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Authors: Thomas Keneally
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me however it was the first departure. I took it for granted that I would be back after a month or two, that my parents would then continue the debate about whether to keep that elegant house in Staroviche or, now that my father was a Belorussian cabinet minister, to find a large apartment in Minsk.
The train left Minsk Central a half an hour after first light, an hour when those old cities can look ideal and eternal, especially on a translucent June morning. The spires of the Mariinski shone. Until the train began to roll out my mother had been tense, since this journey was parallel to a physically damaging departure she herself had made with her parents from Minsk to Grodno a quarter of a century before. To add to her anxiety, fighting between Russian partisans and German units had begun the day before all over the city, and as a sort of bass to the partisan activity, Marshal Rokossovskiâs artillery had been heard all night hammering away twenty miles outside the city. Despite all this Soviet bombast Minsk looked itself to me, I mean it looked immutable. There had been some damage to it in the fighting of 1941, some damage by bombing since, but the dawn light seemed to put a gloss over those small defects. I knew that Minsk had of its essence to stand forever.
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 Maryâs, Kingswoodâso 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.
âI wonder what the Russians will make of all that,â my father murmured to my mother. He had spent years in the classic Belorussian dilemmaâthe 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
The train left Minsk Central a half an hour after first light, an hour when those old cities can look ideal and eternal, especially on a translucent June morning. The spires of the Mariinski shone. Until the train began to roll out my mother had been tense, since this journey was parallel to a physically damaging departure she herself had made with her parents from Minsk to Grodno a quarter of a century before. To add to her anxiety, fighting between Russian partisans and German units had begun the day before all over the city, and as a sort of bass to the partisan activity, Marshal Rokossovskiâs artillery had been heard all night hammering away twenty miles outside the city. Despite all this Soviet bombast Minsk looked itself to me, I mean it looked immutable. There had been some damage to it in the fighting of 1941, some damage by bombing since, but the dawn light seemed to put a gloss over those small defects. I knew that Minsk had of its essence to stand forever.
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 Maryâs, Kingswoodâso 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.
âI wonder what the Russians will make of all that,â my father murmured to my mother. He had spent years in the classic Belorussian dilemmaâthe 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
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