Portraits of War: Ingo

Illustration by Emily Sweetman

By Jacob Sweetman:

Not long after Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24th I started writing a series of portraits of Berliners, affected by the war. It was out of my own feelings of inadequacy, largely, realising the only tangible help I could be would be to try to tell some stories otherwise unsaid. 

But the first thing I learned is how little I knew. Whether it was the look on Ingo's face when I asked if Belarusian was a distinct language from Russian, or on Yuriy Gurzhy's face when I suggested that the war had started on February 24th. It had been going for eight years already, he told me, trying to hide his annoyance. Not to mention the influence of the Omsk rock underground from the 1970's, but that's a story for another day.

I have spoken to a terrified Russian mother, a French journalist working on the borders, a Ukrainian musician, and two Germans, one about people of colour trying to flee, and this one, Ingo, a man who fell in love with Belarus a long time ago.As Ingo says in this  piece, we could all do with learning about the cultural complexities of Eastern Europe, and he's right. It's only now we seem to care, to have noticed at all. I hope it's not too late to try.

– Jacob Sweetman, Berlin. 30 / 4 / 2022

Ingo Petz is tired. Friends ask after him, but he doesn't know how to answer them, he's not sure how he's doing any more; he hasn't really stopped for long enough to think about it. He and his Belarusian wife, Alesja, are living in a “kind of in-between world”. 

But for Petz - a journalist with long standing expertise on Belarus, a past working in Ukraine and studying in Russia, and a humbling knack of being unable to turn his back on a part of the world most of us still fail to understand with any kind of clarity - this war started long ago. 

As it did for so many others, too.

The flood of people leaving Belarus since Aleksander Lukashenko's stolen 2020 election has been unending, the need to keep Ukraine and Russia's neighbour in the spotlight, somehow, never more urgent.

He's been working 10 hour days “curating” independent Belarusian press for the Grimme Online Award winning website, Dekoder, since then. And now an amendment to the constitution means that Belarus could become a base for Nuclear weapons, while its mortuaries are reported to be full to bursting with the bodies of Russian soldiers killed in the war.

He's also trying to help get 45 people out of a town 100km west of Kyiv.

“We know so many people in Ukraine. And of course you have no resources and you need to make sure you don't go mad, crazy, freak out, or get too tired. But you try to help,” he says.

He's had friends withdraw away from him, and he understands why. They don't want to face the tragedy of it all. “It's human,” he says. Others have become closer, too, but it's hard. “Sometimes in weak moments I think I want to get rid of all this, it's so problematic.... we are in a kind of... a... never stopping machine.”

Petz grew up in a small town. The son of 'typical working class west Germans', he was largely unaware of politics. But he is stubborn, you can't tell him not to do something, or that it is pointless trying. Like when his teachers said he was no good at writing, or when the university said he'd never be able to learn Russian in six months so as to be able to study it. 

He also likes to tell stories, about people, about places, about underdogs. 

This is what lead him to clamber onto a bus that took him the thousand miles to Minsk for the first time in the 90's. No-one knew about Belarus, and fewer cared. It was just seen as a backwater with few natural resources, dour faces, and this strange throwback of a moustachioed man in charge.

His mum worried, of course; it sounded like the end of the world. But he says he felt like an eighteenth century explorer. 

It was music that helped draw Ingo into a love affair with the country, as it also gave him a reason to learn the language, distinct from Russian. A rock scene was already building up momentum back then. Clever, brave, young punks, singing in their own tongue at last, pissed off at a lifetime's unfulfilled promises, were daring the authorities to try and stop them. 

He fell in love with N.R.M., the Independent Republic of Dreams, at a festival full of Belarusian speaking bands. There was something about the fervour they inspired, something about the fire in their bellies. He says you could feel the energy. That this actually meant something.

But it was also there he saw the first signs of the brutality inherent in the regime when someone shouted 'Fuck Lukashenko' from the stage. 

The police arrested the singer. They then pulled the plugs and waded into the crowd. One of Ingo's friends was one of them, so he joined the group of people heading to the police station.

“We were waiting outside, demanding to know what was going to happen, there were other people gathering there, and the local police chief came out. He was a small fat guy, a typical post-soviet character, you see them sometimes in films. He was a bit drunk, and he was shouting in Russian that he was going to arrest everybody.”

He called them all Satanists.

He laughs at the memory, and it is funny. But at the time - maybe it was because of his youth, or his lack of political understanding, or maybe because he seems to fear nothing - Ingo says he wasn't scared, not really. 

But not long ago Ingo sent me a link to Aliaksei Paluyan's award winning Arte documentary “Courage”, in which a similar scene develops following the 2020 crackdowns. It shows a crowd built up outside a larger prison, this time in Minsk. They are mostly women, smoking and crying, pacing up and down, waiting as the names of the recently incarcerated are read out, erupting into applause when the gates finally open and people with blackened eyes and clenched fists pour out.

But the fleeting joy is delivered with a punch to the throat.

And as the film focuses on Minsk's most influential independent theatre company, we are left with no doubt about the significance of art to all this, of its ability to reach the people and to hold the powerful to account. As it was music that gave him a way into Eastern Europe, Ingo speaks powerfully of the need for it to bridge the gaps between us, to shine a light into lands we consider alien, but that are more like our own than we'd ever imagine.

On Dekoder there is an interview with Svyatoslav Vakarchuk, the Ukrainian lead singer of the band Okean Elzy, a star also in Belarus, but he hasn't been able to appear there since 2020. He has been playing impromptu shows around Ukraine (“like Batman”, as Yuriy Gurzhy says to me later, “he's everywhere at once”) sitting at any piano, playing on any guitar. 

Vakarchuk talks of orphans and of amputees, of war crimes and, darkly, of revenge. And he urges his Belarusian friends and fans to keep going, to oust Lukashenko, to not  allow them to be used in Putin's war. To continue what they've been doing in what Petz calls the “flying universities”, a cross between parties and wakes and public meetings, where the courtyards of the high rises have been transformed by musicians and academics and poets to discuss the future of the country, trying to cure themselves of what Belarusian philosopher and writer Ihar Babkou calls their “post-colonial sickness”. 

Petz calls it a “revolution in progress”. Because a revolution can't be called a revolution until it is successful. 

Then I ask where he was the morning Russia invaded Ukraine.

“At home. In bed. It was four o'clock.”

“Did you expect it?”

“Yeah.” he says. “Not this large ground scale invasion, but still... A lot of people said it was just hysteria, but I thought when looking and listening to Putin's speeches, and how they took troops from far in the east, you don't do that just for manoeuvres.”

A military base had been established in south east Belarus, the shortest route to Kyiv. 

“So I had a very bad feeling, from the beginning of the new year... Then when it happened Alesja woke me up, we couldn't go back to sleep.” 

They both cried, he says.

But that's when he started moving again, from day to day. Trying to help us understand what we wilfully ignored for so long about the cultural complexities of eastern Europe.

He says that he and Alesya had plans to move to Minsk at some point, and failing that to Kyiv, but neither will happen for a while now. He then says that Alesja fears she will never see her parents again. 

A friend of theirs and her daughter have been staying in Ingo and Alesja's flat in Oberschöneweide since they managed to escape Kyiv (he likes it there because it always had a broader mix of people than he found in the Friedrichshain he lived in a decade ago. There's better stories there.) The daughter comes into the room and offers us soft, freshly made apple pancakes. 

She needs to practice her English, she says, because they'll be moving on to Ireland next week, though she's never been there before. 

Her Mum and Alesja  follow her in, bringing a bottle of champagne, a smile on their faces despite everything. Alesja says that the worst of times is the perfect time to drink champagne and Ingo nods.

It's hard to disagree.

***

Editor’s Note: Jacob is currently looking for an outlet for the entire series of portraits he has collected. We feel extremely privileged to have been given the opportunity to publish the first, and we hope that someone reading this can help bring the entire collection out into the world. If you are such a person, please let us know and we’ll put you in contact.

Jacob Sweetman is a writer and sports journalist, at home in Berlin. His work has appeared in 11Freunde, The Guardian, The Berliner Zeitung, Wisden amongst others. His writing about 1.FC Union Berlin can be mostly found here and he has a website here

Emily Sweetman is an illustrator, at home in Berlin. She is a genius, and her work can be seen here