“White Gloves” does talk after all! “Shall I tell Mr. Harry you will be able to join him and his other guests?” he asks. With my heart still pounding and having some difficulty catching my breath, I only nod. What I should have done was bounced the chauffeur down the stairs, jumped into the Hudson and roared off in any direction. Where I’m not sure. Anywhere!
Terror was in the driver’s seat…death its cargo!
The Black Crows
IT WASN’T HUDSONS OR FORDS that came calling for you in Belarus. It was the “black crows.” The NKVD secret police in their black cars, engines fueled with terror, stalked the streets of our little town.
You never knew when it would be you hauled away to God-knows-where, never to be seen or heard from again. If they passed your house and stopped at a neighbour’s you cried with relief. The rank odor of fear and suspicion permeated the air we breathed.
Millions of my fellow countrymen in what was then known in the West as White Russia were murdered or disappeared during the years I was growing up. The history books talk about executions. They make it sound civilized. It was slaughter. The madness reached its peak in 1937, the year I turned 18.
That was the year Stalin ordered all individual peasant farms, which in most cases had been in the same families for generations, taken from their owners and formed into collective farms—kolkhozes they called them. Those who objected or even questioned the action were usually shot on the spot, their bodies left to rot.
Anyone attempting to bury the dead was considered either a traitor or something called an “inner enemy.” They were ordered to lie down beside the corpse and were either shot or, depending upon the depravity of the NKVD agents, buried alive by neighbours forced at gunpoint to man the shovels.
I watched in horror one day in our little town of Rahachow when a “black crow” pulled up in front of a house only a few metres down the street. Two of Stalin’s henchmen, armed with machine pistols, strode to the front door, knocked briefly and when there was no response shouldered the door open. In a heartbeat they reappeared dragging an elderly man down the front steps. A woman, her hair flying in all directions, holding a coat or large rag of some kind, suddenly appeared on the stoop behind them and began screaming oaths in German and Russian. As the entire street watched through trembling curtains, one of the “crows” kicked the poor old man into the street, then began methodically shooting him.
I have seen some horrible things in my life, but till the day I die I will never forget how his body jumped and jerked and shuddered as each bullet thudded into him. Calmly, as though they’d just finished a light lunch, both of the “black suits” climbed back into their black car and took a leisurely cruise down the street before disappearing around the corner. The old man’s body lay there for hours, the deathly silence on the street broken only by low moaning from somewhere inside the house and the sound of swarming flies and wasps gorging themselves on the blood and the horror.
It should not surprise you then that when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa and attacked the Soviet Union in June of 1941, many Belarusians, myself included, welcomed the Nazis as liberators. Some villagers, dressed in their finest, threw flowers at the Tiger tanks racing by!*
*FACT: It is true that, at first, many of those subject to Stalin’s oppression welcomed the Nazis. Pictures of flower-laden German tanks invading Belarus are on display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW, Washington, DC 20024-2126, or on their website at http://www.ushmm.org/.
It didn’t take long for us to learn that compared to the Nazis, “Uncle Joe” Stalin was a pussycat!
Barbed-wire fence surrounding the Minsk Ghetto, 1941. The sign warns: Anyone approaching the fence will be shot!
The Ghetto
WE DIDN’T KNOW IT AT THE TIME, of course, but that filthy little monster Heinrich Himmler had already issued orders to the SS that fully three-quarters of the entire Soviet population, some 140 million people, were to be exterminated to make way for German “Lebensraum,” which means “living space” in English.
The written instructions handed to all German soldiers read, as follows:
You are not able either to take things to heart or to worry about what you see, or show any compassion. Kill any Russian or Soviet citizen. Do not stop at anything. When you see a man, woman, a boy or a girl in front of you, kill. It will save you from death. It will ensure your future. It will bring eternal glory to you.
Hitler himself declared, “The war in the east is a war of annihilation.”
Most German soldiers had little difficulty following Himmler’s orders. Many were enthusiastic about it all. Public executions, usually public hangings, began almost immediately in the Belarus capital of Minsk only a few kilometres away from our little town.
“The only ones to be left alive,” said the directive, “are those with light-coloured hair and blue eyes.” The “cleaner ones,” according to Himmler. They were to become slaves for the Germans.*
*FACT: Lebensraum was a plan, conceived by Hitler, in which those deemed nonAryan would be exterminated or expelled to make way for German colonists, while the citizens who remained would be subject to forced Germanization. This information is widely available, from such sources as Bolshevik System of Power in Belarus by M. Kasciuk, Minsk, Publishing house Ekaperspektyva and Belarus; and From Soviet Rule to Nuclear Catastrophe by David R. Marples, New York, 1996 St. Martin’s Press. Much of this information is available at the State Memorial Complex in Khatyn. (Khatyn’s entire population was murdered and the town burned to the ground by the Nazis early in 1941 as part of the policy of genocide.) In addition, much of the information concerning the Belarus genocide is available from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC and its website.
What many people don’t realize is that when Germany first attacked, about 40 percent of Belarusians were Jews. You can say what you like about Stalin, but at least he didn’t select the Jews for special treatment. He was equally cruel to us all. However, by the time the war was over, less than 1 percent of the population of Belarus was Jewish. I don’t have to tell you what happened, but let me fill you in on a few details from someone who lived through it. What I’m about to tell you may sound a bit like a history lesson, but you’ve got to understand what happened to me before I arrived in Canada, in order for you to believe me when I tell you I would sooner die than betray my country.
The Germans attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Six days later on June 28, they entered Minsk and within hours had rounded up some 40,000 men and boys between the ages of 15 and 45. Almost all were Jews, although there were a few Soviet POWs and some non-Jewish civilians who had run afoul of German authority for one reason or another.
For four days and nights the 40,000 were kept herded like cattle in a field surrounded by machine guns and floodlights. No food, no shelter, no water. On the fifth day, all Jewish members of the intelligentsia were ordered to step forward. About 2,000 men did so, believing they would be freed. Instead, they were taken to a nearby woods and shot. Within days the murder of Jews and others, singly or in groups, became a daily occurrence.
In late July the Germans established a ghetto in the northwestern part of Minsk into which were immediately crowded some 80,000 people. For awhile some of the Jews were forced to work in slave labour camps and factories. Living conditions were unspeakable. Each