As the Russians were about to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of their great victory, the Byelorussian writer Svetlana Alexiyevich, a 2014 Nobel Prize nominee, received this taped account in the post and couldn’t resist publishing it. Neither can I, so here’s the transcript in my translation – but without my commentary. None is needed.
“There was this Jewish girl Rosa in our partisan unit, pretty, she always carried books with her. Sixteen years old. Our commanders took turns sleeping with her… ‘She has baby hair down there… Ha-ha…’ Rosa got pregnant… They took her into the woods and shot her like a little puppy. Children were born, no way around it, with a forest full of young bucks. Usually, when a baby was born, it was sent to a village straight away. To a hamlet. But who’d take a Jewish baby? Jews had no right to give birth. I came back from a mission: ‘Where’s Rosa?’ ‘What’s it to you? This one gone, they’ll find another one.’
“Hundreds of Jews would escape from the ghetto and roam the forests. Peasants would catch them, deliver them to the Germans for a sack of flour, a kilo of sugar. Write about this… I’ve kept silent too long. A Jew is scared of something all his life. Wherever a brick falls, it’ll hit a Jew.
“We didn’t get out of burning Minsk because of Gran… Gran had seen Germans in 1918 and kept telling everyone Germans were cultured, they wouldn’t hurt peaceful people. A German officer had been quartered at their place back then, played the piano every evening. So Mama began to doubt: should we run or stay? All because of that piano of course… That’s how we lost a lot of time. Germans rode in on their motorbikes. Some locals in embroidered shirts were greeting them with bread and salt. Joyously. There were many who thought: here come the Germans, so normal life will start. Many hated Stalin and stopped hiding it.
“I heard the word ‘kike’ in the first days of the war… Our neighbours would knock on the door and yell: ‘That’s curtains for you, kikes! You’ll pay for Christ!’ I was a Soviet boy. Aged 12, five years of school. I couldn’t understand what they were saying. Why were they saying it? I still don’t understand… Our family was mixed: Papa a Jew, Mama a Russian. We celebrated Easter, but in a certain way: Mama would say it was the birthday of a good man. She baked a cake. And at Passover (when God spared the Jews) Papa would bring home some matzo from Gran. But the time was such that we didn’t advertise that… had to keep silent…
“Mama sewed yellow stars on to our clothes… No one could leave the house for several days. We were ashamed… I’m old now, but I still remember how I felt… Ashamed… There were leaflets strewn all over town: ‘Off commissars and kikes’, ‘Save Russia from kikes and Bolsheviks’. One leaflet was slipped under our door… Soon… yes… Rumours were spreading: American Jews are collecting gold to buy Jews out and bring them to America. Germans like order and dislike Jews, that’s why Jews will have to spend the war in the ghetto… People were trying to make sense of this… find some meaning. A man wants to understand even hell. I remember… I remember well how we were moving into the ghetto… Thousands of Jews were walking through town… with children, pillows… I brought with me, this is funny, my butterfly collection. Now it sounds funny… The locals came out to watch, some with curiosity, some with glee, some with tears. I wasn’t looking around, was afraid to see some of the boys I knew. I was ashamed… I remember that constant shame…
“Mama took her wedding ring off, wrapped it in a handkerchief, told me where to go. I crawled under the barbed wire at night… A woman was waiting at a prearranged place, I gave her the ring, she poured me some flour. In the morning we saw that I had brought home chalk, not flour. A whitener. That was Mama’s ring gone. We had no other valuables… Began to swell from starvation… Peasants with big sacks kept vigil outside the ghetto. Day and night. Waiting for the next pogrom. When Jews were taken out to be shot, the peasants were let in to rob the houses. The local polizei were just looking for valuables, but the peasants stuffed into the sacks everything they could find. ‘You won’t need it no more,’ they’d tell us.
“Once the ghetto went quiet, like before a pogrom. Though no shots were fired. They weren’t shooting that day… Cars… lots of cars… They unloaded children wearing nice little suits and shoes, women in white pinafores, men with expensive suitcases. Great suitcases! They all spoke German. The guards were at a loss, especially the polizei, they weren’t shouting, hitting anyone with truncheons or letting barking dogs loose. Like a show… theatre… That day we found out those were Jews from Europe. We got to call them ‘Hamburg Jews’ because most were from Hamburg. They were disciplined, obedient. They didn’t play tricks, didn’t try to dodge the guards, didn’t hide… they were doomed… They looked down on us. We were poor, badly dressed. We were different… didn’t speak German…
“They were all shot. Tens of thousands of ‘Hamburg Jews’…
“That day… everything is like in a fog… How were we dragged out of the house? How transported? I remember a large field next to the forest… They picked out strong men and told them to dig ditches. Deep ones. And we just stood waiting. First they tossed little children into the ditch… and began to fill it in… The parents weren’t crying or begging. It was quiet. Why, you ask? I was thinking about that… If a man is attacked by a wolf, he won’t plead, beg for his life. Or if a wild boar would attack…The Germans were peeking into the ditch, laughing, throwing sweets in. The polizei were all sloshed… had pockets full of watches… The children were buried… Then they told everyone else to jump into another ditch. So there we were, standing there, Mama, Papa, I and my little sister. Our turn came… The German in command, he saw Mama was Russian and waved her away: ‘You can go.’
“Papa shouted to Mama : ‘Run!’ But Mama was clinging on to Papa, to me: ‘I’m with you’. We were all pushing her away… begging her to go… Mama was the first to jump into the ditch… That’s all I remember…
“I came to when someone hit me hard on the leg with something sharp. I cried out from pain. Heard the whisper: ‘This one’s alive’. Peasants with spades were digging up the ditch and taking off the corpses’ shoes, boots… anything they could take off… They helped me climb out. I sat down at the edge of the ditch and waited… and waited… It was raining. The earth was so warm. They sliced me a piece of bread: ‘Run, little kike. You may get away.’
“The village was empty… Not a soul, but the houses were all there. I was hungry, but there was no one to ask for food… So I roamed on my own. Here and there I’d see a rubber boot on the ground or a galosh… a headscarf… Saw charred bodies behind the church. Black corpses. Smelled of petrol and something fried… I ran away back into the forest. Survived on mushrooms and berries. Once I bumped into an old man, logging. He gave me two eggs. ‘Don’t go,’ he warned, ‘near the village. The peasants will tie you up and deliver you to the Germans. The other day they caught two kike girls that way.’
“Once I fell asleep and was woken up by a shot fired next to me. Jumped up: ‘Germans?’ But there were some young lads on horseback. Soviet partisans! They laughed and started arguing among themselves: ‘And what do we need the little kike for? Why not…’ ‘Let the boss decide.’ They took me to the unit, put me in a separate hut. Left a sentry outside… I was called to interrogation: ‘How did you get to the unit base? Who sent you?’ ‘No one sent me. I climbed out of the execution ditch.’ ‘And maybe you’re a spy?’ They punched me in the face twice and kicked me back into the hut. In the evening they shoved in two young men, also Jews, wearing good leather jackets. They told me Jews without weapons weren’t taken into the unit. If you had no weapons, you had to have some gold. They had a gold watch and cigarette case – demanded to see the commander. Soon they were taken away. I never saw them again… And later I saw the commander with the gold cigarette case… and the leather jacket… I was saved by Papa’s friend, Uncle Yasha. He was a cobbler, and cobblers were valuable to the unit, like doctors. I began to help him…
“First piece of advice from Uncle Yasha: ‘Change your name.’ My name is Friedman… I became Lomeiko… Second piece of advice: ‘Keep your mouth shut. Or you’ll catch a bullet in the back. No one will be punished for a Jew.’ That’s how it was…
“War is like a swamp, easy to get in, hard to get out. Here’s another Jewish proverb: when a strong wind blows, the trash flies highest. Nazi propaganda had infected everyone, the partisans were anti-Semitic. There were eleven of us Jews in the unit… then five. They’d start conversations for our benefit: ‘What kind of fighters are you? Taken like lambs led to slaughter…’ ‘Kikes are cowards…’ I kept silent. I had a mate, real daredevil… David Greenberg… he talked back. Argued. He was shot in the back. I know who killed him. Today he’s a hero, walks around with chest full of medals. Strutting!
“Two Jews were killed for allegedly falling asleep on duty… Another one for his new Luger… they envied… Where could I run? Back to the ghetto? I wanted to fight for my country… to avenge my family… And the country? The commanders had secret instructions from Moscow: don’t trust Jews, don’t take them into the units, kill them. We were considered traitors. Now we’ve found it all out, thanks to perestroika.
“An order came: burn this polizei’s house… Together with his family… The family was large: wife, three children, Granny, Grandpa. At night the house was surrounded… the door was nailed shut… Doused it with kerosene and lit it up. They were screaming there, bellowing. A little boy tried to climb out of the window… One partisan wanted to shoot him, another wouldn’t let him. They tossed him back into the fire.
“I was fourteen… I understood nothing… I memorised what I could, all of this. And now I’ve told the story… I don’t like the word ‘hero’… there are no heroes in the war…
“Many years have passed… half a century… But I still remember… that woman… She had two children. Little ones. She hid a wounded partisan in her cellar. Someone informed… The whole family were hanged in the middle of the village. Children first… How she screamed! Humans don’t scream like that… animals scream like that…
“Should a person make such sacrifices? Don’t know. [Silence.]
“Nowadays they write about the war without ever seeing it. I don’t read that stuff… No offence, but I don’t read it… Minsk was liberated… That was the end of the war for me, I was turned down for the army. Fifteen. Where should I live? Strangers had settled in our flat. ‘Dirty Jewboy…’ Wouldn’t give anything back, our flat, our things. They had got used to the idea that the Jews would never come back.”