The struggle to grieve
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Fotograf: Ingrid Eißele
On the morning of March 11, 2009, Viktorija said goodbye to her parents and headed off to join class 10 D at the Albertville School in Winnenden. “Just a quick bye-bye, as usual,” they say. She was supposed to play the Moonlight Sonata for her piano teacher that afternoon. But by then she was dead, shot by Tim K. She was sixteen and a half. They played the Moonlight Sonata at her funeral.
Jurij Minasenko, his wife Lena and their daughter Viktorija, not yet two years old, came to Germany from the Ukraine in 1994. They wanted her to have a better life. He had been a psychiatrist, she a nurse in the hospital in Lugansk. They arrived with two suitcases. “She was small, we were young, and we had the feeling we had nothing to lose,” Minasenko says. “We didn’t know much about German culture or mentality, but we thought we would give her a future.”
For them, learning German was a struggle. But Viktorija quickly assimilated. Minasenko was soon able to work as a physician and his wife as a pharmaceutical consultant, and their daughter became a self-confident young woman. With four languages and the Cyrillic alphabet at her command, she hoped to join the foreign service. Her musical gifts were undisputed.
After Viktorija left for school, Jurij turned on the PC and Lena caught a bus to the railroad station for an appointment in Stuttgart. She began to wonder why there were so many police cars and ambulances converging on the town. Viktorija was already dead . . . .