Journeys with My Mother (21 page)

In the early autumn of 1943, my mother and I, together with the other prisoners working in the hospital, had no choice but to obey German orders. We moved west towards Lida, away from the approaching Red Army, which would either grant us freedom or a place in a gulag. Such was the fate of prisoners of war who, in Stalin's books, were as good as collaborators. The war was in its third year. Here, in Belorussia, unspeakable events were mirrored in the landscape: ruined cities, charred villages, freshly dug graves and barely covered sites of massacres. Europe's heart of darkness. In the war against the partisans, Germans executed entire villages in reprisal. For every assassinated German, dozens and more civilians were killed; gallows became a familiar sight. The corpses of the hanged – pieces of cardboard, proclaiming their crimes, tied around their necks – remained swinging for days, to show the living what would be done to them if they too helped the partisans.

When, at the beginning of the war, the Germans bombarded Lida, the wooden houses at the centre of the city were consumed by fire. Some of the churches stayed upright but nothing was left of the main synagogue, as if in anticipation that soon there would be no one to attend it. Before the war, the town, like Grodno – populated by Poles, Belorussians and Jews – belonged to Poland. Back then Lida was still part rural, part modern. It had brick houses, a few imposing ones, cinemas, paved streets, hospitals, army barracks and a thriving tobacco industry. Woven amongst this were small plots and unmade roads, low wooden houses of intense blue, even orange. For those who lived there, it must have been the centre of the universe.

Since the German invasion, many clandestine groups operated in Lida. As for the partisans, though the nearby woods weren't big enough to offer them long-lasting protection, across the Niemen River in the area of Novogrudok, Ivie and Zoludok lay the immense and virtually impenetrable forests of Puszcza Nalibocka. These forests and tucked-away villages were teeming with fighters of various political hues. The divisions ran mostly along ethnic lines: the Poles joined the AK
²⁹
partisans, the multi-ethnic rest teamed up with the Soviet fighters. A great many partisans hailed from Lida and the surrounding areas. They came and went: to see their families, to get provisions. Mostly, they were on a mission. This was the town where our nomadic hospital finally settled.

Almost at the beginning, and quite by chance, Gurgen and another prisoner ran into local workers who were in contact with members of the resistance. As the need for our escape grew more pressing every day, our group established direct links with the Soviet partisans. The need was mutual: the partisans were forever short of medical materials and expertise; the hospitals were their lifeline. Ola and two other nurses pilfered whatever they could. Valuable goods changed hands several times before reaching the field hospitals in the forest. One could be hanged for passing a single pill or a bandage, wrote Vala. Yet we smuggled much more.

I admire the audacity of those involved and the coherence of the hospital group; I marvel at my mother.

Before we enter the town, our minibus passes a sign:
, its individual letters made of grey concrete, and so large they would dwarf the tallest of men. As we move along the main thoroughfare I can see some of the town, carelessly rebuilt and drab, empty of shops and people, as if the entire population had abandoned it. Yet it is this lack of cheer, the flatness of colour or the absence of it, the sad monotony of the streets, that brings me closer to the past. I have prepared for this day, and have with me a copy of a hand-drawn plan of pre-war Lida, the only one I could find on the internet. The map is marked in Hebrew, drawn from memory, not to scale, and certainly does not aspire to cartographic excellence. The streets still carry their Polish names, its English explanations added later by someone else. Ribbons of railway lines dissect the city into two uneven parts before diverting to their various destinations. I hope the vertical arrow points north.

After hours of deciphering it, with and without a magnifying glass, I have some idea about the city's pre-war configuration: the location of the Jewish hospital, ghetto workshops, fire station, Tarbut school, prison and orphanage. There are a few hospitals, among them is the one I would love to find most of all – the military hospital where my mother and her companions worked. I also have a present-day map of the town. Perversely, given that most streets carry new names, it is useless. We meander in the late summer heat, Tamara, Annette and I, assuming the hand-drawn map is reasonably accurate.

We get disoriented, then lost, which is just as well. We stumble upon a different Lida, the one I liked to imagine back in Melbourne, of small wooden houses with apple trees, rows of yellow sunflowers, weeds and cats lazing in the sun. I would like to say it is charming, but it is too desolate. Belorussia is poor, desperately so, as is obvious whichever way you look. And despite the dusty roads being adequately rustic for me, by the end of the day I am longing for a stretch of asphalt.

We find the railway station. At least we know where we are on the map. It is lovingly restored, quaint, but no one seems to be waiting for anything. Tamara, who in Grodno had loudly expressed her opinion of President Lukashenko, insists we do not take pictures.

By the time we cross the railway line, the afternoon is paralysingly hot, but where the 1940 map marks the place of the military hospital, there is indeed a building old enough and big enough to qualify as one. Annette and I are delirious about tracking it, busy taking photos, exchanging comments. With our snooping and conversations with convalescing pensioners, we must have alarmed someone. Before long, a four-wheel-drive full of police arrives. They get out unhurriedly and lean nonchalantly against the vehicle, watching us. It is time to retreat. We begin to head back, slowly, pretending not to notice. My legs are stiff as I recall the warning: Leaving the country might be more difficult than entering it.

‘I told you,' Tamara mutters under her breath. ‘Someone was bound to call them.'

When, that same evening, Tamara tries to get in touch with a man who works in the museum of Lida, specialising in the history of the
otriad Iskra
,
³⁰
it turns out to be difficult. He is on leave.

Although until now I knew nothing about his existence, I am disappointed not to meet him. I try not to follow the string of her phone conversations.

Tamara, however, does not give up. I can hear her explaining, arguing, pleading, until she gets his phone number at home. No one answers her call and nothing more can be done. Yet still Tamara does not let go. Several phone calls later, she gets his mobile number. One more call and she gets hold of him. Valerii Slivkin agrees to see us the next morning.

In Australia, privacy laws would prevent the disclosure of phone numbers, no matter what was at stake. In Belorussia, where the citizens have many reasons to be suspicious, it is possible to appeal to human sentiment.

The next day, we are ushered into a large room with several desks and one computer. The sixty-something Valerii is slim, youthful, with short grey hair. He has a brisk, business-like manner. I already know he has left his seriously ill mother in a hospital bed to meet us. I am on borrowed time.

Our conversation starts without unnecessary formalities. No sooner have we introduced ourselves and sat down than he begins to tell me about Ola, tracing her journey from the time she escaped Warsaw. He might be short on details but what he knows is eerily accurate. This is unexpected. I think it is astonishing that someone, a stranger who never met her, knows of Ola's existence, let alone what had happened to her. He tells me about my mother's life, including things I never knew. And if I wished to be sure of my mother's ability to remember the past, now I realise how accurate she was.

Although Tamara and Annette are here too, and somewhere on the periphery I can hear doors opening and closing, people going about their work, my eyes are solely fixed on Valerii. I feel quite unwell but make an effort to pull myself together – now is certainly not the time for the drama of fainting.

Later I would try to remember if there was an enormous map on the wall of that room extending from Poland all the way to Moscow and beyond, or is our journey so etched in my mind that my imagination conjures it whenever I talk about our peregrinations?

Valeri Vasilievich does not need a map. Nor excessive explanations, and for this, too, I am grateful. He hands me a paper, which he wrote. It includes the testimonies of a handful of partisans, as well as the NKVD documents prepared at the time. It is entirely devoted to our detachment.

One of the statements records the presence of ‘a four-year-old girl' who was brought to the forest on the night of our escape. Whoever wrote it had no knowledge of to whom, if anyone, I was attached.

I tell Valerii that the woman sitting in front of him is that four-year-old child. Now he wants to hear about my mother's life from me. Yes, this is the long version. I take a deep breath and begin.

It is his turn to be astounded: how could a Jewish woman with a child, a refugee from Warsaw, have survived those violent years? From his perspective, Warsaw is as far away as a different continent. An extraordinary woman, he repeats, and I am flushed with pride and pleasure.

Time has stopped. Have we been really talking nonstop for more than three hours? Something odd is going on in my head. I do not know whether I am confused or enlightened but I can see that Valerii Vasilievich is preparing to leave.

From that moment everything happens with accelerated speed. I am shown archival documents, newspaper clippings, files of Ola and Gurgen. I take photographs of everything that comes my way lest I am not given another chance, without quite knowing what it is I am photographing. There are many questions I would like to ask but for now I stop at two: is the hospital building still standing and where is the
bania
?
³¹

I do not remember how many times I tried to imagine the hospital in which my mother worked as a forced labourer; now with Valerii's help, I am standing in front of it. As one could realistically expect, it's not the one we so enthusiastically endorsed only yesterday. These days, as before the war, it serves as a secondary school. It must have been a standard design, for I have seen school buildings exactly like it in Warsaw.

During the war, this massive three-storey edifice, together with several bungalows and a few more buildings across the road, formed the large hospital precinct. The hospital of my imaginings is always set in winter, covered with snow, which has a wonderful ability to make the most ordinary places look magic. But nothing much can hide in the harsh summer light: the unpainted exterior, the outbuildings, the unkempt sports field. The school yard, empty of milling students, weeds sprouting through broken concrete, is silent and ugly. Only the front of the school-cum-hospital is much easier on the eye, and the street, with four rows of linden trees, hints at what Lida once was.

Even so, I can already predict that everything I see now will be amplified later, when I am home, whether the images will appear in my daydreams or at night. It will be easier to picture what went on here at a time when armed sentries stood at every entrance and roving guards kept watch over everyone's movements; to see Ola, dressed in a white coat, dashing from one site to another. She always walked fast and – in my head – despite the cold outside, could not be bothered putting on her coat.

In autumn of 1943, the ghetto in Lida still held a few thousand Jews but by the end of September, the last survivors of the massacres had been placed in train carriages and taken to the camp in Majdanek.

The hospital was within reach of the ghetto; it would have been impossible for Ola not to have noticed the movement of a large number of people and lorries along the major road; impossible not to hear the whistles of locomotives in the night air. Did she share her distress with someone or keep silent? One careless remark would have put us on one of those trains.