Manage your dream. Your opportunities are endless - Vlad Rekovski

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for us that we got off the bus, passing the village of Novaya Andreevka, and, bypassing all other transfers, we found ourselves two kilometers from the Karmakkul cordon.

      Many names of villages in this region, like the names of almost all the lakes of the Southern Urals, have Tatar names. The name “Karmakkul” means, for example, “hook lake”. Kul is a lake. The neighboring lake, two hundred meters later, is called Syrytkul, then, two kilometers later, Terenkul, and so on. The reserve itself was formed back in 1918, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin signed a decree on the creation of the Ilmensk mineralogical reserve. In our time, the reserve is called “Ilmensk Mineralogical Reserve named after V.I. Lenin”.

      The walk to the reserve takes about twenty minutes: you need to overcome a kilometer ascent through the first mountain range 400 meters high, and then go down to the foot of Lake Karmakkul. Another ridge of the same mountain range stretches from the opposite side of the lake – Ilmensk. It is more picturesque than the first, and its height is already 650 meters. Lake Karmakkul is connected by rivers with two other lakes included in the reserve. One of the most picturesque and deepest reservoirs of the reserve – Lake Ishkul with several islands – is located in the northern direction, five kilometers away. The protected zone, for which my father was responsible, consisted of the territory from our lake and part of Lake Ishkul with a total length of eight kilometers from north to south, and from west to east – the entire territory from one to the other border with an average width of seven to eight kilometers. The peculiarity of the security zone is that the entrance and entry into the reserve is completely prohibited. For sixteen years the reserve has become my home for me.

      When I came to my parents, I saw that my father’s health had deteriorated. The disease slowly crept closer and closer despite all his efforts and positive mood. The reason for the acceleration of negative dynamics was the fact that Russia stopped purchasing some medicines in Europe in 1993, and instead began to use analogues of domestic production. His condition deteriorated sharply in just three months, during which his father took a Russian-made drug. My mommy told me about this in detail, that’s what I still call her!

      Father’s illness began to progress

      My father had a very rare disease, the source of which has already been precisely established. It is caused by microorganisms that enter the human body when eating fresh wild berries or as a result of direct contact with wild animals. The most dangerous of all animals in this regard are foxes.

      These microorganisms settle mainly in the lungs and liver of a person and begin to multiply there gradually. A person infected with such microorganisms at the first stage, sometimes lasting for years, does not feel anything until the number of microorganisms begins to manifest itself in mild shortness of breath and a slight (up to 37 degrees) increase in body temperature. At this stage, the lungs and liver cease to fully perform their functions, and the person begins to feel it.

      Until now, it has not been possible to find a remedy that could completely cure a person from these microorganisms. Modern medicine has not yet developed such a drug. The existing German medicine allows only to stop the growth process of pathogens and reduce their activity, which leads to an improvement in the condition of an infected person. In 1995, my father spent several months in Hamburg, in a special clinic for tropical diseases, in which there were only four such patients from Germany.

      And then, in 1993, the Ministry of Health of the USSR (Russia) stopped buying this medication in Europe, and the released Russian analogue, after a week from the beginning of its intake, began to have very strong and severe side effects on my father’s body. Our family at that moment had to decide where to get German-made medicines for my father. We found an opportunity to buy it in Germany. The cost of the course for a month was about eight hundred US dollars, and the drug had to be taken constantly throughout the rest of my life. So fate has set a new task for us: how to cope with all this?

      It was not easy for us at all. But we all: me, my mother, my brother and my father came to this decision together, weighing all the “pros” and “cons”. Only one major factor was for me personally: my father’s health! There was no other way.

      Chapter 2. First step into the unknown world…

      Making an important decision

      We decided to leave to live in Germany. At that moment, my mother’s three sisters lived there.

      But what did it mean for me to leave everything and go to live in Germany, another country with a different way of life, different customs? But what about German, which I did not know? What about all this? I had to leave my startup business, my friends, my habits and go into a world still incomprehensible to myself! THIS were my FEARS at that moment, which I needed to cope with.

      I thought that there should also be advantages in this situation, and began to list them: I am young at my twenty-four years old and, if necessary, I can get another or additional education in Germany, which will open up NEW, unknown opportunities for me.

      I thought that for this I need to first learn the language, which will give me some advantages for my future. But that was not all. That time was very turbulent in Russia, my business involved serious risks, my safety was not guaranteed by anything. And it was not clear what Russia would be like in five or six years. My brother Dmitry, who was a year and a half younger than me, he worked in various places and earned very modest income, he had dubious friends and abused alcohol. I thought about him and worried about him. Departure from Russia should only benefit him.

      And my father, to my proposal to leave for him with his mother alone, to Germany, replied that he would not go to Germany without me and my brother, and my mother supported him.

      So, the decision was made, and we started the process of paperwork for the exit. Earlier in the family we did not speak at all about the fact that we have relatives abroad. Mom’s older sister went abroad in the seventies. She and her mother rarely corresponded, since in the USSR, living behind the “Iron Curtain”, it was dangerous to have relatives abroad. This could have far-reaching consequences – such a fact could significantly limit the choice of profession, career growth, self-realization as a leader.

      But by that time, in 1993, all three of my mother’s sisters had already lived in Germany. My mother was German by birth, she was from those Germans who moved to the Volga region at the invitation of Tsarina Catherine II in the 16th century from Schlesia, the eastern part of Germany. Today these lands are part of Poland.

      Russian Germans. Generational history

      Immigrants from Germany during the time of Catherine II received land and could engage in agriculture. As a result, whole German villages with German schools, beautiful houses and good roads were formed in four hundred years. The inhabitants of such villages spoke only German, and this was their own little world for them. When we were about to move to Germany, we did not know that such villages existed in southern Russia.

      Before the revolution, my ancestors owned a large farm, which in 1917 was taken away and passed into the possession of Soviet collective farms, and my great-grandfather named Rekovsky was shot by the Bolsheviks. But this was not the end of the ordeal for the Rekovsky family, as well as for many other Volga region Germans. 1941 came, the Great Patriotic War with fascist Germany began. At night, the entire village was surrounded by special services, and an order was given to evacuate the entire population. People could only take with them documents, which were later seized by the NKVD, and some clothes and food. All were put into a cargo train at the nearest station and taken to, but where – it is not known. These frightened people did not know how long they would take them and what awaited them ahead. And they faced difficult trials ahead: complete poverty, death of relatives from hunger or from work in the Gulag and “labor camps”.

      The echelon reached its destination in about a week, it was the city of Novosibirsk. The people were put into

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