Journeys with My Mother (19 page)

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
Ostarbeiters
²⁴
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
Standortkommandatur
²⁵
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 from 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
izbas
²⁶
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.

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.