The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [31]
“You saw the memorial—the swastikas,” Ina said. “No one was punished. The authorities ignore such things. They maintain the illusion that nothing bad happened. Lukashenko has declared that he admires Nazi order and that we can learn from Hitler.”
Not until the archival material turned up in the mid-’90s had government officials conceded to Minsk’s tiny Jewish community that Maly Trostinets had been a mass murder primarily of Jews. “It is time to tell the truth,” Ina’s colleague had written after viewing the archival documents. “Most of the victims were prisoners of the Minsk Ghetto, along with foreign Jews from the many countries of Central and Eastern Europe.”
The documents also testified that the foreign Jews transported to Belarus in 1941 through 1943 had shared my grandmother’s fate. Nearly all met their deaths at Maly Trostinets. Out of perhaps 80,000 Jews imprisoned in the Minsk Ghetto, “Only several thousands of Belorussian Jews survived,” one report concluded, “and only a few dozen foreign Jews survived.” But the documents concerning Jewish deaths at Maly Trostinets had never circulated in Belarus, and the film Lev made, based on these documents, had been squelched.
“Anti-Semitism,” Ina said. “But this is only one reason Lev’s film cannot be shown.” She cleared her throat. “Second reason,” Ina resumed in her efficient tone. “People aren’t familiar with what happened at Maly Trostinets. It was hushed up.” In Belarusian history, the Jewish Genocide doesn’t exist.” The Soviet government blocked access to information and failed to raise the matter during the postwar Nuremburg trials.
Here was another piece of the story that made no sense to me. What motive could the Soviets have for protecting the Nazis who had betrayed their trust, occupied their land, and slaughtered millions of their citizens? Why hadn’t the Soviets raised the issue of Maly Trostinets at Nuremburg? Why had they protected a Nazi secret?
“Understand,” Lev replied, leaning forward from the back seat, “this was not just a Nazi secret.” He paused and turned to Ina, who was polishing her glasses with a handkerchief.
“The official number of people killed at Maly Trostinets is 206,500,” she said.
“Yes.” I’d heard that figure before, seen roughly that claim earlier in the week, chiseled into the monument looming above the dead eternal flame. Though Jews weren’t specifically mentioned in the inscription, this number presumably included most inhabitants of the Minsk Ghetto, as well as Soviet soldiers, Partisans, and all the foreign Jews.
But according to documents unearthed in the National Archives, Lev explained, human remains in the forest told a far different story. A sheaf of reports dated July 14, 1943, just two weeks after the Occupation ended, described the uncovering of thirty-four mass graves concealed with pine boughs—some of these graves fifty meters long. After measuring the graves’ grisly contents, the investigators concluded that the remains of 476,000 people were buried in the forest around Maly Trostinets, vastly more victims than could be accounted for by the ghetto dead, the transport records, and the estimates of others the Germans had killed in the forest.
“That’s more than twice the official figures,” Lev said, stabbing his index finger in the air. “But the Soviet government prohibited the publicizing of this information.”
“But these were German crimes,” I repeated. “Why would the Soviets want to hide them?”
“Because,” Lev said, “this number also includes victims of the Soviet Secret Service of the ’30s.”
For years before the war,