The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [32]
Ina nodded. “Stalin’s police had used Maly Trostinets as a killing place in the forest, where the bodies were easily hidden. This was part of the mass extermination of the intelligentsia whom the Soviets were so afraid of. “
“You see,” Lev said, “the Nazis came to a place already well-prepared for killing Jews. Stalin’s police were at Maly Trostinets before the war and killed a lot of people. The revelation of Nazi crimes would have unveiled Soviet crimes as well. So, at Nuremberg they didn’t broach the subject.”
Whether or not the 1944 estimates were accurate, I thought, if Blagovschina Forest had been a dumping ground for the bodies of political dissidents well before the Nazis arrived, the Soviets had a powerful motive for sealing their files on Maly Trostinets.
Lev nodded. “All during Soviet Power, no one spoke of Maly Trostinets.”
“The Soviet era is over,” I protested. “Belarus isn’t responsible for Soviet crimes, but still, this silence persists. Why?” I turned to Ina. “You referred to three reasons why Lev’s film was banned.” I’d only heard two. First, the documentary would be unwelcome in an anti-Semitic country. Second, the long history of official erasure had kept Maly Trostinets out of the cultural memory. “The third reason?” I asked.
“Yes, there is something else.” Ina glanced at Lev.
“As you’ll see,” he said, “the location of the graves would be an enormous embarrassment.”
Eleven kilometers southeast of the city, we reached the section of Blagovschina hidden beneath the blue stamp on my map. We turned left at an opening in the woods and followed another convoy of trucks with canvas-covered beds, like those we’d noticed out on the Partisan Highway. As, raising clouds of dust, the trucks lumbered along a rutted dirt road through the forest, I heard the faint rumbling of heavy machinery.
Enveloped in dust, the little Moskveech rattled along, past an empty sentry box with a sign reading “Warning! No Trespassing” in red foot-high Cyrillic letters, and into the cool dimness of the forest.
I felt a surge of nausea as the thick, pungent stench hit. My hands went up over my ears as the grating and clanking grew louder.
“Shut your window,” Lev barked, and I wound the handle tight, muting the noise and reducing the stink, just before we emerged from the forest into a vast clearing where we beheld entire mountain ranges of garbage and trash. Ahead, the trucks turned left to labor up a steep path toward the crest of the nearest trash mountain.
Here was my answer. The third reason why the Belarus government still protects the secrets of Maly Trostinets. The Holocaust killing field is now the Minsk city dump.
We breathed in the thick airless vapor and stared in silence as the convoy of trucks crept up the steep incline, then tipped the city’s rotten cabbage and rusted fenders and broken chairs and dead cats onto the graves of Maly Trostinets. Somewhere deep beneath those heaps of trash, along with the bones and ashes of those quarter-, maybe half-million other souls, lay my grandmother Berta’s remains.
We parked near the foot of the nearest garbage heap. Marina stifled a sob. “All those people,” she whispered.
I’d anticipated that I’d grieve too when I first saw the site of my grandmother’s murder, but I only felt numb. The scene through the rolled-up car window felt unreal, like an abstract painting: jagged lines, grids, fractured geometric shapes, mixed with splotches and smeary curves. Muted whites, grays and browns accented here and there by glints of light and blotches of darker hues; the psychedelic swirl of an oil slick on a puddle. Splatters and webby lines of blue around the base of one slope created a mottled effect, like a canvas by Jackson