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 that only too well, because during that terrible winter we ripped and hacked it to pieces in a largely vain attempt to keep the furnace fueled and thus ourselves alive.
The German guards in their greatcoats, heavy boots and thick gloves laugh as the once proud stage slowly disappears into the voracious maw of the furnace. From somewhere they have acquired a large gas heater, which, as they often tease us, keeps them “nice and toasty” in the balcony office they have converted to a small barracks.
I remember too, how the basement and back rooms are jammed with looted treasures from Belarusian homes, churches, cathedrals, and theatres. All being stored for that “glorious” day when Herr Hitler rules the world and the Swastika flies from every flagpole. Tapestries, antique furniture, silverware, paintings, sculptures, and other priceless works of art await that “new dawn” when they will adorn the homes, churches, cathedrals, and theatres of the new “supermen” who are creating for us all Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich.
As with cream, the very best is being skimmed off the top almost daily by those destined to be the leaders of this grand “new world order.”
It is my job to record all items as they are dumped onto the main floor of the Opera House and present my list to SS General Kurt von Gottberg who arrives each evening in a chauffeured black limousine accompanied by six armed guards.
The routine is the always the same. Each evening I stand, “loot list” in hand, just outside the main entrance to the Opera House. At precisely 6:30, the limousine pulls up, a rear window rolls down, a gloved hand extends, fingers snap and the list is slapped into the glove which quickly disappears into the darkness of the rear seat as the heavy vehicle and its guards speed away. I never really get a good look at the General who, although neither of us knows it, will soon replace Satan himself.*
*FACT: Kurt (sometimes spelled Curt) von Gottberg did replace Wilhelm Kube as Generalkommissar for Belarus.
If the looting and pillaging has gone particularly well and things get a bit bogged down in the Opera House with an overabundance of “loot,” I will sometimes be ordered to pick up a hammer or crowbar and either help unpack some of the arriving boxes or, if a treasure is heading out the door to a “superman’s” home or office, I might cobble together a crate sufficiently strong enough for shipment through what is becoming increasingly dangerous territory for the Germans.
Sitting now in the warmth and comfort of this splendidly refurbished Opera House, I am startled as Aida appears to turn directly to me and begins to sing “Oh, my country, what you cost me!” Raising her arms she points and there it is! Yes, over there, just to her left. The memories flood in! I see it again as though it was only yesterday: a magnificent marble statue of the crucifixion! Look closely, Aida. One of the thorns from the crown that adorns Christ’s head is missing!
Escape
THE GHOSTS TAKE ME BACK now to the time of deliverance from this place—March 5, 1942.
During the night, I tape the marble thorn to the inside of my left thigh, using a stolen strip of masking tape.
At dawn the next day we set to work building a solid wooden crate large enough to accommodate the ten-foot high statue with its nearly six-foot-wide cross. We are told the statue will be loaded aboard a transport truck that evening, but we know it won’t actually leave Minsk until well after dark, in order to lessen the risk of partisan attacks.
Fully believing I am under God’s protection and having observed previously that none of the guards know anything about carpentry, I begin to construct a base for the crate that is more than six feet square, with full expectation that no one will recognize it doesn’t need to be nearly that large. I am right. By the time our breakfast of black bread
