The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [30]
On the warm, blustery morning of Lev’s guided tour, I was again headed down the Partisan Highway, the same road Natasha and I had taken two days earlier. Marina was driving, with Lev in the back seat. Ina the historian made up the fourth in our group crowded into the little Moskveech.
I would finally see the mass burial site known as Maly Trostinets, Lev assured me—the place where my grandmother lay buried. The place Hitler had designated as the first of what was to have been a network of mass dumps for the human trash of Europe. But, Lev added, in the same mysterious tone he’d affected in Marina’s kitchen, it wouldn’t be what I expected. Again, he declined to elaborate, merely repeating what he’d told me that night: “With your own eyes, you will see it.”
Like virtually every Belarusian Jew, Lev had more than a professional interest in the site of the documentary I would view only later. Although he himself had survived the war and the Jewish genocide by fleeing with his mother and sister to Kazakhstan, Lev’s aunts, uncles and grandmother had been prisoners of the Minsk Ghetto, as had Marina’s and Ina’s extended families. Their remains doubtless lay with my grandmother’s in the depths of Blagovschina Forest, which was the basis of our unspoken kinship.
We passed the path to the village of Maly Trostinets, where the old man had told Natasha and me of screams in the night. Before us, beyond a field of dandelions, a fleet of canvas-covered trucks disappeared as they headed into a dip in the road, then reappeared as they climbed up the other side.
“Turn around. Look,” Lev barked as the Moskveech topped the hill and headed into the dip. Peering out the car’s rear window, I saw only the sloping road. “Because of this hill, a boy survived,” Lev said, as the Moskveech emerged from the dip and the dandelion field reappeared. Then Lev told the only tale I’d ever hear of escape by a prisoner bound for the killing ground at Maly Trostinets.
“Two brothers were in the back of a truck. One little boy and his brother,” he began. “The truck was carrying them to Blagovschina. The older boy knew they would be killed. The truck reached the top of that hill.” Lev glanced back over his shoulder. “The big boy lifted up his brother. He heaved the little boy into the field by the roadside, just as the truck started down the hill.” The soldiers in the truck’s cab had seen nothing. The boy was found by Ghetto escapees hiding in the forest. Lev could attach no name to this story he’d heard while gathering material for his film, but if it was true, that dip in the road had provided the little boy his miracle.
The horrors of the Minsk Ghetto had been kept alive by a few thousand survivors. I’d even heard a tale of escape from the tangle of corpses in the Yama pit. But silence surrounded the gruesome events in the forest. There was only this wisp of a story. In the absence of human memories to draw on for his film, Lev had combined scenes from the present-day landscape with a voice-over narration pieced together from interviews with villagers and from a handful of uncirculated documents. These papers had been discovered by Ina’s university colleague in the Belarus National Archives in 1995, a few years after Russia had turned over the records of the former Soviet state to the new nation of Belarus. But when Belarus’s state-controlled television stations had refused to air Lev’s documentary, the silence surrounding the forest killings settled back in.
This silence puzzled me. Maly Trostinets had been a Nazi crime, not a Russian one. The Soviet state that had sometimes collaborated in Nazi crimes against Jews no longer existed. I studied the web of splattered insect corpses on the windshield, wondering: Why would the government of Belarus be reluctant to expose the sins of another country, another era? Why would they deny the physical reality recorded in Lev’s documentary? Why had the film been banned?
“Three reasons,” Ina began