in both German and Belarusian and had considerable clerical skills, so they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: Help unpack, sort, and carefully record all items looted from Jewish and other wealthy homes, churches, and institutions, which were brought to the Minsk Opera House prior to distribution to the Nazi hierarchy, or be shot. I chose not to be shot.
One of the few things I do remember of that terrible time is that I was ordered to write that fat turd Goebbels’ name on many of the more valuable items. Albert Speer once showed up with a military escort of about twenty SS officers and with much motorcycle revving, heel clicking and “Heil Hitlering,” Herr Speer picked out a Rubens, thus beating poor old Herr Goebbels to a choice prize!
I suppose it is amazing I can recall anything from those bleak and desperate days. I am unclear whether it is my advancing age or the deep fog into which I had descended at the time that clouds my memory of those few months in Minsk.
It was the screaming of the terrified children in the pit that awakened me from my slumbering fugue. I recall, as though it were only yesterday, looking up as the sounds of the terrified children pierced the windows of the opera house and seeing, as though for the first time, the poor emaciated slaves, clothes hanging from sharp shoulders, toiling around me. Some were surely only days from death.
As a non-Jew with light hair and blue eyes, one of the “cleaner” ones according to Himmler, I was given better rations and accommodation than those slated for eradication. No doubt the intent was that I should be kept alive in reasonable condition so that after the Nazis had won the war I would be shipped off to Germany or one of the conquered countries as a slave, although I didn’t realize it at the time.
The sound of the doomed children shook me free of the paralysis that had engulfed me and it was at that moment that I resolved to escape, despite the terrible fate that awaited those who were caught making a break for freedom. In the belief it would discourage further escape attempts, the Germans made sure we could hear the nightlong screams from those caught trying to flee. Hundreds of us were forced to view the public hangings that followed the torture. It was a very effective deterrent.
Many of those who escaped from the ghetto did so by slipping away from work parties sent outside the city to repair railway lines, roadways and bridges destroyed or damaged by the partisan attacks that had already begun to bedevil the Germans. Later, a highly organized underground was established in the ghetto that helped hundreds to escape through sewers, holes in the fence, and tunnels.* Since I worked well into the night at the Opera House labour camp just outside the ghetto, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, no such opportunity presented itself to me. My escape would have to be more creative.
*FACT: Many details concerning life in the Minsk Ghetto, the Opera House labour camp and the atrocities, including the above event, are all available from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Minsk after WWII, with the Opera House in the background
The Unasked Question
I WANT TO PAUSE HERE in my story for a moment to ask a question of you. How in the world could a young, fit, trained soldier of the Soviet Union end up in Ottawa in 1943? Because in that aspect, the history books are accurate. I did arrive to begin working at the Soviet Embassy in the fall of 1943. Why have the media never asked how that could possibly be? That is if in fact I really was a trained Soviet soldier who was moved to Canada as a cipher clerk!
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
