The Best Travel Writing 2011

by James O'Reilly

  “Do you like it?” Marina kept asking, her dark eyes begging for reassurance. I insisted I did like it. Eighty percent of its buildings destroyed during the war, Minsk had reemerged as an orderly modern city. But like Marina herself, with her apologies and her pleas for approval, the place felt abandoned. Marina parked the car before a wedding-cake-shaped “Stalin Gothic” building. Cradling my arm, she conducted me to a sundial enshrined in the center of a marble fountain in the building’s courtyard.

  “Here you can see the distance to everywhere,” she said.

  Etched around the sundial’s face were arrows pointing toward the major cities of the old USSR and indicating their distance from this deserted sidewalk in central Minsk: “Kiev, 573 km,” “Moscow 700 km.” The implication that the former Empire constituted the world made the city feel even more lost. Back home when I’d told people I was headed for Belarus, their eyes would go blank.

  “Belarus?” they’d say. “Where’s that?”

  “Is that a country?”

  “Is it in Russia?”

  Further on, Marina stopped the car to show me Minsk’s only Holocaust memorial where it stood at the edge of a ravine surrounded by maple, chestnut and linden trees. This was the site of a particularly ghastly pogrom known as “Yama,” or “the pit” that was carried out in March of 1942. Replaying Babi Yar, the infamous massacre of Ukrainian Jews that had taken place only six months earlier, the Nazis rounded up 5,000 Jews from the Minsk Ghetto, marched them to the edge of this ravine, ordered them to remove their ragged clothes, then shot them or shoved them over the drop to be buried alive as bulldozers filled up the valley.

  Had my grandmother been among those murdered at Yama, I wondered? A fenced-off section of the Ghetto had been reserved for a portion of foreign Jews who were not killed immediately. “It was very terrible for these foreign Jews,” a Belarusian survivor named Galina had told me back in Detroit. “They didn’t know Russian. They couldn’t speak to the guards. They couldn’t speak to anyone.” The foreign Jews would stand, mute and starving, arms extended through the barbed wire that separated them from the larger Ghetto. “They held out watches, rings, handkerchiefs, shawls. They tried to exchange anything for food.” One woman put gold earrings in Galina’s hand. “She didn’t realize that we, too, had no food.” In winter, Galina had seen the bodies of foreign Jews beyond the barbed wire, frozen and stacked like lumber. “Some of them killed themselves,” she remembered. “After a while, we started thinking it was better to be a Russian Jew.”

  As I thought of that scene from the past, I made out the pale ghost of a swastika on the black marble menorah commemorating the Yama bloodbath. Vandals, probably members of Belarus’ flourishing neo-Nazi movement, had spray-painted it here only last month, Marina said. Elsewhere on the monument, they had scrawled: “Holocaust Now,” and “Death to Jews.”

  Incidents of neo-Nazi vandalism had increased in recent years, Marina told me. Earlier, a 30-liter can of white paint had been splattered over the same memorial. Leaflets accusing Jews of crimes against Christianity had called for retribution. Anti-Semitic graffiti had shown up all over the city. At Jewish cemeteries throughout Belarus, memorial wreaths were often torched and headstones upended or shattered.

  That night as I settled onto the red velveteen couch in the book-lined vestibule that served as a living and dining room in Marina’s sixth-floor apartment on Kommunistchiki Ulitza (Communist Street), I spotted a globe of the world atop a bookcase. I stretched up and traced the route I’d taken here from Vienna, my finger inching east through Warsaw, then on to the Polish border. But a chunk of colored cardboard had worn off the globe. Belarus was missing. I replaced the globe on the bookcase and scanned the titles of volumes crammed into bowed shelves. There were collected works by Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, and dozens of scientific tomes whose titles I couldn’t translate. Later, as we sat at a table pulled up to the velveteen couch eating dumplings and spiced mushrooms, Marina mentioned that her mother had been a radiation specialist at the National Institute of Energy. She’d worked on the cleanup of Chernobyl shortly after the reactor blew up in 1986, then on and off for years until she fell ill with the cancer that had already spread throughout her body. Marina herself had worked in “the zone’ for several weeks during 1987.

  Recently she’d suffered a bout of breast cancer. Her father had died of thyroid cancer the previous year. No one could prove that Chernobyl was the cause of her family’s afflictions but, Marina told me, “Most of the people who worked there are dead.”

  The next morning Marina and I rode a bus downtown to the Museum of the Great Patriotic War of Belarus, where Marina’s friend, Natasha, worked as a guide. Natasha knew the location of Maly Trostinets and had agreed to accompany me there. As we walked up the museum steps, Marina again took my arm. “I want to tell you something,” she said in her gentle voice. “Natasha is Belarusian.”

  I didn’t understand. Wasn’t Marina Belarusian too?

  “My country—yes. My nationality—I am Jewish,” Marina explained. “Natasha is Belarusian.” This was a distinction frequently drawn during my stay in Minsk. Marina wasn’t religious. After generations of Communism, few Jews are. But ethnic divisions are carefully preserved. Until recently, Belarusian passports had been stamped with the bearer’s “nationality.” The stamp on Marina’s passport had shattered her dream of attending medical school in the ’80s, and she’d found work as an engineer—a meaningless title, she told me, for her job was entirely clerical.

  “Natasha is old friend,” Marina said. “As children, we were in school together.” But, as a Belarusian, Natasha might not understand my preoccupation with the Jewish victims of Nazi crimes. A quarter of the nation had perished during the war, Marina reminded me. Like most Belarusians, Natasha felt that Jews warranted no special place in a hierarchy of suffering. Over and over during my stay, I’d hear people make such statements with no evident malice or irony. “The War” is the dominant historical theme in Belarus, not the Jewish genocide that had taken place in the country’s midst.

  Natasha was a slight, pale woman with thin lips and a severe expression, which turned into a smile when she spotted Marina. We would take a taxi out to Maly Trostinets that afternoon while Marina was at work, Natasha announced in English. We would visit the monument—erected out there in the ’60s, that stood on a hill above an eternal flame. “It’s a lovely place,” she added to my surprise.

  The taxi driver shook his head when we asked to be driven to Maly Trostinets.

  “Ne zniyou,” he said. I don’t know.

  But Natasha gave directions, and soon we were headed south of the city on my first of two trips down the Partisan Highway. As my eyes scanned the fields of purple buckwheat and yellow cornflowers along the road, I wondered: Was this the route along which my grandmother had once been marched or driven?

  Probably so, Natasha said. The old Mogolov Road, renamed Partisanski Prospect after the war, was the only route past Maly Trostinets. A few kilometers out of Minsk, Natasha directed the driver to turn off the highway and wait for us by a marshy field at the foot of a hill.

  Natasha and I followed a rutted goat path up the hill past a splintered signpost that spelled out “M. Trostinets” in Cyrillic letters. From a distance, the pre-war wooden houses of Maly Trostinets, with their vanished paint and sagging ridgelines, had looked abandoned, but as we approached the village, I spotted chickens skittering around the yards and leafy vegetables in the gardens. A pregnant goat lazed in the road. Here and there old people sat on porches or leaned on garden hoes. At two in the afternoon the younger generations were at school or at work, a world away in the concrete city a few kilometers up the highway.

  “Was this the site of the killings?”

  “Nyet,” Natasha replied. No, the name “Maly Trostinets” had come to refer to the mass slaughters that took place, not in the village itself but in several nearby locations.

  I asked some elderly villagers if they recalled the Ge
rman camp or the convoys of human cargo passing by on the highway sixty years back, but most said they’d moved here after the war. One man with white hair bristling from underneath a faded blue baseball cap said his wife had lived here all her life. During the German Occupation, she had told him, villagers often heard screams in the night. But that was all he knew, and now his wife was dead. No one else could tell us anything.

  As we walked back down the hill toward our waiting taxi, I was startled by an ominous, loud clattering—like the rattle of a machine gun. When I turned to Natasha in alarm, she laughed and pointed toward a stand of wiry brown reeds where a white stork stood, its head thrown back, breast feather puffed up, mandibles clacking.

  “This bird brings good luck,” Natasha said.

  With the state of things in Belarus, I thought as the stork flapped its black-fringed wings and glided away, luck was the most its people could hope for. But I kept this to myself. Natasha plucked some reeds and held them out to me. These were the hollow “trostniki” for which the village was named, she told me, adding, “This is the plant of the bible. The baby Moses was found among trostniki.”

  Back on the highway, our taxi passed stretches of birch and pine forest and fields carpeted with dandelions and feathery Queen Anne’s Lace. Had my grandmother died on this road? I wondered. At sixty-eight, she might well have been among those too old or sick to walk, who were crammed into gas vans known in the Ghetto as “dushagubki,” or soul killers. Survivors remembered watching from behind the barbed wire as they passed—black metal boxes on wheels marked with the letters “MAN,” the name of a German truck manufacturer. Their tailpipes were rigged to spew asphyxiating fumes back up into the box.

  Had this been Berta’s fate? Or had she already died before reaching Minsk, suffocated in an airless freight car along the way? Or perhaps my grandmother had been among the multitudes shot at the edge of the long forest trenches discovered after the Nazis’ retreat. I still hadn’t seen those trenches.

  “Where are the graves?”

  As if in reply, Natasha instructed the cab driver to turn off the road, and we entered a clearing. At the foot of steps leading up a grassy hill to a monument sat a stone cauldron the size of a truck tire.

  “The eternal flame,” Natasha explained. But the cauldron held only sand.

  A black marble column atop the hill commemorated “More than 200,000 victims of Nazi crimes—Partisans and soldiers of the Soviet Army and local inhabitants.”

  No mention of Jews.

  “They were local inhabitants too,” Natasha said sharply.

  As I opened my mouth to protest, the clanging of a bell distracted me. A cow was tethered to a nearby pine alongside a meandering path through the woods.

  “The graves were here?” I asked, gazing into the distance where a flock of goats was grazing along the path.

  “Nyet. Nyet.” Natasha shook her head. “This monument is not in the right place.” The actual site of the mass graves was “a filthy place a few kilometers down the road.” Scrunching up her nose, she refused to take me there.

  That evening back at Marina’s apartment in Minsk, Lev, the filmmaker with the wild Einstein hair, showed me the right place. When I again smoothed out my wrinkled map on Marina’s table, Lev’s finger stabbed at the blue mapmaker’s stamp that recorded the city’s population, latitude, and other vital statistics.

  “That’s where it is,” he said. “You think the placement of the stamp there is a coincidence? No.” He turned to me, his bushy eyebrows raised. “They hide the graves, the disgrace.”

  Several years back, Lev had gone to the site of the graves and filmed a documentary about Maly Trostinets. But the documentary had never been shown. State-controlled television refused to air it.

  When I asked him why, Lev sighed heavily. Up went the eyebrows. He would give me a guided tour of the spot beneath the mapmaker’s stamp. “You will not believe it,” he said in Russian, slamming his palm down with a thump on the wobbly kitchen table. “With your own eyes, you will see.” Then, promising to return on Friday, he marched out the door of the apartment. Marina turned to me with the bewildered look she frequently wore. Lev’s combat boots sounded on the stairs.

  On the warm, blustery morning of Lev’s guided tour, I was again headed down the Partisan Highway, the same road Natasha and I had taken two days earlier. Marina was driving, with Lev in the back seat. Ina the historian made up the fourth in our group crowded into the little Moskveech.

  I would finally see the mass burial site known as Maly Trostinets, Lev assured me—the place where my grandmother lay buried. The place Hitler had designated as the first of what was to have been a network of mass dumps for the human trash of Europe. But, Lev added, in the same mysterious tone he’d affected in Marina’s kitchen, it wouldn’t be what I expected. Again, he declined to elaborate, merely repeating what he’d told me that night: “With your own eyes, you will see it.”

  Like virtually every Belarusian Jew, Lev had more than a professional interest in the site of the documentary I would view only later. Although he himself had survived the war and the Jewish genocide by fleeing with his mother and sister to Kazakhstan, Lev’s aunts, uncles and grandmother had been prisoners of the Minsk Ghetto, as had Marina’s and Ina’s extended families. Their remains doubtless lay with my grandmother’s in the depths of Blagovschina Forest, which was the basis of our unspoken kinship.

  We passed the path to the village of Maly Trostinets, where the old man had told Natasha and me of screams in the night. Before us, beyond a field of dandelions, a fleet of canvas-covered trucks disappeared as they headed into a dip in the road, then reappeared as they climbed up the other side.

  “Turn around. Look,” Lev barked as the Moskveech topped the hill and headed into the dip. Peering out the car’s rear window, I saw only the sloping road. “Because of this hill, a boy survived,” Lev said, as the Moskveech emerged from the dip and the dandelion field reappeared. Then Lev told the only tale I’d ever hear of escape by a prisoner bound for the killing ground at Maly Trostinets.

  “Two brothers were in the back of a truck. One little boy and his brother,” he began. “The truck was carrying them to Blagovschina. The older boy knew they would be killed. The truck reached the top of that hill.” Lev glanced back over his shoulder. “The big boy lifted up his brother. He heaved the little boy into the field by the roadside, just as the truck started down the hill.” The soldiers in the truck’s cab had seen nothing. The boy was found by Ghetto escapees hiding in the forest. Lev could attach no name to this story he’d heard while gathering material for his film, but if it was true, that dip in the road had provided the little boy his miracle.

  The horrors of the Minsk Ghetto had been kept alive by a few thousand survivors. I’d even heard a tale of escape from the tangle of corpses in the Yama pit. But silence surrounded the gruesome events in the forest. There was only this wisp of a story. In the absence of human memories to draw on for his film, Lev had combined scenes from the present-day landscape with a voice-over narration pieced together from interviews with villagers and from a handful of uncirculated documents. These papers had been discovered by Ina’s university colleague in the Belarus National Archives in 1995, a few years after Russia had turned over the records of the former Soviet state to the new nation of Belarus. But when Belarus’s state-controlled television stations had refused to air Lev’s documentary, the silence surrounding the forest killings settled back in.

  This silence puzzled me. Maly Trostinets had been a Nazi crime, not a Russian one. The Soviet state that had sometimes collaborated in Nazi crimes against Jews no longer existed. I studied the web of splattered insect corpses on the windshield, wondering: Why would the government of Belarus be reluctant to expose the sins of another country, another era? Why would they deny the physical reality recorded in Lev’s documentary? Why had the film been banned?

  “Three reasons,” Ina began in her professorial voice. “First, this film is about Jews. S
oviets hated and feared Jews. Soviet hatred of Jews was the same as Nazis’, and this anti-Semitism persists today in Belarus in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways.” By “subtle” anti-Semitism, Ina meant, for example, the kind of discrimination that had ended Marina’s dream of attending medical school in the ’80s. “Not-so-subtle” examples included the desecration of Jewish cemeteries and the ominous graffiti smeared across the marker at Yama.

  “You saw the memorial—the swastikas,” Ina said. “No one was punished. The authorities ignore such things. They maintain the illusion that nothing bad happened. Lukashenko has declared that he admires Nazi order and that we can learn from Hitler.”

  Not until the archival material turned up in the mid-’90s had government officials conceded to Minsk’s tiny Jewish community that Maly Trostinets had been a mass murder primarily of Jews. “It is time to tell the truth,” Ina’s colleague had written after viewing the archival documents. “Most of the victims were prisoners of the Minsk Ghetto, along with foreign Jews from the many countries of Central and Eastern Europe.”

  The documents also testified that the foreign Jews transported to Belarus in 1941 through 1943 had shared my grandmother’s fate. Nearly all met their deaths at Maly Trostinets. Out of perhaps 80,000 Jews imprisoned in the Minsk Ghetto, “Only several thousands of Belorussian Jews survived,” one report concluded, “and only a few dozen foreign Jews survived.” But the documents concerning Jewish deaths at Maly Trostinets had never circulated in Belarus, and the film Lev made, based on these documents, had been squelched.

  “Anti-Semitism,” Ina said. “But this is only one reason Lev’s film cannot be shown.” She cleared her throat. “Second reason,” Ina resumed in her efficient tone. “People aren’t familiar with what happened at Maly Trostinets. It was hushed up.” In Belarusian history, the Jewish Genocide doesn’t exist.” The Soviet government blocked access to information and failed to raise the matter during the postwar Nuremburg trials.