A Family Madness

by Thomas Keneally

  Other cities look like accidents. Here, in the west of Sydney for example, there is a feeling of a great red brick holding camp. The recurring shopping centers could have been dropped from helicopters like military equipment. Here there is no necessity in operation between the earth and what sits on it. Mount Druitt, Rooty Hill, Saint Mary’s, Kingswood—so transient they seem to beg a tidal wave and shall unhappily receive one.

  Minsk, on the other hand, on the morning I left it in 1944, was the only possible city which could have lain stringlike beads along those bends of the River Svisloch. And so Minsk defied the storm. It was known, even as we creaked away from Minsk Central that morning, that the Germans were leaving wounded men behind to make way for us thousand citizens of Bela Rus. We Belorussians had priority. For the seat I took; for the second one taken by my adolescent sister Genia; for the third taken by my father Stanislaw, the police chief of Staroviche and Deputy Minister of Justice of the Belorussian Republic; for the fourth taken by my mother Danielle, four German boys had had to be left to an absolutely guaranteed death. Four simple lads no doubt too young for politics or for worldviews, the pitiable cannon of their manhoods only so recently trundled forth were to be abandoned to the Bolsheviks. On their unwitting washed-out features would fall the entire vengeance.

  As the railway line skirted the airport road you could see the long scars which I knew by then to be the burial places of Jews and Bolsheviks.

  “I wonder what the Russians will make of all that,” my father murmured to my mother. He had spent years in the classic Belorussian dilemma—the choice of working for breathing space with one barbarous nation or another.

  To flee by train is a far less satisfactory experience than getting out by plane. In the rear of battlefields there is always too much train traffic. Coaches are sidetracked to let priority freight through. A strange feeling always overcomes the passenger when, for a reason no one explains, a train creaks and, after many metallic moans, stops; when the engine stops too, and from the summer woods either side of the line the noise of insects invades the compartment. When this happens and you know that behind you the Soviets are not resting, are devouring townships, then the placid murmur of honeybees can pierce you like a knife. It pierced my mother and became the abiding terror and frustration of her dreams.

  It was after the train had stopped for twenty minutes, that terrible determined inertia, and then started rolling with a will toward the Polish border, a border which in childhood had signified to my mother a certain relative safety, that she leaned over to my sister and me. “Not many will be saved from Minsk,” she told us. “When you pray you should consider what it means that you have been saved.”

  My sister Genia, fully adolescent by then, cast her eyes up at the luggage rack. Genia would be the one who resigned from the role of refugee earliest. My father and mother could not, for reasons I shall soon explain, ever cease to be Belorussians in exile. Because of certain guarantees I received the day Onkel Willi died, I traveled very calmly. My mother had no such comfort. She needed guarantees of safety and would never receive any. My father, as you will see, was in his manner a warrior.

  My mother was a native of the “big smoke”—to use an Australian term. Her family came from Minsk itself. My father was born a little further east, in the provincial city of Rogachev. Both families were clans of lawyers, always political. They lived in a Belorussia which had for centuries suffered partitioning. In modern times we have known only six weeks of independence. During the centuries of servile longing we were a “divine melon” (my father’s phrase) divided always between Poland and Russia. Citizens of Minsk used to joke that their city had changed hands one hundred and fifty times in recorded history. The Poles and the Russians may have considered themselves very different, but were like brothers in their intolerance of Belorussian language and culture.

  When my father was sixteen years old and was being taught by Polish Jesuits in Minsk, the delightful news of the fall of the Tsar, ever the enemy of Belorussian independence, reached the city. The German Army, who were then occupying Minsk, allowed my grandfather and various other Belorussian patriots to assemble and to found a Belorussian Republic. In its government my grandfather was Minister for Forests. Perhaps he thought he would for a long and tranquil decade govern Belorussia’s primeval thickets of spruce and hornbeam, oak and birch and alder and elm. Perhaps he thought that for many seasons he would have the regulation of the deer and the wolves, the lynx, the Belorussian bear and the herds of Zubr. Belorussians always thought like that, always believed that in the end the world would allow them to breathe. The Australians are more realistic, I notice. They believe that Asia—the Chinese, the Indonesians, the Japanese—will swamp them. Some welcome the idea, most fear it, but all expect it. The Australians are a young race who think like an old one. Whereas the Belorussians, whose country has rarely been more than a concept, a happy phantasm, have always thought with the dewiness of youth.

  My grandfather had no time to assert a forest policy before the Bolshevik Army came down the road from Smolensk. And the Germans, who had played a small game of holding off the Soviets by allowing my grandfather and his friends to form a government, now decided to play a bigger game, German staff officers arranging with the Red generals that as the German Army withdrew from the east, the Soviet armies should flood in and fill the gaps. They hoped that if they let the Reds in, the Reds would keep the Poles busy in the east—such was the ploy. It suited the Bolsheviks’ fantasy, which had to do with marching all the way to Germany to link up with rebellious German workers and soldiers. It suited the Germans, who knew the Soviets wouldn’t make it to Berlin, that the Red armies were too primitive to do more than waste themselves trying to beat a path across Poland.

  The Germans and the Russians having made peace, only some White Tsarist cavalry units were, by minor skirmish, holding up the Red advance. And as the Reds brushed these White troops aside, my grandparents on both sides fled west by train with their children. There could be no rest until, on lines clogged with the retreating Polish Army, they reached Warsaw. Even there Polish newspapers carried the terrifying dictum of the Soviet General Tukhachevski: “The way to Germany lies over Poland’s corpse.”

  But Warsaw was as far as he got. The Poles at last burst out along the Vistula south and west of Warsaw and then advanced until they were within a short ride of Minsk itself, the city that lies at the heart of Belorussian dreams. Then the Allies stepped in. In those days it was the British who used to play at being Henry Kissinger. Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary, negotiated a line that ran fair down the middle of Belorussia and gave the territory to the west to the Poles and what lay to the east to Russia. The fashion of the day was self-determination, but as had ever been the case, no one was interested in self-determination for the Belorussians.

  My mother and her parents lived in no great style in that Warsaw suburb named Praga, across the Vistula by the Warsaw zoo. My father’s family, however, the family of a Minister for Forests in exile, occupied a somewhat better apartment in the heart of the city, close to the Warsaw Central railway station. Both my grandfathers devoted their exile to Belorussian affairs.

  They applied themselves in particular to the besetting problem of Belorussian real estate. Polish landlords had flooded back into Western Belorussia now, claiming ancestral property, being granted it (without the need to pay compensation) just because their grandparents or great-grandparents had once held and exploited that land. (My maternal grandparents, for example, had held large timber and dairy holdings around the oblast of Minsk, and had lost part of them to the Soviets and part of them to a noble Polish family with a long memory. Hence the poor apartment by the zoo, with only the dream of a Belorussian homecoming to add opulence to life.)

  The Poles liked the Belorussians as much as they liked the Jews, and accepted only a minute quota of them into the universities. My father’s education by the Polish Jesuits had been adequate to earn him a rare place in the
law faculty at Warsaw. “To be a Hottentot at Oxford,” he would tell me, “was like being a Belorussian at Warsaw, with the chance of imprisonment and physical damage thrown in.”

  After his graduation he provided what would now be called legal aid for Belorussians, traveling as far as Baranovichi and Staroviche to represent his people in property cases, in municipal wrangles over the building of a new church or development, or approval for a shed in which to run Belorussian classes. He wrote widely in the barely tolerated Belorussian newspaper published in Warsaw. It ran under a succession of names, for no sooner had one name been approved than the Polish police would prohibit it. So it was called variously Nation, Independence, People, Freedom, Voice, Belarus, Unity, Survival. At last the Polish police let them publish for some years under the harmless figurative name Dawn. But there was always censorship, and sometimes stories would be blanked out, so that Belorussian readers called it, from its censored patchwork appearance, The Quilt.

  These Belorussian exiles in Warsaw had to suffer the surveillance not only of Pilsudski’s security police but of Soviet agents as well, operatives of Lenin’s Cheka and then of OGPU, both of them the forerunners of the renowned KGB. Cheka agents would follow my mother and grandmother to and from the markets in Freta Street. The Cheka would have been delighted to see them steal something, some special fruit of the kind they had been used to affording in Minsk, or a necklace or a scarf. There would have been an immediate denunciation to the Polish police, who would have brought their ample prejudices to the case. It was worse when in 1925 my father began courting my mother. OGPU agents tracked them as relentlessly as chaperons. Any violation of the bylaws governing the behavior of lovers in Lazienki Park would have brought the Polish gendarmes running.

  On behalf of Western Belorussia, my father was elected to the Polish Lower House, the Sejm, at the age of twenty-five years. Only thirteen representatives were permitted from the various national minorities, so that my father’s election made him famous in that half of Belorussia which lived under Polish rule.

  In the winter of 1927, my father and grandfather were arrested by the Polish police one morning at breakfasttime and charged with belonging to a subversive Belorussian society called Gramada. They were taken over the railway line to the Pawiak prison. Here they were treated to the same methods the SS would later use on the Poles themselves—the “tramcars,” cells in which prisoners sat or kneeled like monks in total silence at little benches which resembled prie-dieux, while one at a time they were taken out and questioned and beaten and returned to sit or kneel in silence still. My father’s jaw was broken here, and the crookedness with which it mended became more pronounced as he grew older.

  My father, his jaw attended to by doctors so that he would show no marks in court, stood trial with eighteen other Belorussian deputies and senators, and the outcry from liberals within Poland was such that they were acquitted. The three thousand other Belorussians who had been arrested that January morning were tried en masse—my two grandfathers among them—and sentenced to jail terms. But again the liberal outcry was such that the sentences were suspended. My grandfathers returned from a timber camp in Silesia within a few days. There is that to be said for liberals—they may be in no way equipped for governing the world, but they are admirable in specific cases of injustice.

  My grandfather the Minister for Forests would die within a year of his release. My maternal grandfather, also an arrested and then released member of Gramada, never again settled to writing articles and attending meetings, the two activities which up to then had sustained him in his exile.

  The experience of Pawiak and the trial convinced my father that he should marry and affirm his Belorussian nationality in a way that even the Poles could not proscribe or the OGPU betray—namely by founding his own Belorussian family. The wedding in the old Jesuit church behind the city square was attended by agents both of OGPU and of the Polish security police. For the sake of my grandfathers, who had been so marked by their imprisonment, the families tried to make a joke of those uninvited guests.

  9

  RADISLAW KABBEL’S HISTORY OF THE KABBELSKI FAMILY

  It seems that in the last days of August 1939—I can dimly remember the excitement of holiday packing—our family left our apartment in Warsaw locked and went off for what my father said would be a short holiday near Puck, a sheltered Polish resort on the Baltic, not far from the great international port of Gdansk. We were to stay in a beach hotel. I was told that as an added excitement we were to find my godfather Ostrowsky already booked in there and waiting, like the presiding genius of our holiday. He had in fact summoned us to the Baltic, and when we got on the train for Gdansk we found we were not the only Belorussians making for Puck, that he had invited half a dozen other families too. The parents all seemed calm and almost maliciously unexcited to be going to the beach so late in the summer, so close to the date when offices, factories, schools returned to full-blast production. The children however were feverish with the ecstasy of it, except such older ones as my sister Genia, who seemed stuck halfway between the sober adults and the crazily happy children. She did not race up and down the corridors of the train with the rest of us. Sometimes she mentioned—with a cool adult sort of yearning—her art teacher, a German-Pole called Mr. Beckmann, and surmised that he would be very surprised not to see her in his class the following Tuesday.

  It was still very warm on the Baltic beaches, but the wind was turning to the northeast and kicking up sand. The women sat together behind barriers of windproof canvas and talked quietly yet intently, not at all like adults relaxing in the sun. The men sat in their own colony of beach chairs, grouped around the lean and pallid figure of Ostrowsky, a few hundred meters north of the women. The water was freezing, so only children and those interested in self-discipline splashed in and disturbed the pastel blue surface and the concentration of the Belorussian patriots who sat around my godfather.

  One afternoon we came back to our rooms on the third floor of the hotel to find Polish security, plainclothes agents, and blue-uniformed policemen searching them. Further up the corridor bathrobed Ostrowsky was arguing with a Polish officer who stood by supervising the plunder. Perhaps plunder is too strong a word, because although the Poles were raking through drawers and suitcases, they were not taking anything. They wanted to know, my father later said, why so many notorious Belorussians were all together in a Baltic resort hotel at the end of the season. They hoped they might find some instructive documentation among our luggage while we were on the beach.

  My mother said to one of the agents, “I suppose you have no objection if my children and I wait on the patio until you have had the courtesy to vacate our rooms.” She was a long-boned and elegant woman. My father used to say she was his image of a Hapsburg princess. She withered those heavy Poles. I loved her for being so impressive, for soothing my fear with her imperial manner.

  Two days later the invasion of Poland commenced and all travel was suspended. Battle resounded very dimly along that quiet coast. In the pine trees behind the beaches the small refreshment stalls selling baskets of late-season strawberries, blueberries, raspberries stayed open, and we children sprinted back and forth between the soft fine sand and the wooded paths, buying and fetching berries for our parents, turning up at their beach chairs with our lips stained from the ratio of fruit we’d eaten as commission. The adults were happier now. They had at last found the holiday spirit.

  We stayed here in Puck, in a hotel now empty except for ourselves, all through the invasion. One morning at breakfast the waiters appeared in greenish military uniforms—they were to go within the hour to their Polish regiments. Some of the waitresses dropped plates unexpectedly and stepped behind the drapes to weep. Four or five days later, while an autumn squall was sweeping in over the Bay of Puck, some Gdynia Nazis turned up on motorcycles and in trucks, German nationalists who had lived twenty years under Polish rule, and ran up the sodden flag of National Socialism in front of the Polis
h post office, where up till then all dramatic events had centered on the sending off of postcards of scenes of Puck and Hel and the fishing village at Jastarnia.

  As rain squalls became more frequent and the siege of Warsaw continued, we remained guests of the hotel. The possible expense frightened my mother. Through the open door between our room and theirs I could hear them talking about it. Even though I did not understand every word that was said, since I had always been a devout eavesdropper, and since to overhear my parents in their bed whispering about business constituted prime entertainment, I can remember the conversation with some accuracy. “No,” my father said, “don’t concern yourself about it. Ostrowsky assures me the bill will be paid by the Reich Security Central Office.” My mother’s silence indicated a certain disquiet. My father said that both parties hoped to make use of each other, the Belorussians and the Nazis. What other world force to cooperate with? The Soviets? “We have to come out of this war with a national integrity,” he murmured. And this I remember in particular, though the nomenclature he used meant so little to me then. “Thank God,” he murmured, “that through Ostrowsky’s advice my contacts have always been with the Gestapo and the SD instead of with those sodomites in the storm troopers.”

  As the Baltic mists now took over Puck in earnest and filled the corridors of the hotel with damp, as fog roiled in opened doors and windows like steam from a Turkish bath, we yearned to be liberated from the hotel. And in time Warsaw fell and we were able at last to go home to our apartment, which had survived the bombing. Mr. Beckmann the art teacher had joined the Waffen SS—Genia saw him in his uniform in the Freta. My father wrote for a new Belorussian newspaper—there was some censorship because the Germans did not want their allies the Russians offended. My father also attended administrative courses run by the Reich Security Central Office in an old Polish government building near the Gdanski bridge. Once he complained that he was sure there were Soviet plants in the course, but the German officers who came to our apartment for coffee and cognac used to reassure him that of course the OGPU had its agents there, but they were fairly supine and inefficient and the SD had an eye on them.