Julia Ioffe: Putin is trying to take over Russia’s memories of World War II

 My grandmother Khinya is not a sentimental woman. But last July 4, she shocked my mother, her daughter-in-law, when she suddenly poured out her memories of that day when she, a girl of 11 living in Zhitomir, Ukraine, fled with her family in a freight train full of the wounded to Kyiv, then to Kharkov, then onto a collective farm in Kazakhstan to escape the blitzkrieg, which, in her memory, appeared as planes swooping low and strafing people in the streets as she hid in the bushes. Her grandmother and pregnant aunt refused to travel, and she never saw them again. (Later, a Russian neighbor said that, when the Germans rounded up the Jews and began to shoot them, her aunt went into labor.) She told my mother that she relived this horror every July 4, quietly and unassumingly, as is her way.