Think of it. Refresh your memory. Even though Hitler had failed in his attempt to capture Moscow during the winter of 1941, when I arrived in Canada in October of 1943, the 900-day-long siege of Leningrad was still underway, and more than a million were dead.
Only two months previously, at Kursk, the Soviets and Germans fought in the largest single land battle in history. More than a million men and five thousand tanks took part in that epic seven-day struggle. The Germans were finally thrown back, but in the fall of 1943 they still held large tracts of the Soviet Union, including my own country of Belarus. Millions of Soviet soldiers lay dead. More than three million had been captured and faced God knows what fate. Don’t forget, in 1943 the Soviets were all alone in fighting Hitler in Europe. D-Day and the launch of the Western Front didn’t occur until June of 1944.*
*FACT: This is not exactly true. The allies landed in Sicily on July 10, 1943, and by the fall of that year were fighting their way up the “boot” of Italy.
So I ask the question again. How could it be that a perfectly fit, well-trained Soviet soldier was not fighting shoulder to shoulder for the Motherland with his Red Army compatriots?
In all the attempts to convince everyone that I betrayed my country to help the West, this question was never asked: How I (if I really was a soldier as they still claim) got to sit out a life-and-death struggle in the Soviet Union in the safety and comfort of Ottawa while my countrymen were dying by the millions? Why would the Soviets not have sent someone too old to fight, or a disabled soldier, perhaps even a woman unfit for battle?
Don’t you find that a little strange? Could it be that not everything you were told about Igor Gouzenko is true? Is it possible that everything the history books and even the movies claim about me was a giant lie? By the time you hear me out, that is the conclusion you must come to.
So let me tell you what really happened and how it was that I escaped the carnage of the Eastern Front to assume a minor role in the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, Canada.
Miracles
I SUSPECT I AM AS BRAVE as the next man, but the thought of the knives, testicle crushers, and other fiendish devices awaiting those caught trying to escape from Minsk is too frightening for me to even contemplate. If I am really going to proceed with an escape attempt, I must first devise some method of cheating the torturers. I do not fear a quick death. “What I must find,” I tell myself, “is a means to achieve it if caught.”
I am allowed a small knife, hammer, and crowbar with which to open some of the packing cases containing the pillaged treasures, but all such tools must be returned to the guards at the end of my working day, usually close to midnight. Even if somehow I am able to conceal the knife, it is too small to do the job properly. Death will have to be swift and certain!
They say there are no atheists in foxholes; I doubt there are many in ghettos either, but until that time I had been one. What overcame me that terrible night of the Purim massacres, I cannot tell you, but for the first time in my life I find myself on my knees praying for strength and deliverance.
God arrives the very next morning. Well, to be completely accurate, it is a huge, beautifully carved marble statue of Jesus on the Cross, pillaged from a Warsaw cathedral, probably St. John’s.* Why it has been shipped from Warsaw to Minsk only God knows. About ten feet tall and weighing, I suspect, close to a ton, it appears to be in perfect shape, but as I struggle to remove the Polish newspapers which crudely encase it, something falls to the floor and rolls to my feet. It is a thorn made of stone; about eight inches long and tapered at one end to a sharp point. A thorn, cleanly broken from the crown of thorns, encircling Christ’s bowed head! A miracle! I have my weapon.
*FACT: I have been unable to determine if such a statue existed at St. John’s or any other cathedral in Poland prior to the war. Six-hundred-year-old St. John’s Cathedral was partially destroyed by the Germans in 1944 during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Following the collapse of the uprising in November 1944, the remains of the magnificent cathedral were blown up by the Germans as part of their planned destruction of the entire city. The cathedral has since been rebuilt and is one of Poland’s national pantheons.
Gunfire suddenly rattles from the street just outside the Opera House—all eyes dart in its direction. Stooping swiftly I grasp the stone thorn and stuff it into my shirt.
God is not finished with his miracles. The next day a truckload of lumber and a large tarpaulin arrive along with orders to build a crate large enough to accommodate the statue and its enormous base, which we learn is to be shipped to the cathedral in Berlin known as the Berliner Dom.
My heart leaps when I see what had been sent!
Ghosts
TODAY THE RENOVATED AND VERY MODERN Minsk Opera House on Parizhskaya Kommuna Square is one of the most beautiful in all of Europe, home to the National Academic Great Opera Theatre of the Republic of Belarus.
Three years ago, I decided the ghosts had been sufficiently banished to allow me to return to the country of my birth for the first time since the war and, at my wife’s encouraging, to once again walk through the doors of the Opera House, this time as a free man. My own safety surely was no longer an issue. The “hunters,” convinced I could no longer do them any harm, had long ago given up their search, or at least that is what I believed. Everyone involved was dead now anyway. Except me!
With what I guess you would describe as a morbid kind of fascination, I had for years, here in my little cliffside hiding place, devoured all the news about the Opera House I could get my hands on. I took some pride in knowing it was here that world-famous singers such as Ludmila Shemtchuk and Maria Gulegina launched their brilliant careers and that the children’s matinees featuring performances such as Peter Pan, Puss in Boots or Magic Music were also renowned the world over.
“Today,” I tell myself, as my wife and I join the crowds entering the building, “this place has become a stage for the magnificence that man is capable of. A cathedral of beauty and art and joy and children. A home for angels!”
How very different I think, from the winter of 1941-42 when this was a house of horrors, a place of death and cruelty, hopelessness and despair. Mankind at its very worst. A place fit for no one but devils and their disciples.
When I was last here as a slave of the Nazis, all the wooden seats had been stripped from their moorings and thrown into the street, where residents had spirited them away for firewood. Sadly, we inmates could have used them ourselves to feed the basement furnace whose spasmodically flickering flame was seldom able to bring the winter temperature above freezing.
Today as we enter this splendid new Opera House, my wife takes one of my hands in hers and softly caresses it. “You’re trembling,” she says. I haven’t noticed. “Would you like to go back to the hotel?” I shake my head, but my heart pounds.
I think I am doing fine, walking briskly down the aisle to our seats, when suddenly, there it is: a pile of filthy rags, through morning-clouded eyes; a dark smudge amidst the clutter; beak-like fingers curled in final terror around the grillwork of the floor vent. Just in front of me. A frozen corpse!
My wife gives a soft cry, “What’s the matter? Are you all right?” I am clutching her arm hard enough to cause her pain.
“Ghosts,” I say, “just ghosts.”
I recall how the poor fellow must have climbed down from his frigid bunk during the night while the guards slept and how, not realizing, or perhaps not caring that the furnace was out, he lay down on the floor vent trying to suck some heat out of it and froze to death.
She strokes my hand, “Shhh, the music; it’s beautiful.”
The thing that strikes me is that there is very little inside that appears familiar. The seats are all new and very modern, much of the architecture has been altered, and the stage is completely new. I know