Aliona van der Horst’s documentary tells an impossibly painful and sad story from the second world war; it is an extraordinary tale, arguably worthy of Boris Pasternak and David Lean. It is presented by Dutch Estonian novelist Sana Valiulina, born in Soviet-era Tallinn and resident in Amsterdam since 1989. All her life, she reveals, she has been obsessed with the memory of her father, Sayar, a cold and distant figure when she was growing up, because for 15 years after the war he had been imprisoned in the gulag and made to internalise a grotesque sense of shame for having allowed himself to be taken prisoner by the Nazis after the battle of Smolensk in 1941; Stalin had told his troops to die in combat rather than submit to this dishonour.
Sayar never spoke about the war, or his postwar experiences in the gulag, but using his diaries and letters, Valiulina has pieced together his staggering story. He joined the Red Army as a teenager, became Stalin’s cannon fodder after Hitler’s invasion and was captured. But crazed with hunger and fear and PTSD, he accepted the Germans’ Mephistophelean bargain: in return for food, he could join their turncoat “volunteer battalion”, wear the swastika of the Germans’ Eastern Legions and fight against his former comrades. As it turned out, these forces were chaotically useless and paralysed by patriotic guilt, so they were redeployed by the Nazis to France where they faced the Allies’ beach landings. Sayar escaped and presented himself to the Americans as a “defector” and a “prisoner-of-war” which the GIs appear to have accepted without asking too many questions. Sayar was in liberated Paris and then shipped out to the UK. But according to the terms of the Yalta conference, Sayar had to be repatriated to the Soviet Union, where a grim future awaited him.
But that is not all. Sayar evidently befriended writers and intellectuals in the camps, became an autodidact, literary enthusiast and compulsive letter-writer, firing off missives to a family friend; she was the aunt of a young woman called Tagira who was to become Sayar’s wife and the mother of Sana herself. An impulsive romantic, Tagira discovered these letters at her aunt’s house; she wrote back and the pair began a remarkable epistolary love affair which lasted 15 years. Sana’s mother consecrated herself to this unseen suitor: the lonely, tortured, vulnerable, self-made intellectual burdened by the injustice of war. (When she finally clapped eyes on Saya on his release at Moscow station, she appears to have been shocked by how wizened and reduced he was, compared with the old photos she had seen; she ran away but finally accepted her destiny.)
We see Sayar’s now middle-aged daughters, Sana and Dinar, travelling up to the frozen north, trying to imagine what it must have been like for him. Van der Horst uses digitally enhanced silent archival footage with a dramatised voiceover of Sayar’s writings; Sana tells us of her agony in trying to glimpse her father’s face in this old historical film. And then in an old copy of a GI magazine called Yank she makes a flabbergasting discovery. An arresting and poignant story from a wartime nightmare that continued silently for years after peace had been declared. The title is taken from Sayar’s own recorded determination in the icy gulag to turn his body to the sun wherever possible: for British audiences it may recall Wilfred Owen’s poem, Futility: “Move him into the sun — /Gently its touch awoke him once … ”
• Turn Your Body to the Sun is released on 26 January on True Story.
