Journeys with My Mother Read online

  I loved Gurgen with an uncomplicated child’s heart and the memory of him has stayed with me. As an adult, I wanted to meet him for old times’ sake, perhaps to see if he was worthy of our affection, especially my mother’s.

  Eight years after Ola’s death, the urgency of finding him has become very strong. I have very few clues: a handful of memories of his warmth and humour, and a handful of facts. My correspondence with archives and museums in Russia and Belorussia has brought no results. Nobody can tell me anything about a man with an uncommon name, of unknown address. I might as well seek the wind.

  Three months before my newly hatched plan to travel with Annette to Belorussia, I phone a woman I know who speaks Russian. I’m hoping she can help me decipher a few handwritten letters I have found among my mother’s papers. These blue triangles, addressed to my mother and kept with photographs in Warsaw, look familiar. I’d never thought of reading them. Until now.

  But unfortunately, Pani Ania is tied up until July.

  ‘Pani Ania’ – we usually speak in Polish – ‘in July, I’ll be in Europe. I hope to go to Belorussia.’

  ‘Where to? Minsk?’

  ‘No, Grodno and Lida,’ I answer absentmindedly, thinking of finding someone else to help.

  ‘To Grodno? We are from Grodno. Why are you going there?’

  ‘I am looking for a man my mother knew during the war.’ I cannot see any point in going into details which only matter to me. But Pani Ania is persistent.

  ‘What’s his name? She asks me.

  ‘Martirosov, Gurgen Martirosov. I don’t know his patronymic.’

  ‘Martirossyan,’ Pani Ania, who is a retired teacher, corrects me. ‘He was Armenian.’

  ‘I know … but he Russified his name,’ I answer, half listening.

  ‘We met him after the war, he lectured at our institute.’ Finally, I hear what she is saying. It is so unexpected, I feel giddy and need to steady myself. Gurgen is not a figment of my imagination. Even in this hemisphere, someone else knows of him.

  Could it be that I never believed I could possibly trace Gurgen? Less still, that help could come from such an unexpected source, from people living not far from me, in Melbourne. This is so sudden, I remain guarded.

  ‘You knew him? I realise you are very busy but if you could tell me something about him, anything, absolutely anything, could I drop in … tomorrow night?’ I ask. I have to stop myself from driving to Caulfield straightaway – patience is not my strong suit – but it would be impolite to even suggest it.

  What they knew about Gurgen was about as much as students might about their lecturers: about his seriousness, problems with the NKVD,27 but also of his ability to laugh. So, he was a real person, someone who lived in Grodno and held a university position, at least in the early fifties.

  Blessed be the internet, which allows me to make direct contact with the state university in Grodno. I write a short email to the personnel department, press ‘send’ and keep my fingers crossed. I fear the disappearance of the old documents or, even if kept, that they are buried under the strata of more recent papers. And would anybody be bothered to search?

  I need not agonise. The response comes the following day. My excitement reaches its zenith.

  Dear Halina,

  Quite by chance, I saw your letter about Martirosov family. As it happens, my own family has known them for many years. I would like to mention that it is only Gurgen Martirosov’s daughters and the granddaughter who are alive. They live in Grodno. I contacted his daughter Nina and she agreed to give you their home phone number.

  You can contact them directly by phone.

  Good luck,

  Irina L.

  I can hardly contain my excitement and want to give the unknown Irina a bear hug, but she is too far. When, a few days later, I phone Grodno, Nina simply says: ‘We are waiting for you.’ The sound of her melodious Russian, the kindness, the possibility of meeting Gurgen’s family, moves me to tears.

  Our next obstacle is getting into Belorussia. Impoverished and isolated, tightly controlled by its President Lukashenko, it remains a police state, practically shut for individual tourists. Obtaining visas becomes a prolonged, nerve-wracking exercise. Just reading the information – written in terrible officialese – about the visa entitlements and restrictions, issued by the Belorussian foreign affairs department, is enervating: if, upon arrival, you don’t report your presence within the first 24 hours, you’ll find that coming into the country is easier than leaving it. Viewed from the safety of Melbourne, it is amusing, even exotic, but I feel nervous and take note. It reminds me of the worst years of the Cold War in Poland. I have been warned by those in the know: it cannot be done, it is unheard of – no one goes to Belorussia individually, unless they have relatives or friends who live there.

  Once in Warsaw, a week before our planned departure, we are still without visas. I am in despair. The only remaining option is to ask Nina to invite us, an alternative I have been rejecting for months. Even so, I phone her again to ask if I could put her name and address on the application form. ‘Of course’, is her immediate answer. Five days later the visas are ours.

  Sitting at the table in the large, somewhat dilapidated, apartment of Gurgen’s household in Lenin Street, the daughters and granddaughters of people who spent the war years together, Nina raises her glass of vodka: ‘Za vstrechu! To our extraordinary meeting!’ We drink to the miracle of our parents’ survival; their resilience and courage. ‘Za vstrechu!’ I cannot think of a better toast. The vodka, straight from the freezer, goes down smoothly. I look at Annette to share the moment and she, too, has tears in her eyes. We pay tribute to all those who are no longer alive and cannot be with us, certain they would have been pleased with the turn of events. I am grateful for the good luck that brought me here.

  It is dark outside, the air of the late summer night already has the sharp edge of the approaching autumn. It feels good to be here, in this room imbued with warm oriental colours and the hospitality of our hosts. We stay for many hours. There is much to talk about. They know nothing about Ola but I am interested in everything they can tell me about Gurgen’s life.

  Nina puts on a disk with the songs of Okudzava.

  Okudzava is a Russian bard in the tradition of Villon and Brassens; a poet who sings intimately as if for you alone, about everything that matters. About war, love and treason; about kindness and mercy. But it is the first song, heard many times before, ‘The Paper Soldier’, that sets the mood and makes me cry even more: for my parents and Gurgen, and for everyone who suffered so much in that war. Were they not like the paper soldier going into the fire, and just as mortal?

  These evenings spent at Gurgen’s home with his collection of books and photographs, listening to the stories of his life, replace a legend with a man, not altogether unlike the one I had imagined. I recognise the familiar face, his deep dark eyes framed by black eyelashes, a prominent Armenian nose and a certain panache. Although the first postwar pictures show him thin and haggard, his hollow cheeks giving his face a triangular shape, it is obvious he was fond of horsing around; now assuming a Napoleonic pose, now fooling around with children. He smoked with gusto. I would have liked to ask my mother if he was vain.

  It is in the same photo album where Annette excitedly spots a small picture of Ola; the caption reads: winter 1944. That is all. Suddenly I feel bashful. Nomen est omen? Is the name Martirossyan linked to the fate of Armenians in the hands of the Turks? The sisters, however, know little about Gurgen’s childhood years and even less about the genocide. There are two of them: Tamara and Nina. Tamara, who is retired, followed her daughter to faraway Moscow. Luckily for me she happens to be in Grodno, staying with Nina and Gurgen’s granddaughter, Nadia. The older of the two, she seems to know Gurgen the best. The sisters are so unlike that I need to be convinced they have the same parents. Tamara is as large and robust as Nina is small and delicate, with Gurgen’s soulful eyes and prominent nose. She, too, looks Armenian.


  Nina, who is a pediatrician, has to work in two hospitals to make ends meet. I see Nina’s hardship, her frugality, yet they take care of us as if we were their long-lost friends which, in a way, we are.

  Annette and I stay in a hotel around the corner where we have a suite of two large rooms with a huge bathroom. The windows look onto greenery and a small orthodox church in shades of pink and red; at night the sky is heavy with stars. Grodno is the only town in Belorussia left intact by the Germans. Such a ‘courtesy’ did not extend to the Jewish population.

  We use the hotel only to sleep and store our belongings; the rest of the time we spend with the Martirosovs. Tamara tells me how, in the thirties, during the terror, Gurgen was expelled from the party and fired from his work in the university archives. He never found out what his ‘crime’ was. It could have been something he had said, something considered disloyal. Someone higher up in the hierarchy vouched for him in writing, but when his benefactor was arrested and sent to the Lubyanka prison, Gurgen began life on the run. He moved between friends until, in the middle of the night, they smuggled him in the boot of a car out of the city.

  It was winter and the villas in the wooded outskirts of Moscow were empty. He stayed in one, not daring to go out, to light a fire or cook. After weeks on the run, alone, debilitated by hunger and cold, he listened to every noise outside and debated with himself how to get out of his trap. For a while, he thought constantly about ending his life, having plenty of time to think about it. His idea of walking at night, far away from the dacha, to lie down in an open field and allow nature to take its course, was to ensure he did not incriminate his friend in whose cottage he was staying. But there were other thoughts too. He remembered a play which had made an impression on him, and he wished to see it again. He saw himself back in Moscow. Ultimately, it was this idea that preoccupied him and proved stronger than any other.

  Primo Levi wrote how, in the concentration camp, the memory of a poem obsessed him. The need to recall it, to share it with his companion, was so strong that he was prepared to give his daily ration of soup to remember Dante’s verses.

  Gurgen was twenty-four, and instead of killing himself, he took a train to Moscow. He sat for university exams. By the time the war broke out, he was working at the Institute of Philosophy in the Science Academy in Moscow, lecturing. Either the NKVD had too many suspects to follow, or Gurgen was never of interest to them. He had many reasons to hate the system yet, when the war broke out, like countless others, he responded to the party’s call to join the Narodnoe Opolczenye.28 He would fight not for the Communist regime but for the Rodinu, the Russian land and its people, imagining that after the war things would change for the better.

  Civilian volunteers were poorly equipped and ignorant of combat. The original plan to train them properly came to little. The front lines changed fast; there was no time for any, let alone thorough, preparation. Hence, casualties among volunteering office workers, musicians, students and the like were horrendous.

  In the fight to defend Moscow, Gurgen lasted long enough to see the German troops just across the river. He was captured at the beginning of October, in the aftermath of the battle of Vyazma. He found himself in the camp of Roslav where the prisoners were penned behind barbed wire. There was a shortage of shelter, little water and only the slop of soup twice a day. Like millions of others, the prisoners were doomed to die of starvation. It was only a matter of time.

  Though falling on the battlefield seemed preferable to the slow end in the camp, Gurgen kept living and started hatching plans of resistance. In March the following year, he got lucky. He was selected as part of a group of fifty to work in the military hospital in Oryol, some 350 kilometres south of Moscow.

  Lida in1940. Legends translated by Ellen Sadove Renck, superimposed on map by Irene Newhouse. Courtesy of JewishGen, Inc.

  17

  Lida

  To admit to being a prisoner of war in one’s biography would

  be risky; nobody wanted to mention it.

  —Valerii Slivkin

  The city of Lida belonged to a past so distant as not to be real. With recollections came nostalgia and the need to go back. Sometimes, I picture a shtetl (village) of small crooked houses, piled on top of each other, as they do in Chagall’s paintings. At other times I tell myself that the Lida of old can no longer exist, that, war-ravaged and carelessly rebuilt, it is bound to be a drab place of grey communal buildings in various degrees of neglect. I cannot feel objective about Lida, where so much happened. It is possible that in my mind, Lida will always remain an imaginary place.

  As it happens, our journey to Lida is unremarkable. Annette and I leave Grodno early. The night’s cold lingers but the days still belong to summer; it is likely to be hot. Tamara, who is travelling with us, has assumed the role of manager. She has taken care of the timetables and tickets, prepared sandwiches, fruit and coffee. All this for a journey of two and a half hours. Annette, connected to her iPod, is catching up on sleep while Tamara, an inveterate talker, chats with other passengers.

  I look intently through the window, trying to take in every detail of the landscape, as if it alone could tell me about the past. The view is monotonous, the grass surprisingly green for this time of year; small fields adjoin old wooden houses and their minuscule orchards. Occasionally, a concrete and steel construction in a state of decay comes into view, clashing with my expectations. I might be the only one paying attention to the forests and the events of some sixty-six years before, while I plan what to do next.

  There is a museum of Lida, with its collection of war documents and archives. I long to find the hospital building, the city baths, the wooden house in Morgi Street where we lived after liberation. I hope that at least some of them will be standing. Then, perhaps something wonderfully unexpected will happen, serendipity, a stroke of luck to jolt my memory or to illuminate me.

  None of this could happen while staying at home.

  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 AK29 partisans, the multi-ethnic rest team
ed 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.