face, were removed from the museum, and from the streets, even from banknotes. The story of the Gulag, the communist concentration camps, of Stalin, and the massacre of Ukrainians, whom he starved to death, came to light. Statues of Lenin were still preserved in the streets, as was his image on banknotes. A large statue of Lenin was precisely in front of the Volgograd Polytechnic University, which in turn is close to a huge weapons factory, which was kilometers long, on a bank of the Volga River, where tractors were also manufactured, and they were called Sabut tractor. While touring the "War Museum", I discovered a photo of Che Guevara. Then I remembered that in my country Ecuador, I was an admirer of Russia, of Stalin, of Lenin, but above all of Che Guevara. He was possessed by his revolutionary ideals, I went to work as a doctor in Esmeraldas, the poorest and most rebellious province of Ecuador, where I met my wife Verónica, who was the beauty queen of this province, we got married at 27 years old, she He accompanied them to work in Cabo San Francisco, in the Muisne Canton, at that time the most remote place in that province, where the humid tropical forest was still present and mangroves abounded. We arrived with another doctor who also brought her family, Dr. Muñoz, who went to fight with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. He had a wife and small children born there. It was a place where two Liberation Theology priests had created the largest peasant organization on the Ecuadorian coast, the "Organización Campesina Muisne Esmeraldas OCAME"