Journeys with My Mother Read online

We were still in the basement when someone up above shouted in German, demanding to know if anyone was hiding. The cellar was kept dark, no one uttered a word, breaths were suspended, the stand-off dragged on. The lone German was hesitant to enter untested territory and we were terrified of what could happen to us. The disembodied voice persisted until someone shouted back that only convalescents and nurses, all unarmed, were taking cover from the fighting.

  Someone descended and Ola saw a uniformed officer in high boots, a fox-fur draped over his shoulders, the head of the animal on one side, the bushy tail on the other – grotesque and threatening. In the expansive mood of a drunk, the German took stock of our appearance: ‘You are liberated! You’ll have plenty to eat. The German people live well!’ he boomed.

  My mother froze. She was frightened by Germans and fearful of drunks. For two years she’d been fleeing the Nazis. Now, when she was in their hands, it was impossible to predict what this drunk and repugnant specimen would do.

  He sat heavily on the steps; then, with one boot off, he pushed his foot forward. Now everybody could see his khaki, well-fitted, woollen sock.

  ‘We don’t wear foot rags,’ he slurred, ‘we have socks. You are despicable. Don’t you know how to wash?’

  When the rumble of the fighting stopped and everything went quiet, Ola could not bring herself to return to the wards. As in Warsaw, on the night of her escape from the burning hospital, she wanted to find a little corner, all to herself, to calm down, to take stock of our situation. She asked a local nurse if we could stay with her. The woman agreed and we walked together through the town, fresh ruins still smouldering, to her place on the outskirts of the city.

  The next morning the nurse changed her mind so Ola, with me in her arms, trudged back to the only place she knew – the hospital. It had already been taken over by the Germans. As soon as she entered, she was introduced to the new director.

  He was Anatolii Minakovski, a Soviet surgeon who’d been captured by the Germans when parachuting from a shot-down plane. A tall, well-mannered man of about forty, with attentive eyes and greying temples, he spoke German and was to take responsibility for the everyday running of the hospital.

  Ola feared and disliked him instantaneously. Her fears were justified. Not only was Minakovski a collaborator, he was also likely to have access to the staff’s documents and declarations. Three months earlier, she’d had to explain at length to the party officials how it happened that she, a foreigner, had found herself in this part of the world. Now, at the beginning of October, the mere thought of what was in her dossier made her nauseous. What had been mitigating in summer – her allegiance to communism, her Jewish origins, her escape from Warsaw and rescuing the Soviet wounded, all duly recorded – would spell death in autumn. In case she was questioned, she ‘tidied’ her narrative.

  I still have the now-disintegrating, yellowing piece of paper affirming her valiant attempt to bluff her way out: my birth certificate. The writing is still legible, except for the date – placed exactly on the crease and smudged by a watery stain – indicating when the certificate was drawn. To stave off suspicion about our flight from Warsaw, she made me born in Oryol. And, to be on the safe side, she burned every photograph she had.

  The Germans brought with them autumn, then winter. At the very beginning of their occupation, there were hardly any changes in the hospital routine. No one knew what the new administration had in mind. It was a waiting game, though nothing good was expected. Then, over the course of a few days, Soviet patients from all over the town, even from the nearby psychiatric hospital, were simply dumped in the hospital building. The staff were directed to place them anywhere, regardless of their conditions: a few to a bed, on the floors; those with infectious diseases and those with mental problems or injuries. The stench of untreated wounds and blood, faeces and urine, mingled with the sickening smell of disinfectant.

  During the siege of Oryol, the hospital food supplies were pilfered and food rations inadequate: a couple of hundred grams of bread and a bowl of watery soup was the daily limit. Later, even these rations were considered too generous. The medical staff attempted to ease the suffering of their patients, made worse by the ban on carrying out any surgical procedures. Apart from cleaning and changing wound dressings, nothing more could be done.

  My mother, cut off from the radio and newspapers, could not know what was happening beyond the hospital. She could not know that the ultimate intention of the German occupiers was that prisoners of war would die of starvation.

  Every day Minakovski and Ola went on ward round together, inspecting every area. The patients begged for help. Some swore as only the Russians can, convinced that a hospital director could negotiate and wrestle some food from the Germans. Minakovski offered them no consolation. ‘You can’t bargain with them,’ he said. ‘You could only try to run away.’ Ola was heartbroken to see row after row of men who not long ago had had a chance of recovery, now floundering in unwashed linen, delirious, starving. Their hunger was so unrelenting that they took to chewing the leather straps of their uniforms. They began to die of infected wounds, gangrene and cold.

  The high-ranking officers were more fortunate as the army had prepared them for the eventuality of being captured, providing them with syringes and morphine. Now they were the only ones in a position to choose how and when to die. No one interfered with their attempts, least of all the nurses who would rather have seen them die by their own hand than under interrogation. This was my mother’s daily reality, in a place that no longer served to save: the pleading for food, for mercy, for help to escape, for last messages to be passed to those they loved. These two or three months stayed in her mind as an inferno, the darkest days of her life. Still, the nurses did what they could. Though most of the runaways were captured and put to death, the nurses removed plaster casts when asked, fudged paperwork, pronouncing their patients dead.

  I would like to believe that these acts of defiance gave her strength.

  For the most part, the Germans kept away from the fetid wards, but not Minakovski; hence, the staff’s subversive actions were risky. At some point, however, Ola began to suspect that Minakovski was averting his eyes. She was aware that he too had to be cautious. Revealing his allegiance, no matter how obliquely – such as advising Ola that he’d destroyed incriminating papers – was fraught with danger. Not that my mother trusted him straight away. Too much was at stake. Yet, in the end, she had to admit she’d misjudged him.

  Meanwhile, the front line east of Oryol wavered. Occasionally, on a good day, they could hear the cannonade, bringing them hope that their entrapment would not last much longer. It crossed Ola’s mind to run away. But winter was approaching and she had nowhere to go. The uncertainty of moving from one place to another with a toddler worried her as much as staying.

  Minakovski was also considering this possibility, at least at the beginning. Yet the longer he waited, the more he felt responsible for the people under his care. To abandon his duties would be unethical. It seemed that he had to make one of those decisions that decent people face: to save oneself or to assist others. Like a sea captain, bound by honour, he had to be the last to leave his sinking ship.

  For Minakovski, escape was a gamble but staying at his post amounted to death. As a Red Army officer and a doctor, he would only remain alive for as long as he was useful.23 He was on borrowed time, and yet he stayed. We were all trapped.

  At the beginning of the year, in January 1942, the regime gave new orders – the wards were to be emptied, scrubbed clean and made suitable for German casualties. For a few days, empty lorries arrived at the hospital. The imprisoned patients, shivering from cold, some incapable of walking, were pushed by German soldiers onto platforms before the trucks took off for an unknown destination. Towards the end of the action, when the last of the remaining inmates were put on the trucks, as if on a whim, as if it were a mere afterthought, the Germans ordered Minakovski to climb onto the last one.

  It was hor
rifying to watch. Only a moment earlier he’d been standing next to them, one of the staff; the next, he was on his way to his death.

  One of the nurses ran behind the truck, passing her mittens to Minakovski. He’d never even had a chance to put on his coat. It provoked the guards’ laughter.

  There is a forest near the town – and winter in Russia is beautiful – where the prisoners were taken, forced to dig their own graves and shot.

  Over the years, my mother told me about that day more than once. The bleak morning, the prisoners flinching from the biting wind, Minakovski’s pale face and his farewell gesture, all those people going towards certain death. She never said ‘killed’, she said ‘murdered’. When talking about atrocities, she used brutal words and I flinched every time.

  My mother always thought highly of Minakovski as an honourable, decent man. A doctor who’d stood by his patients, just like Janusz Korczak – well known to everyone who grew up in postwar Poland: a doctor, a pedagogue-teacher and author of books who, during the war, ran the orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto. Days before deportation, he refused the offer of escape. Instead, he remained and went to his death with his young charges.

  My mother never had an opportunity to fulfil Minakovski’s last wish, to tell his family in Kiev about the last months of his life. Not that it was likely that they lived long enough to see the end of the war. Not many Jews in that part of the world did.

  Somewhere in Oryol, twenty thousand young women were transported to Germany as labourers; thousands of Soviet soldiers, penned behind barbed-wire fences with no shelter, were dying from typhus, starvation and exposure. The winter of that year was the coldest in the century and Oryol was long covered in deep snow.

  The Jews did their suffering in the ghetto. The war against the Jews extended throughout the occupied area. SS Einsatzgruppen, the small units accompanying the Wehrmacht, were given the task of rounding up and exterminating Jews. Group B was following in our footsteps, from Białystok to Wołkowysk, not missing the towns and villages we went through, all the way to Oryol, sweeping the countryside of Jews along the way. The orders were carried out with due diligence. No effort was too strenuous, no project too bold or negligible, as long as every one of us, regardless of age, character, wisdom or simplicity, the ability to reason or to do good, baptised, assimilated or traditional – absolutely no one was to escape their fate. After all, that was the Final Solution. We were in constant danger, yet staying in the eye of the storm proved to be the safest option. It is most satisfying to think about it that way.

  The empty wards filled with wounded Germans. There were no more Soviet doctors; only nurses and orderlies were kept to work alongside the German staff. In the sea of Germans, the group of the interned Slavs – Ania, Nastia, Masha, Tania, Klavka, Ola and few more – lived and worked, cheek by jowl. They made reluctant German collaborators, marking their time. They were aggrieved by Minakovski’s fate and worried about their own.

  Early in the spring, the hospital administration brought a large group of Ostarbeiters24 from the POW camp in Roslav. They were an interesting bunch. Chosen for their abilities – nurses, tradesmen or men capable of hard physical work – they boosted the German workforce, and even more so, the morale of the Slavs. Within a few months, some prisoners had formed a small subversive group and Ola was part of it. Of the newcomers, some stood out from the very beginning, including two nurses – stocky Vala and slender Zina, both strong, audacious women – and Gurgen Martirosov, whose intelligence, knowledge of languages and organisational skills proved to be great assets.

  Vala was from Perm in the Ural Mountains. Thanks to the eight tightly written pages of her testimony that I obtained from the archives in Belorussia, I know how she was encircled and captured, kept in the camp with thousands of soldiers, most of them men; how she ministered to the wounded and the sick as typhus was reaching epidemic proportions, with nothing more than potassium permanganate and rewashed bandages; how, on New Year’s Eve of 1941, she and two other women escaped, only to be caught a few hours later, on the first day of 1942, which was supposed to be better than the year before; how they were hastily tried but not killed because they were still needed; how the other two, one of them a doctor, were sent to the nearby ghetto the moment it was revealed they were Jewish. All of it, and more, I discovered only a few years ago, long after my mother had died.

  Shortly after their arrival in Oryol, Gurgen, Vala and Zina conspired to join the partisan forces in the forest. To gather information, they rifled through the soldiers’ pockets, sifted through rubbish, eavesdropped on officers’ conversations. Every detail was important: the morale of German troops, the strength and proximity of the partisans, the involvement of the Allied forces and, most of all, the latest from the front lines. It took months before the men, who regularly cut trees for fuel, could make their first contact with the local partisans. As for Gurgen: he would become an important person in my mother’s and my own life.

  There are several photographs from that time, two years exactly, during which my mother and I stayed in the military hospital in Oryol. It appears that we were living in a room with a tiled ceramic stove for heating and, because it was Christmas, we had a decorated tree. My favourite photograph – maybe because my mother looks so lovely – shows her sitting at the table. There are a few books; a crystal vase filled with, I presume, artificial flowers; a handmade snowman; a candleholder.

  Her open face and calm eyes look straight into the camera; her hair, much longer than before, is pushed to the back. Such order and equanimity amid such uncertainty. Among other mementos Ola managed to save is a series of black-and-white photographs. Taken by a German photographer, the miniature postcards capture the landscape of the city under occupation: streets and churches, the bridge across the frozen Orlik, the old fortress with its watchtowers turned prison and, black against the white, discarded war machinery. But there is more to see: Oryol under snow, almost empty of people, Germans patrolling the streets; the Town Hall occupied by Standortkommandatur25 and signs in German directing traffic towards Bryansk, Gomel and Kursk. Not the place to find fresh flowers in winter.

  The bridge on one of the postcards could be the same one where a German guard took away Ola’s warm mittens as she walked home from a nursing assignment, either delivering a baby or nursing an invalid. There were no Russian doctors and nurses were much in demand. People paid in kind: a few potatoes, a couple of beetroots or carrots. On one occasion she was rewarded with a large potato dumpling, heavy and as thick as mud – she cups her hands to show me how big it was – stuffed with cabbage. It was still hot. She scooped out some filling, fighting the temptation to eat it all by herself. Our food rations were small and at night she raked through German leftovers. On the days when I was sick, which was often, she had no choice but to lock me up. It was heartbreaking to leave me behind as I carried on, crying for the food she did not have. Occasionally, when no one was looking, Elke, a German nurse, would slide a container full of food into Ola’s medical bag. And the taste of warm rice with plump raisins and other treats was something she never put out of her mind. Neither was the kindness of a young girl who risked punishment for her deeds. Years later, just as we were about to sit down to a meal, she would say, almost to herself, embarrassed for broaching the subject: ‘Halinko, hunger is a terrible thing.’

  I never found it easy to deal with my mother’s desolation and would try to divert her thoughts, bringing her back to the Australian cornucopia, as if the war and the hunger could be forgotten. She kept on returning to the events in Oryol: the madness of hunger, the suicides, the failed attempts of the escapees, Minakovski’s nobility, his fate. Every time, she suffered again. She had a need to share it with me, as if to have me as a witness, though I remembered nothing of it. Perhaps she thought it was her duty to tell, and mine to remember, because things like that must never be forgotten.

  The following year, 1943, was not so propitious for the German side. It began with their withdrawal f
rom Stalingrad, followed by the Red Army’s successful advancements on other fronts.

  In the middle of the year, before Oryol was retaken by the Red Army, just when our first attempt to escape to the partisan forces was almost at hand, our hospital was ordered to evacuate and all of us, the prisoners of war, had to follow. It was still summer when, like a slow caravan, our hospital began to move from one place to another. By train and lorry, the meandering convoy had to pick the safest route to avoid the Soviet partisans. We were going west – through Gorki, then Orsha, where we stopped for several months.

  I have only very few fragmented memories of that time. Of izbas26 and their always warm ovens; of befriending a black kitten, a living creature so soft and smaller than me; the pain of my first loss as we left it behind on the road while our truck moved further and further away until I could no longer see it. Ola bit her lips and said nothing in response to my wailing; all she needed was a cat to worry about.

  16

  Gurgen

  In the bedroom wardrobe made of cherry wood, years after the war, my mother still kept her old tools of trade. The stainless-steel instruments were smooth and cold to touch. I handled them with interest, trying to guess their use. I was in the habit of burrowing through the cupboards in search of sweets and unexpected surprises, which could be tucked away anywhere, even among my father’s shirts. When it came to storage, my mother’s practices verged on the shambolic. And, if she was hiding the sweets from me, she underestimated my investigative streak. There, under a pile of fresh linen, was my most treasured find: the photograph. I would look at it intently before putting it back in the same place. I thought of it as the deepest of secrets. Why else would it be there, in the wardrobe, by itself, and not with the rest of the photographs that were piled carelessly in the drawer of the dining-room dresser?

  It shows my smiling mother, a man whose name was Gurgen, and between the two of them, sitting on the windowsill, my small self. My mother’s smile is radiant, mine shy. She looks beautiful in a checked blouse with a round collar, short skirt and rough boots; Gurgen is still in uniform and armed. Although I no longer remember the moment the photograph was taken, it is dedicated to me, in the year the war ended: For the little Piglet, don’t forget the Black Cat, Gurgen. I had been aware of their closeness, as if it was the most natural thing between two people, something I did not understand but yielded to without questioning, let alone resentment. I asked no questions or talked about it to anyone, as if it was also my secret.