The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [28]
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 German camp or the convoys of human cargo passing by on the highway sixty years back,