Journeys with My Mother

by Halina Rubin

  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.

  18

  Breakout

  The Germans feared lice and typhus as much as they feared the partisans. The plan for breaking free relied on this, otherwise trivial,
understanding.

  Planning for our escape began almost immediately after our arrival in Lida; even so, a couple of months had to pass before it could be attempted. Though the plan was simple, the logistics were not. The escape of a large group of prisoners from a closely guarded hospital, in a town full of Germans, without loss of life, called for precision and coordination with those in the forest.

  Winter came early that year and from the beginning of November there was plenty of snow.

  The date was set for the first week in December.

  The action began when one of the nurses reported to the hospital commandant that the prisoners’ quarters were infested with lice. As expected, an order was immediately issued to take all POWs, together with their bed linen, to the bania for delousing. In the evening of 7 December, all the prisoners, many ignorant of the plan, climbed onto the lorries. Amazingly, only one junior officer was assigned to supervise the operation. Perhaps the Germans did not fear what they considered to be a group of obedient Soviet prisoners. They had known them since the beginning of the war and trusted them, as they would their loyal employees in a time of peace. None of the prisoners was armed but it was known that one of the outbuildings was full of guns and ammunition.

  While we drove towards the bania, four men were left behind. First, one of them broke the metal bar of the treasure trove: a cache of weapons. Romanov, a skilled electrician, disconnected all the lights, leaving the entire precinct in winter darkness. Lastly, all remaining vehicles were disabled, making an immediate pursuit impossible.

  By the time the electricity was restored, the four men in a weapon-carrying lorry had reached the rest of us at the town baths. Inside, the unsuspecting officer was easily overpowered; blows to the head left him unconscious. To his misfortune though, he recovered almost immediately, ran into the street and started screaming. He was shot dead. If only he had not recovered from the blows. Why do I feel awful thinking about that killing, in the context of so many atrocities? Because it is ignoble for one person to be attacked by many? Was he trading lighthearted remarks only a moment before they pounced on him? Were they reluctant to kill him because he was a decent man and they knew him well? I am relieved not to have any memory of that event, and even more that I did not have to make decisions.

  Fifty-three men, women and one child drove in German tarpaulin-covered trucks through the night streets of Lida and beyond. In the tiny village of Dokudovo we met our contact who would guide us towards Puszcza Nalibocka. Everyone was tense; I was the only one oblivious to danger. For all I know, I could have been asleep.

  There were things the official reports of the escape did not mention, details of no importance to anybody, but my mother remembered them well. The Gawia, a tributary of the Niemen River, had to be crossed. As we had to avoid guarded bridges, the river had to be forded. It was a cloudless and cold December night, the sky full of stars. Perhaps the ice was too thin to support the weight of our loaded vehicles, I don’t know; all I remember that that we had to walk across to the other side. Unexpectedly the ice cracked and we were plunged into the freezing river. As my mother waded through the icy waters she was largely preoccupied with holding on to her knee-length, pure-wool knickers that were gradually sliding down. She could not afford such a loss.

  Once we’d crossed to safety, her hands numb, she took off all my wet clothes. I remember standing naked on the truck platform, shivering in the wintery breeze while she rubbed me with spirits before quickly putting layers of bandage over me from top to toe. Then someone, I think it was Gurgen, put his coat over my shoulders. The cold of that night, the river crossing, my mother’s fast-moving hands, the weight of the coat, forms my first coherent memory. I was just over four.

  It was well known that partisans were loath to take in people who did not have firearms, especially women. But in our party, all twelve women were nurses and every man was skilled at using weapons. We carried with us precious essentials: medical instruments, dressings, medications, linen, plus an impressive arsenal of weapons, ammunition, even two generators.

  Valerii told me about Aleksander Malewski, one of the go-betweens for our group and the partisans that night; how he’d been diverting materials stolen by the nurses to the Polish Home Army partisans.

  At the time of our escape, the Polish patrols were lying in wait for us. But after three days of waiting, they left half an hour before we turned up.

  ‘What would they have done with us?’ I asked Valerii. According to him, there were a few possibilities: they would have taken our loot and killed us or we would have been robbed of arms and dispersed, leaving us at the mercy of fate. Even the most benign scenario – that we’d be absorbed into their forces – was risky. There was no trust or love lost between the Poles and the Russians. We were saved by mistiming. That the Polish partisans attempted to entrap us reveals the shared hunger for arms, medical materials and the complexity of a three-way struggle for dominance.

  A few months later, Malewski was caught double-dealing. He was executed by our side in March 1944.

  19

  Partisans

  We might be hunted like animals, but we will not become animals … Every day of freedom is an act of faith.

  —Tuvia Bielski

  To escape into the forest to join the partisans was a brave, almost senseless, move. Your mother was a remarkable woman.

  —Valerii Slivkin

  At the very beginning of the war when the Wehrmacht rolled across the land, laying waste to the countryside and its people, scattering those still alive in all directions, hundreds of terrified human beings – local men and boys, odd deserters, inadvertently abandoned army soldiers, Russians, Poles, Jews, Gypsies and Belorussians – sought the protection of the forests. As for the Jews: there were no concentration camps in Belorussia; death came to them where they lived. Those who understood the inevitability of annihilation summoned the courage to leave their hiding places, the ghettos, to join the fighters. They fled despite the possibility of being robbed, even murdered, by the very partisans they intended to join. For all the horrendous losses, the number of partisan fighters kept increasing.

  It was an odd collection of people: professionals and peasants, artists and criminals, workers and school graduates. In normal times, they would never have dreamed of rubbing shoulders with each other. But here, united by the common enemy and the will to live, they shared food, conversations, daily tasks and the ledges of bunkers, called zemlyankas. When we joined the partisan forces, one of them served as our new home.

  Made of logs, long and squat, the zemlyanka was almost entirely sunk into the ground, with natural light coming through one small window. Rough as it was, it was better than living in the open.

  In the forest, of necessity, our life was primitive. Men and women slept next to each other, dressed in the clothes they wore during the day. Despite a layer of straw and burlap, sleeping on logs is something my bones still remember.

  My mother and I had a place in the furthermost corner. Ola attached a piece of hessian to the wall, marking the boundary of our space. Sometimes she would bring in a sprig of spruce or wildflowers. No matter where we were, she made it home. She detested lack of privacy, grime and lice but – like everyone else – she had to find a way to deal with the circumstances.

  We’d joined the forces at the very beginning of winter, which guaranteed freezing temperatures for at least three months. Just then, I grew out of my shoes and my mother, wrapped in a shawl like a peasant babushka, carried me everywhere. Her cold cheek next to mine, her breath laboured, she trod carefully through the snow. It was then, for the first time, that I sensed how hard it was for her, and I felt gratitude for everything she did for me.

  Around us was a forest so dense that even wild animals – boars, deer and wolves – chose to follow the same known tracks. The myriad of lakes and rivers made the terrain marshy.

  Only the locals knew how to get their bearings, how to keep away from the swamps ready to swallow you up; how
to keep the wolves away. It was a perfect place to hide, but tough to survive.

  My first memory of fear: in the late afternoon of a summer day, my mother and I were on the way back to our base, somewhere in the forest. When the path diverted into two, perhaps three tracks, my mother stopped, hesitating about which one to choose. At dusk every track looked the same: sinister, the trees closing in on us. It felt as if there were only the two of us in this huge forest. Her moment of uncertainty seemed to pass. Holding me by the hand, she continued to walk. I baulked, pulling her in another direction. ‘Mama, not this way, we’ll get lost!’

  Surprisingly, she listened to me and we found our zemlyanka later the same evening. I wonder why she paid attention to what I said. She, too, must have been worried.

  Sometimes I think about that immense forest, its menace and its beauty.

  By the time we joined this civilian army of thousands, the partisans had already inflicted significant damage on the German forces. Under Moscow’s leadership, however, the wild and disparate groups were transformed into wellorganised fighting units, supported by equipment and expertise. The partisans’ missions – acts of sabotage, of blowing up bridges and railway tracks to derail trains –took many days to accomplish and were rife with risks. Armed confrontation with the Germans was unavoidable. While the partisans’ attacks had the element of surprise, the way back to their bases was more predictable. The partisans were hunted, making retreat the most dangerous part of the action. To shake off their pursuers, the men had to hide, sometimes for days. Then, slowed down by exhaustion and the wounded, they needed deftness or luck to avoid the swamps. Many fell in. Gurgen himself was once trapped in the bog which nearly swallowed him. Rescued, he took many weeks to recover.