• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 909 0

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