The Best Travel Writing 2011

by James O'Reilly

  Here was another piece of the story that made no sense to me. What motive could the Soviets have for protecting the Nazis who had betrayed their trust, occupied their land, and slaughtered millions of their citizens? Why hadn’t the Soviets raised the issue of Maly Trostinets at Nuremburg? Why had they protected a Nazi secret?

  “Understand,” Lev replied, leaning forward from the back seat, “this was not just a Nazi secret.” He paused and turned to Ina, who was polishing her glasses with a handkerchief.

  “The official number of people killed at Maly Trostinets is 206,500,” she said.

  “Yes.” I’d heard that figure before, seen roughly that claim earlier in the week, chiseled into the monument looming above the dead eternal flame. Though Jews weren’t specifically mentioned in the inscription, this number presumably included most inhabitants of the Minsk Ghetto, as well as Soviet soldiers, Partisans, and all the foreign Jews.

  But according to documents unearthed in the National Archives, Lev explained, human remains in the forest told a far different story. A sheaf of reports dated July 14, 1943, just two weeks after the Occupation ended, described the uncovering of thirty-four mass graves concealed with pine boughs—some of these graves fifty meters long. After measuring the graves’ grisly contents, the investigators concluded that the remains of 476,000 people were buried in the forest around Maly Trostinets, vastly more victims than could be accounted for by the ghetto dead, the transport records, and the estimates of others the Germans had killed in the forest.

  “That’s more than twice the official figures,” Lev said, stabbing his index finger in the air. “But the Soviet government prohibited the publicizing of this information.”

  “But these were German crimes,” I repeated. “Why would the Soviets want to hide them?”

  “Because,” Lev said, “this number also includes victims of the Soviet Secret Service of the ’30s.”

  For years before the war, the territory alongside the highway on which we were traveling had been guarded by secret police, later known as the KGB. While making his film, Lev had interviewed elderly citizens of the nearby village, who remembered hearing frequent gunshots in the night during those years. Around the gravesites, Lev had found dozens of cartridges from pre-war Soviet weapons.

  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 Pollack. A tangle of wire spilled over a ravine. Here and there, vapor rose from the earth and drifted like smoke.

  Suddenly, the air was full of shrieks and vibrating wings as a flock of gulls appeared overhead.

  Ina peered up at the birds, shading her eyes from the late-morning sun. “Surrealischeski!” she cried.

  “Hitchcock,” shouted Lev, the filmmaker.

  The gulls had shattered my protective shell of abstraction. As they rose in a mass and receded behind another trash mountain, the scene grew more real, more solid, my impressions specific. My stomach churned as I stared at brown liquid seeping from festering pools on the ground. Rot and dust and the sulfurous vapor of methane hung in the air. Coils of smoke rising from fires scattered over the mountains added the acrid odor of burning paper and wood to the sting of soot seeping through the car’s cracked windows. Identifiable objects came into focus: twisted fenders and mufflers scattered over the clearing, a rag snagged on a piece of metal, rippling in the wind like a tattered flag.

  Gradually, the people emerged. Of course, they’d been there all along, standing ankle-deep in muck near the base of the mountain—bent women in ratty headscarves and ill-fitting dresses, men in baggy trousers, one with a shirt tied over his nose and mouth like an outlaw. Farther up, other clusters of scavengers sifted through the avalanche of trash. The pronged maw of a steam shovel scooped up thick sludge. A bulldozer knocked around tires, oil drums, and unidentifiable large objects.

  Lev leaned forward from the back seat and called to Marina, who’d closed her eyes and was holding her head in her hands. He gestured toward the path the trucks had taken up the mountain. Hands trembling on the wheel, Marina aimed the Moskveech toward the path, and we plowed our way up on a carpet of trash.

  “Koshmar,” Marina whispered, “nightmare.”

  I doubted the car would make it up the steep grade, but I kept my mouth shut. Lev was aiming for the full effect, directing the scene he’d wanted the world to witness, the memory he’d tried to snatch back from oblivion.

  Marina shifted gears. The Moskveech rattled and wheez
ed and, miraculously, kept climbing.

  A dozen yards from the summit, a tire sank into the mud. The engine stalled. Lev draped his camera strap around his neck, unhooked the door’s makeshift wire fastener, and leapt out.

  “Follow me,” he hollered theatrically as he sprinted the remaining yards up the mountain. Turning up the collar of my shirt in a hopeless attempt to cover my nose and mouth, I stepped from the car into a welter of foul-smelling feathers and took off behind Lev, nearly tripping over the rusted springs of a mattress. Marina was soon at my side, pressing the hem of her flowered blouse to her nose, while Ina kept guard at the car like a getaway driver. We stirred up black columns of flies that settled again like soot as we passed. Here and there, gulls and yellow-billed starlings feasted on scraps of food, mixed with splintered wooden slats and leaves and paper—the whole mess strewn with ashes and chicken feathers.

  The wind picked up, scouring the outer layer of trash on the summit, where machines, like mindless gladiators, kept scraping and dragging and smashing. Our presence was ignored. The ecosystem of the dump toiled on—fire and methane, machinery and scavengers—all oblivious to the invaders scaling the hill and the little car stalled on the path.

  When Marina and I caught up with Lev, he was standing at the edge of a cliff paved thick with bird droppings. The cliff overlooked a half-dozen more trash mountains. Lev was peering through a veil of blowing paper and plastic bags toward the city spread out in the distance, its wedding-cake buildings shimmering in the heat.

  On the outskirts of Minsk, beyond the apartment blocks, the countryside stretched to the horizon, a peaceful mosaic of deep blues and greens. With the hand that held his camera, Lev made a sweeping gesture. “The graves are all over this place.” The forest around and beneath the dump was riddled with burial trenches. During his filming, he’d discovered vast caved-in gullies nearby in the forest that grave robbers had ransacked for treasure. He’d found scraps of clothing, combs, toothbrushes, and many bullet casings. Once he’d unearthed a boot with a cache of coins, provision for a future, stitched into the insole.

  “How long has the dump been here?” I asked in Russian.

  “After the war,” Lev said. He raised his camera, snapped a photo of the vista. “Right after the war they made this dump.”

  “But why? Why exactly here? Right over the graves?”

  Lev’s bushy eyebrows shot up. He shook his head. “This site wasn’t chosen at random,” he said. “Remember, this was an area the Soviets wanted to keep quiet about.” It was the site of many political assassinations. Locating a dump here after the war was part of the cover-up, part of the scheme to keep people out. Just after the war, the forest had been isolated, supposedly as part of a military project. It had been surrounded with barbed wire and posted with signs that ordered, STOP. NO TRESPASSING. THEY SHOOT HERE.

  “That gave the impression that the place was a military shooting range,” Lev said. “But no, it was already a dump. They didn’t want people nosing around here.”

  I recalled the memorial a few miles up the road, the marble column on the hill I’d visited with Natasha.

  “Is that why they set up that monument so far from the graves?” I asked Lev. “They didn’t want people coming here?”

  “Da, da,” he said, nodding vehemently. “The monument was erected in a place that’s got nothing to do with the killings.”

  The three of us stood gazing over the city, the sun warming our backs, until Lev pointed down the slope, where a man was trudging across the path near the car, rooting out objects and dropping them into his sack. Lev jogged toward the man and called out a greeting. Marina and I tagged along close behind. As the man glanced up with expressionless red-rimmed eyes, my heart raced. The spirits of the place felt suddenly close by. Without a word the old man sloshed on across the mountain in his yellow rain cap and oversize boots.

  “He’s deaf,” Lev said offhandedly. “I don’t think he heard me.”

  As I watched the old man’s figure receding, his yellow cap blurring into the rubble, I thought of my father, Proteus, the old shape-shifter, and my final glimpse of him vanishing down the alley pushing his cartload of relics. Although Proteus could not have known of this place, he must have understood what had befallen his mother after his failed rescue attempt. Perhaps his efforts to save my grandmother had been half-hearted. Maybe he’d waited too long. When the agent’s yellow cable arrived in 1941, Proteus must have felt himself his own mother’s murderer. Was this the image in the mirror that he fled? The unbearable knowledge that drove him from one protean incarnation to another and ultimately turned him away from the world?

  “I want my body burned,” his will had read. “I want my ashes taken out with the trash.”

  Shrieks filled the air, disrupting my reverie. A fresh cloud of gulls dove and receded, dove and receded, their sharp cries adding an eerie counterpoint to the low-pitched rumbling of machinery.

  Lev had wandered away from Marina and me. He was snapping pictures—a box tumbling by, the clean-picked skeleton of an animal—a cat perhaps or small dog, a drift of feathers, a cart-wheeling newspaper. He scooped up a dirt-filled jar from the rubbish, shook out the dirt, and trudged back toward the summit, stooping now and then to ferret out some small fragment and drop it into the jar.

  The earth was slick underfoot, and Marina slipped as we clambered down the mountain to meet Lev. I took her hand, helped her up. Her hand was cold, trembling.

  “I feel it through my shoes,” she murmured. Her soft voice trailed off. I felt it too. Numbness was gone, replaced by what I can only call an aching homesickness. We were standing on the horrors of history, leaning against one another in silence. There were no words for it.

  Suddenly a shout rang out, and a thick, uniformed figure appeared from behind some barrels. The guardian of the dump. What had taken him so long? A nightstick dangled from the man’s belt. Sunlight glinted off a badge on his navy blue shirt. Dark glasses masked his eyes. The man shouted again and hurried toward Lev, one hand hovering above his hip like a cowboy about to quick-draw.

  A few yards from Lev, the guard stopped and shouted again.

  Lev glared back, eyebrows arched sardonically.

  The guard stepped forward, white-knuckled fists clenched above his hips, but Lev stood rooted to his spot, looking like a giant glittery-eyed bird with his beaky nose, his tufts of white hair flapping in the wind.

  With one hand the guard reached for his nightstick and flourished it, lunging forward and grabbing the strap of Lev’s camera with the other hand.

  Still clutching the jar and his camera, trying to free the strap, Lev lowered his head like a bull and butted the guard. Marina and I hung back a few yards. I glanced down the slope, gauging the distance to the car.

  The guard slammed Lev on the shoulder with his stick, but Lev wouldn’t let go of his camera.

  From down the path came the sound of an engine starting up. Ina had started the car, and managed to turn it around. She was backing up toward us.

  Hearing glass shattering, I turned to see Lev, still clutching his camera and strap in one hand. His other hand was empty. Near the guard’s feet, shards of Lev’s jar of relics were scattered along with its contents—fragments of newspaper, a length of green ribbon, a twisted spoon. The guard’s beefy face twisted with rage.

  “Run to the car,” Lev shouted, unnecessarily. Marina and I were already running, with Lev close behind, snapping pictures as he ran.

  Once we were all in the car, Ina coasted down the path toward the foot of the mountain, the red fire extinguisher bouncing around on the dashboard, the wipers flapping, scraping grime from the windshield. Gasping, Lev laughed like a madman. Suddenly, we were all laughing hysterically, though at what I wasn’t sure. Lev pointed at the guard, who stood on the crest of the mountain, waving his stick like a Keystone Cop.

  “What does he imagine he’s guarding?” Lev wondered between snorts of laughter. “What does he think he’s guarding with his
ridiculous uniform?”

  Shoulders shaking with laughter, Lev worked the wires to secure the broken passenger door. “What the hell does he think he’s guarding?” he repeated. “He probably doesn’t even know!”

  We laughed all the way to the foot of the mountain, where Ina stopped the car. We all fell silent then, and turned back for one final look.

  “Koshmar,” Marina whispered from the back seat. “Nightmare.”

  “History,” corrected Ina, the historian.

  As we reached the clearing and headed back toward the road, a fresh wave of gulls wheeled overhead. I turned to watch their winged shadows flickering over the mountain of trash. I still heard their cries, growing fainter and fainter, as the Moskveech bumped along past the guardhouse with its looming STOP. NO TRESPASSING sign, and on through a half-mile of sunlight-laced forest.

  As we turned back onto the Partisan Highway, Marina tapped my shoulder and pointed to the cloudless sky. A stork was gliding toward us, silently, white head and neck extended, black tail feathers spread, its long legs trailing like streamers. Ina stopped the car, and we watched the stork as it coasted down to a giant nest at the top of a telephone pole, folding forward like a hinge as it landed.

  “This bird is our national symbol,” Marina reminded me. “We say it brings happiness.”

  I smiled. “Does it bring babies too?”

  “Yes, we also have this story,” Ina said. “There are many legends about the stork, all happy ones. The stork is the bird of hope. And, perhaps because they return to the same nest each year, there’s a legend that storks brought to mankind the gift of memory.”

  Hearing this, Lev again burst out in laughter.