off the tongue as I tell you about Patsy Regan, but I digress.
To this day I am not sure where she lived. Certainly not in the house I helped her to that first fateful night of the “twisted ankle.” Each time I broach the subject with her or suggest we might play a little “please, please” in her house to escape the ever present stink of cooked cabbage which drifts up from the apartment below, she makes some excuse about a landlord who won’t allow male company.
She claims she doesn’t mind the cabbage fumes and when I explain that I rented the tiny apartment in the first place because the smell reminds me so much of home, she falls on me with such force I am knocked to the floor.
“I’m going to give my big strong Russian something he never got at home,” she says. And she does!
• • •
Anyone who lived in the Soviet Union when “Uncle Joe” Stalin was in one of his purging moods will tell you what they feared most was a knock on the door. Friends never knocked, but Lavrenti Beria’s dreaded secret police, the NKVD,* always did and when they came calling it would be a good idea to put a bullet in your brain right then and there—that is if you could afford a bullet.
*FACT: The NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) eventually became known as the KGB (Committee for State Security).
You’d think that after two years in Canada some of the trepidation would have abated but as they say, old fears die hard. Besides, let’s not forget, even in Ottawa, the specter of Soviet “secret police” hovered over all who worked at the Embassy like the little black cloud that used to follow the Al Capp cartoon character around. Joe Btfsplk from Dogpatch in the comics; Joe Stalin from hell in Moscow! Definitely two people you did not want to come calling!
When the knock on my Delaware Avenue door comes, it isn’t a delegation from “Uncle Joe” summoning me to a protracted Siberian “vacation,” but a missive from “Uncle Harry” requesting my presence at a special dinner party he is throwing the next night at his home. The note pressed into my hand by the white glove of the Hudson Super Six chauffeur concludes, “ I hope my niece can join us as well.”
“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
