The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [29]
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