The Best Travel Writing 2011

by James O'Reilly

  As a child, you studied death also. After school, you went alone to the funeral parlor near your school and stood with the mourners around the open casket. You liked to be there when it was time for the viewing, to see what death looked like. You approached death methodically, unafraid; death was your rival. Poverty, abuse, disease, none of these had gotten you so far, but you knew that death was a worthy opponent. In those days, you watched it and you mastered it, you looked back at me from the page, smiling with a different kind of hunger altogether.

  Katherine Jamieson is a graduate of the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Programs, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Ms., The Writer’s Chronicle, Meridian, and The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011. Read more of her essays, articles, and stories at katherinejamieson.com.

  CAROLYN KRAUS

  The Memory Bird

  Bearing witness never ends.

  ON A WARM AND WINDY JULY MORNING, WE WERE headed south on the Partisan Highway out of Minsk, Belarus. Marina, the friend of a Jewish Belarusian expatriate I knew back home in Detroit, was nervous at the wheel of the little twenty-year-old Soviet-built Moskveech she’d just learned to drive, its doors wired shut and a red fire extinguisher skittering around on the dashboard. The car was coughing out smoke as we passed a six-foot-high wooden obelisk topped with a red star that marked the Minsk city limit. Farther on, the road bisected a factory district, then passed blocks of gray apartment complexes that had sprung up after the war on the outskirts of every Soviet city. Up ahead, a goatherd urged his flock along the highway beneath a sign proclaiming: “Pay your taxes. You’ll feel great!” Atop many of the telephone poles lining the road, storks’ nests were perched like giant straw hats.

  Packed into the narrow back seat of the Moskveech were Lev, a sixty-year-old self-taught Belarusian filmmaker with intense black eyes and tufts of white hair ringing his otherwise shiny bald head, and Ina, a Belarus State University history teacher who was also curator of the one-room museum of Jewish History that occupied the corner of a basement near the center of Minsk. Jews now made up only three percent of the city’s population, but given that Minsk had been nearly half Jewish before the war, the collection Ina had shown me the day before was alarmingly skimpy: a few dozen artifacts of Jewish life in Minsk that had survived—a treadle sewing machine, a matzo press resembling the wringer on an old washing machine, a lone prayer book rescued in 1944 from the smoldering ruins of the Minsk Ghetto, and a scattering of photographs including one of skulls spilling out from an upended gunny sack discovered at the site of a Holocaust slaughter.

  Lev and Ina made an odd pair: the professor in her prim black skirt and bobbed gray hair; the filmmaker with his rumpled slacks and t-shirt, his solid row of gold-capped bottom teeth, and those two clownish puffs of white hair. Neither Ina nor Lev spoke any English, so for the most part, we spoke Russian, which I’d studied as a college exchange student in Moscow back in the ’70s. Marina translated what I couldn’t express or failed to understand.

  These three would be my guides as I neared the end of a long, winding journey that had led me from my home in Detroit, where I’d raised two sons and worked as a teacher and journalist, to today’s destination, Blagovschina Forest on the outskirts of Minsk, in search of my father’s, my grandmother’s—and ultimately my own—history. The impetus for this journey was my discovery, a decade after my father’s death, of documents in a box of his papers and letters—my first solid clues to the fate of his Austrian Jewish family.

  But in truth, my journey to wrest my father’s history from the shadows had commenced long before I discovered the box of his papers. Growing up with a single mother scarcely out of her teens, I’d known my father only through his letters that arrived, sometimes daily, throughout my childhood. These letters revealed nothing personal about my father. Instead, they were entreaties that I renounce the materialism of my childhood world and pursue what he called “the Spiritual life.” My father’s letters were bitter diatribes against that slough of evil that comprised my young world—the schools, the churches, books; my mother, teachers, friends.

  My father, Otto Kraus, had escaped to America in the ’30s, a few years before his widowed mother and the rest of his Viennese family were exterminated. He’d given his first name at Customs as Proteus, the Greek god of prophesy and sea change. As Proteus, my father had earned a doctorate in German literature at Berkeley and had taken a teaching job at a college in Florida. After the war, in what I imagine to have been a tumult of guilt and sorrow, my father tucked Proteus the Shape-Shifter away behind an initial and, as Otto P. Kraus, embraced the rigid, ascetic personal brand of Christianity that he would preach for the remainder of his life. Denouncing this earthly swamp of mortal error that seethes below a plane of pure ideas became his obsession, ultimately replacing even his class curricula and leading to dismissals from first one university, then another.

  Defrocked as an academic, my father, by then past forty, had lit out for California with the fifteen-year-old girl who would become my mother. The younger sister of one of his students, the teenager had sat in on one of his classroom sermons and had listened intently. A year later I was born, but before my second birthday, my father had wandered off to begin a new life, taking his message to the streets. I’d been in his presence only twice since I was a toddler.

  Both times I’d gone looking for him in the Los Angeles neighborhood where he rented a room in someone else’s apartment, I’d come upon my father scavenging through the alley Dumpsters and piling into his shopping cart the old sweaters, dog-eared magazines, and broken toasters that he would later haul to the Salvation Army. During each of these visits, my father had insisted that, despite the barrage of letters he’d sent me throughout my childhood, given my mother’s worldly ways, he likely wasn’t even my father.

  When I’d tried to engage my father in conversation, he drifted off to that higher plane, and soon—launching into the same lecture I’d received as a child in his countless letters—he was speaking of the life of the Spirit. “This is your true father,” he’d concluded during my last visit, wagging a crooked index finger that, I noticed, matched my own. Soon, he was trundling his shopping cart back down the alley. With a hollowness in my heart, I watched him disappear—a small, dark figure in a cracked leather jacket and his head in a book.

  Soon after my second visit to Los Angeles, my father died. “I want my body burned,” he’d stipulated in a will discovered after his death. “I want my ashes taken out with the trash.”

  For years my father’s instructions had haunted me, and I’d sought in vain to uncover the source of his all-encompassing bitterness. My first real clue was a yellow cable I found in the box of his papers, informing my father that the money he’d sent for a visa to enable his mother’s escape from Nazi-occupied Vienna on a boat to Cuba was forfeit, since Cuba had just then declared war on Germany. The cable, dated December 22, 1941, might as well have been my grandmother’s death warrant. The Nazis were already rounding up Vienna’s Jews. Before finding his papers, I’d known almost nothing about my father’s life in Vienna and nothing whatever about my grandmother, not even her name.

  Armed with the yellow cable and my grandparents’ marriage certificate, the fruit of patient research by an Austrian specialist at the Mormon archives in Salt Lake City, I’d set off for Vienna, where I unearthed my grandmother’s property documents and, eventually, her 1942 deportation record. As I held the thick ledger in my hands, I stared at the one-line notation: “Berta Kraus, destination: Maly Trostinets.” I’d never heard of the place. Returning home, I could locate only a scant paragraph here and there in Holocaust histories describing events that had taken place at Maly Trostinets, named for a village outside Minsk in Belarus, then a Nazi-occupied state in the Soviet Union. Between 1941 and 1943, the surrounding woods had been the site of a slaughter that claimed more than 200,000 souls, including Partisans, Soviet soldiers, at least 60,000 Belorussian Jewish prisoners from
the Minsk Ghetto and—according to wildly varying estimates, between forty and eighty thousand foreign Jews transported east from the ghettos and concentrations camps of Germany, Austria, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Only a handful survived to tell fragments of the story.

  The war ended, the Cold War froze, thawed, then froze again; the Soviet Union disintegrated; the Soviet state of Belorussia became the nation of Belarus. But the evil of Maly Trostinets has remained obscure, shrouded. Six decades later, the largest, most efficient Nazi extermination camp on former Soviet territory appears as little more than a footnote, though it ranks fourth among death camps in Europe in the number of Jewish lives it ended.

  Later that summer, I returned to Vienna with a Belarusian visa, purchased a ticket to Minsk, and boarded a train, setting out on the same railroad tracks that more than sixty years earlier had carried my grandmother on an odyssey that ended in a forest trench near Minsk. Armed with my halting college Russian, I retraced my grandmother’s final journey, determined to confront that tragedy from which—in sorrow, guilt, helplessness or bitterness—my father had turned away. Doing so, I hoped to reclaim a shard of my own buried history.

  “Why do you want to go there?” the round-faced young man sitting opposite me in the train compartment inquired in English when I told him I was headed for Belarus. He smiled, adding matter-of-factly, “In that place is only poverty and dirt.”

  I shrugged. “I have friends,” I told him.

  That was true in a way. Through my Russian neighbors back home, I’d contacted a local community of Belarusian Jews, several of them survivors of the Minsk Ghetto. These expatriates, in turn, had put me in touch with Marina, a forty-year-old Minsk resident who’d invited me to stay in her apartment. As a Jew in an anti-Semitic country, Marina had hoped to emigrate from Minsk to America after the breakup of the Soviet Union when emigration laws had relaxed. But when both of her parents had fallen ill, Marina postponed her trip in order to care for them. Meanwhile, the window of opportunity slammed shut. Emigration laws tightened. Immigration to America became next to impossible. Belarusians could enter the U.S. only by winning permission in a national lottery. Now Marina was likely stuck in Belarus for good.

  My young compartment-mate stretched his hand out to me and introduced himself as Tomás. An affable Czech with blue eyes and straw-colored hair who worked for the Subway sandwich chain, Tomás was bound for Warsaw to break ground for a new franchise, after opening forty-two new Subways in Prague that summer.

  I inquired whether Subways and Golden Arches had sprung up in Belarus, reportedly the most backward country in Eastern Europe.

  “One under construction in the center of Minsk,” Tomás replied. “Already they have a McDonald’s.”

  He pulled out his wallet, extracted a folded paper and waved it in the air. “This work permit. It takes me years.” He frowned. “I go four times, but I always fly out the same day. If I can catch a flight.” The small fleet of Belarusian-operated planes was substandard, he said. They weren’t permitted to land in many European airports.

  “Too loud,” the Czech said. Besides, “Nothing happens in Minsk. Nothing. Economy—worst in Europe.” He shook an index finger in the air. “Money—worthless.” The red and blue rubles traded by the fistful were virtually play money. “No matter—it’s nothing to buy,” Tomás added. “They have a horrible dictator too, this Lukashenko. It’s like the worst days of Soviet Communism.”

  A middle-aged man wearing a plaid tie and shiny brown shoes seated next to Tomás had been listening, shaking his head and smacking his lips noisily while using a jackknife to saw off hunks of a pungent salami wrapped in newspaper.

  “They brought it all on themselves,” he broke in between mouthfuls. In flawless English, he introduced himself as a history professor from Warsaw.

  “Wasn’t it a democratic election?” I asked the professor.

  Brushing bits of salami from his moustache, he laughed. “Yes. Lukashenko won in a landslide. Belarus is a nation of followers. They’re too scared to be without Communism, so they elect this guy, Lukashenko—he used to be the boss of a chicken collective.” The professor lopped off several hunks of salami and offered them around. A brief nationalist movement had arisen in the early ’90s after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, he told me. Belarusian was declared the national language, and the country set out on the road to a privatized economy.

  “But they weren’t ready for the breakdown of the Soviet Union,” the professor said. “For them, independence was a catastrophe. They saw Lukashenko as their solution.” In 1994, elections were held, and Lukashenko received eighty percent of the vote on his promise to recreate a lost paradise. He would revive the old system, restore full employment, provide free health care, and officially reinstate the familiar Russian tongue.

  “Idiots!” the professor said, shaking his head. “They were glad to return to Communism. There’s no elite in Belarus to form an idea-oriented leadership. The Jews, maybe. But there aren’t many now—the Nazis got most of them during the war and the rest fled. Any Jews still there want to get out.”

  Beyond the country’s political and economic problems, Belarusians face a gruesome array of health hazards, the professor added with a look of disgust. Most of the radiation from the 1986 Chernobyl explosion blew downwind from Ukraine into Belarus, contaminating half the country’s soil, possibly for the next hundred years. “Much of the food and water is probably still unsafe,” he warned me.

  As my fellow travelers continued their litany of Belarus’s woes, the train rattled eastward, past the low hills and mistveiled forests of the Polish countryside. Against this graceful backdrop, it was hard to picture Poland’s neighbor to the east—backward, unlovely, and swept by the winds of Chernobyl. I envisioned Belarus as an island set adrift beneath a perpetually hovering raincloud.

  As if reading my thoughts, the Czech stretched out both hands, palms up, his fingers spread in a gesture of futility. “Nothing there but ignorant people,” he said. “The people has disappeared in their minds. They are sheep. No national identity, no history.”

  But, of course, Belarus does have a history, a tragic history of invasion, partition, and devastation that makes its current troubles appear not so much self-inflicted as the working out of some ancient curse. I’d caught glimpses of this past back in Detroit, while trying to flesh out a skeletal outline of events at Maly Trostinets. For four hundred years, Belarus was laid waste by a series of wars before being divided in 1919, the western part ceded to Poland, the eastern becoming the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. During the Second World War, the Germans leveled more than 600 Belorussian villages and killed a quarter of the Republic’s inhabitants. Not only did the Nazi army slaughter most of the Belorussian Jews, Hitler also designated the state of Belorussia as the site of a network of death camps—one vast, spreading graveyard for European Jews. Although the Nazi’s grand plan was never fully achieved, one such site had been established in the forest near Minsk: the mysterious Maly Trostinets.

  Transports from the ghettos and concentration camps of Europe began arriving in Maly Trostinets in 1942, the year noted on my grandmother’s deportation record. Meanwhile, during a series of pogroms and transports to the forest, the entire population of the Minsk Ghetto was liquidated. The genocide ended two years later, when the Soviet Army marched into Minsk.

  About this landlocked country of ten million, the news was still bad. The government was dogged by allegations of money laundering, drug smuggling, and arms dealing to terrorist groups. Yet, in the U.S. the plight of Belarus was virtually unknown outside Belarusian immigrant circles. If Americans knew anything at all about the place, it was probably that Lee Harvey Oswald had defected to Minsk and married a Belorussian before returning to the U.S. to assassinate President Kennedy.

  Arriving in Minsk, I slowly came to realize that the name Maly Trostinets, so unfamiliar to the rest of the world, was also virtually unknown in Minsk beyond the city’s tiny Jewish co
mmunity. Neither did it show up on the area map I purchased at a kiosk in the train station.

  “I’m not surprised. No one knows about it,” Marina told me later when I spread out the map on her kitchen table. She herself could not locate the place, she said, observing that Maly Trostinets does not appear in Belarusian history books.

  A soft-spoken woman with anxious black eyes and curly black hair, Marina had met me at the train station. As we drove off in the Moskveech that had belonged to her father, we shifted back and forth between languages until it was clear that her English was better than my Russian.

  Each time the tiny car sputtered, lurched, and stalled, Marina’s face would redden. Her eyes would brim with tears.

  “I’m not used to driving,” she whispered, as we turned onto Skorina Ulitza, the city’s main street. At first glance, Minsk wasn’t the shabby place I’d been led to expect by my compartment-mates on the train to Warsaw. What I saw through the fissured car window were ’50s-era cinderblock buildings in a clean, though gloomy-looking city, its streets all but deserted at four in the afternoon. In another respect, though, my companions’ predictions proved accurate. Minsk was a time trip back to the USSR, beginning with the scale of everything. Skorina Street was seven lanes wide and lined with hulking gray office buildings, the holdover state-run department store monopolies known by the acronyms GUM and DUM (pronounced “goom” and “doom”), and signs plastered with patriotic messages. One billboard extolled Soviet World War II heroes. Another pictured President Lukashenko with his shiny head and bushy mustache.

  So, Belarus has simply exchanged one bald-headed icon for another, I reflected, recalling my student days three decades back among the streets and squares of the Soviet Union with their ubiquitous statues and portraits of Lenin. But no, Lenin was here too, towering thirty feet tall above the courtyard of “The President’s Palace,” as the executive headquarters was known. Other post-Soviet states might scrap their iron curtain artifacts, but in Belarus, Marina told me, gigantic Lenins still brood over every town and village.