The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [26]
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 community. 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.
“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