Lena Wolf grew up believing that all Germans came from Kazakhstan — until her grandmother Emilia began telling her bedtime stories. They were her first horror stories — revealing a hidden truth about her family’s life in the USSR, a past shaped by silence, fear and survival. Today, living in London, Lena looks back on these stories from the distance of migration itself.

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Her ancestors were among the Germans invited by Catherine the Great to settle in the Russian Empire in the 18th century. Everything changed in 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Overnight, being Soviet German became a crime. Over a million ethnic Germans, including Lena’s family from the village of Blumenfeld in present-day Ukraine, were labelled “enemies of the people” and deported to remote regions of Siberia and Kazakhstan. As “special settlers,” they endured forced labour and lived under a strict settlement regime, while their language, faith and culture were systematically erased. These injustices were never officially acknowledged and remain largely unknown in Russia today.

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In May The Universe Be Your Home!, Lena sets out to recover what was lost — to understand how to love and trust a country that erased her family’s past. Through the interwoven voices of three generations — Lena, her grandmother Emilia and her mother Angelina — the graphic memoir traces a journey through silence, memory and belonging. It is a story about what remains when home is taken away — and how families carry their sense of identity across borders and generations. By telling a story that was meant to disappear, the book gives voice to a silenced history — so it can be heard, remembered, and carried forward.​​​​​

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International collaboration​

I am proud of the international team behind this book. The cover was created by Oksana Drachkovska, a Ukrainian artist who became a refugee herself. The book was written and created by Lena Wolf from London (UK), illustrated by Christoph Heuer (Germany), and coloured by Ester Salguero (Spain).