A Family Madness (7 page)

Again, we knew very young that events are subtle and that “war criminal” is a relative and shifting term. It was a term used with a straight face by Stalin, whose crimes against the Belorussians and Ukrainians make the SS seem almost indulgent. Nonetheless I consider it my last daughterly duty to send these journals to a far continent where they are not likely to cause comment or serve as evidence. I place them therefore in the care of a loyal son. My advice to you is nonetheless to burn them. There will be too much in them about Onkel Willi, and that awful man Bienecke, and all the rest. I remember you in that six months we spent in Berlin at the end. You were in a daze, which was merciful given the level of bombing. But it was not a happy daze. It terrified Mother. Remembering that child, my advice to you is at least to store them unread and at best to burn them. You and I know how there are vipers nesting in those pages
.

I hope you and your children are well. As for me, though childless, I have a loving husband. Father thought him a crook and a child molester, but he has been an honorable man all these years
.

The journals are on their way under separate cover
.

Your—believe me—affectionate sister, Genia

8

R
ADISLAW
K
ABBEL'S
H
ISTORY OF THE
K
ABBELSKI
F
AMILY

I am moved at this late hour to produce a history of my family. My purpose is to mark the inroads the struggle for Belorussian freedom made upon the lives of my parents, and so to create the background for my own attempt to prepare a true Belorussia of the spirit here, on this earth which will so soon become a wilderness. I wish as well to place my father's journals in a suitable context.

Let me say first that in Belorussia itself, in certain parts of Berlin, Paris, New Jersey, where Belorussian exiles live, it would be a matter of surprise that my father ended in Australia. For he was, while still young in political terms, a minister of the Belorussian government and a familiar of the great Belorussian patriot Ostrowsky. Most of his government colleagues would spend their later years in South River, New Jersey, as intimates of various intelligence and counterintelligence bodies—the Office of Policy Coordination for one. Others lived in Paris, trusted employees of the French Secret Service. My father, far from running a research group at a nice address in Rue de Granillers or speaking at anti-Soviet seminars in London or Edinburgh, would finish his life as a guard (retired) on the Government Railways of New South Wales.

When my father came to Australia with me in the late 1940s, it was the theory that he would be a fund-raiser among Belorussian refugees in Sydney and Melbourne. The money he raised in this distant latitude was to stand against the day when the Belorussians would return east to their homeland. Money would also be needed by the Belorussian government-in-exile, still largely scattered around various Displaced Persons camps in Germany. There was always the risk that under Soviet pressure they would be arrested by the Allies and forced to stand trial for various incidents which had taken place in our homeland between 1941 and 1944.

My father was also meant to make friends in Australia of the fledgling Australian security and intelligence groups. There was some contact in this regard. The Australians, like most Western countries, were very frightened of being infiltrated by Communists masquerading as refugees. If the Australian files were looked at, it would probably be seen that for some twenty years my father was an adviser to the Australians on the political probity of this or that Belorussian immigrant.

But the true reason for my father's flight to the antipodes was that by his mid-forties he was already exhausted by politics. It is scarcely too dramatic to say that history had looted him. As well as that, through the incidents I am now going to consider in this history, he had by the time he immigrated to Australia lost all his political influence among those arch and crafty Belorussian politicians and patriots. Even as a teenager I knew and understood this. My father was being retired by his colleagues, sent like the early British convicts to a distance from which he was unlikely to return.

Before I look at the European causes of my family's decline, let me say that my father achieved Australian visibility only once, in 1955. In that year Australian Belorussian communities were visited by an old political enemy of my father, Mikolai Redich. Redich had been dispatched on a fund-raising mission. His task was—as they say in this country—to “ginger up” the Belorussians here. One winter's evening that year, after Redich had delivered a lecture in the suburb of Ashfield and was returning home with my father to Parramatta, a Sydney suburb where he was being accommodated by old friends from the Displaced Persons camps, Redich fell from a train at Lidcombe station, suffered extensive injuries, and died almost at once.

It was remarkable that at the inquest numerous Australian officials appeared to testify to my father's good character. But among the Belorussian community here there was much gossip about the cause of Redich's death, and this event marked the beginning both of my father's decline in health and of our increasing estrangement from other Belorussian refugees in the city of Sydney.

Trains have figured crucially in the Kabbel family history. For all of us they have been vehicles of exile. At the center of my own history I place our escape from Minsk, together with the families of other Belorussian officials, in a train especially provided by the SS. This train rolled out of Minsk some five days before the Russians captured the city in June 1944. I was then eleven years of age. Aides of General von Gottberg, German Kommissar of Belorussia, waved us all off from Minsk Central. My mother was not impressed by this show of SS formality. She would not forgive von Gottberg's crowd for failing to attend the funeral of Oberführer Willi Ganz, her favorite guest among the Germans, her confidant and—with my father's approval—closest friend. Oberführer Ganz had been Onkel Willi to me. His body lay in the Catholic cemetery in Staroviche—it was von Gottberg's fault that it had never been shipped home. It would now fall to the Russians. His mute grave would go unmarked, or even be desecrated. It had to be admitted, as my father, until recently police chief of Staroviche, pointed out to my mother, that Oberführer Ganz had been buried in an autumn of heavy rains and fierce partisan activity, both factors making a muddy hundred-mile journey by von Gottberg unreasonably dangerous. She had not been persuaded however.

The young and highly polished SS men seeing us off from Minsk seemed to imply by the joviality with which they shook hands with our President, Radislaw Ostrowsky (my godfather as it happens), that we were off to some Baltic beach for the summer, perhaps that same one at Puck where we had spent the war's first autumn waiting for Warsaw to fall. My parents of course knew better than that. For them it was not the first flight from that ancient and revered city of the Belorussians. For me however it
was
the first departure. I took it for granted that I would be back after a month or two, that my parents would then continue the debate about whether to keep that elegant house in Staroviche or, now that my father was a Belorussian cabinet minister, to find a large apartment in Minsk.

The train left Minsk Central a half an hour after first light, an hour when those old cities can look ideal and eternal, especially on a translucent June morning. The spires of the Mariinski shone. Until the train began to roll out my mother had been tense, since this journey was parallel to a physically damaging departure she herself had made with her parents from Minsk to Grodno a quarter of a century before. To add to her anxiety, fighting between Russian partisans and German units had begun the day before all over the city, and as a sort of bass to the partisan activity, Marshal Rokossovski's artillery had been heard all night hammering away twenty miles outside the city. Despite all this Soviet bombast Minsk looked itself to me, I mean it looked immutable. There had been some damage to it in the fighting of 1941, some damage by bombing since, but the dawn light seemed to put a gloss over those small defects.
I
knew that Minsk had of its essence to stand forever.

Other cities look like accidents. Here, in the west of Sydney for example, there is a feeling of a great red brick holding camp. The recurring shopping centers could have been dropped from helicopters like military equipment. Here there is no necessity in operation between the earth and what sits on it. Mount Druitt, Rooty Hill, Saint Mary's, Kingswood—so transient they seem to beg a tidal wave and shall unhappily receive one.

Minsk, on the other hand, on the morning I left it in 1944, was the only possible city which could have lain stringlike beads along those bends of the River Svisloch. And so Minsk defied the storm. It was known, even as we creaked away from Minsk Central that morning, that the Germans were leaving wounded men behind to make way for us thousand citizens of Bela Rus. We Belorussians had priority. For the seat I took; for the second one taken by my adolescent sister Genia; for the third taken by my father Stanislaw, the police chief of Staroviche and Deputy Minister of Justice of the Belorussian Republic; for the fourth taken by my mother Danielle, four German boys had had to be left to an absolutely guaranteed death. Four simple lads no doubt too young for politics or for worldviews, the pitiable cannon of their manhoods only so recently trundled forth were to be abandoned to the Bolsheviks. On their unwitting washed-out features would fall the entire vengeance.

As the railway line skirted the airport road you could see the long scars which I knew by then to be the burial places of Jews and Bolsheviks.

“I wonder what the Russians will make of all that,” my father murmured to my mother. He had spent years in the classic Belorussian dilemma—the choice of working for breathing space with one barbarous nation or another.

To flee by train is a far less satisfactory experience than getting out by plane. In the rear of battlefields there is always too much train traffic. Coaches are sidetracked to let priority freight through. A strange feeling always overcomes the passenger when, for a reason no one explains, a train creaks and, after many metallic moans, stops; when the engine stops too, and from the summer woods either side of the line the noise of insects invades the compartment. When this happens and you know that behind you the Soviets are not resting, are devouring townships, then the placid murmur of honeybees can pierce you like a knife. It pierced my mother and became the abiding terror and frustration of her dreams.

It was after the train had stopped for twenty minutes, that terrible determined inertia, and then started rolling with a will toward the Polish border, a border which in childhood had signified to my mother a certain relative safety, that she leaned over to my sister and me. “Not many will be saved from Minsk,” she told us. “When you pray you should consider what it means that you have been saved.”

My sister Genia, fully adolescent by then, cast her eyes up at the luggage rack. Genia would be the one who resigned from the role of refugee earliest. My father and mother could not, for reasons I shall soon explain, ever cease to be Belorussians in exile. Because of certain guarantees I received the day Onkel Willi died, I traveled very calmly. My mother had no such comfort. She needed guarantees of safety and would never receive any. My father, as you will see, was in his manner a warrior.

My mother was a native of the “big smoke”—to use an Australian term. Her family came from Minsk itself. My father was born a little further east, in the provincial city of Rogachev. Both families were clans of lawyers, always political. They lived in a Belorussia which had for centuries suffered partitioning. In modern times we have known only six weeks of independence. During the centuries of servile longing we were a “divine melon” (my father's phrase) divided always between Poland and Russia. Citizens of Minsk used to joke that their city had changed hands one hundred and fifty times in recorded history. The Poles and the Russians may have considered themselves very different, but were like brothers in their intolerance of Belorussian language and culture.

When my father was sixteen years old and was being taught by Polish Jesuits in Minsk, the delightful news of the fall of the Tsar, ever the enemy of Belorussian independence, reached the city. The German Army, who were then occupying Minsk, allowed my grandfather and various other Belorussian patriots to assemble and to found a Belorussian Republic. In its government my grandfather was Minister for Forests. Perhaps he thought he would for a long and tranquil decade govern Belorussia's primeval thickets of spruce and hornbeam, oak and birch and alder and elm. Perhaps he thought that for many seasons he would have the regulation of the deer and the wolves, the lynx, the Belorussian bear and the herds of
Zubr
. Belorussians always thought like that, always believed that in the end the world would allow them to breathe. The Australians are more realistic, I notice. They believe that Asia—the Chinese, the Indonesians, the Japanese—will swamp them. Some welcome the idea, most fear it, but all expect it. The Australians are a young race who think like an old one. Whereas the Belorussians, whose country has rarely been more than a concept, a happy phantasm, have always thought with the dewiness of youth.

My grandfather had no time to assert a forest policy before the Bolshevik Army came down the road from Smolensk. And the Germans, who had played a small game of holding off the Soviets by allowing my grandfather and his friends to form a government, now decided to play a bigger game, German staff officers arranging with the Red generals that as the German Army withdrew from the east, the Soviet armies should flood in and fill the gaps. They hoped that if they let the Reds in, the Reds would keep the Poles busy in the east—such was the ploy. It suited the Bolsheviks' fantasy, which had to do with marching all the way to Germany to link up with rebellious German workers and soldiers. It suited the Germans, who knew the Soviets wouldn't make it to Berlin, that the Red armies were too primitive to do more than waste themselves trying to beat a path across Poland.