The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [27]
“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