THE PAST IS SILENCE

Anne Applebaum travels to Belorussia to

discover her family's roots, and encounters the painful truth, or lack of it

Kobrin IT WAS a Saturday morning, and still dark when the bus left Brest for Kobrin. I had to stand: all the seats were filled with traders heading for rural markets, their boxes filled with stale chewing-gum and Brand X soda, fake blue jeans and car Parts. Through the window, I saw pinpricks of light coming from small farmhouses, and the outline of trees. Like everyone else in the Polish-speak- ing provinces of western Russia — now Belorussia — the 19th-century inhabitants of Kobrin had been forced to serve in the Tsar's army. The life of a conscript was terrible — long marches, no food, no sleep, beatings and jail for those who dis- obeyed. People would do anything to get out of it shoot holes in their feet, swallow Poison to become ill, break their arms and legs.

Instead of mutilating himself, my father's father's father, horn in Kobrin during the late 19th-century reign of Tsar Alexander III, ran away to America. He smuggled himself across the border to Prussia and made his way onto a ship sailing for New 'York, arriving at Ellis Island some time in the first decade of the 20th century, From New York, advised perhaps by one of the Jewish charities, or driven perhaps by some desire of his own — a love of small towns, a fondness for the provincial life — he made his way to Ensley, Alabama, where he opened a shoe store. Not long afterwards, he married my great-grandmother, who was also from Kobrin; he had gone to New York to find her, and persuaded her to marry him after boasting of his 'chain' of shoe stores. There was no chain, although he was even- tually to own three shops, which apparent- ly went some way towards making up for the absence of the rest. Somewhere along the Way, he probably changed his name, or had it changed for him, from Apfelbaum — apple tree — to Applebaum. Perhaps it sounded better in English; perhaps it was just easier to spell. After that, my great-grandfather rarely sPokeof his birthplace. As a child, I was sometimes told that he came from Poland, sometimes that he came from Russia, but

never Kobrin. My father doesn't remem- ber hearing the name of the town at all, and it took my grandmother some months to recall that her husband's parents had been referred to as 'the Kobriners'. Per- haps my great-grandfather had no fond memories of Kobrin. Or perhaps Kobrin was just the past, and therefore best for- gotten. That was the way most of his gen- eration felt about immigration. Once they arrived in America, they wanted to become American, and lost interest in whatever had happened before. If one knew what was best, one was careful not to tell the children anything about it, lest they somehow grow up foreign. It was still early when I arrived in Kobrin, and a mist had descended, wrap- ping the houses in a thick bandage of fog. The bus stopped first near the new town, where low concrete houses huddled togeth- er for warmth. Most of the traders got off: the market, it seemed, took place in the bus station parking lot. The bus then bumped its way down the pock-marked streets towards the older part of the town.

I got off in what would have been the old market square — a flat, weed-infested green space in the centre of the old town — and was immediately hit by a wave of strong odours: mildew seeping from the houses, bread from the bakery, stale beer and diesel fuel. There wasn't much to see, so I stopped a middle-aged woman who emerged from one of the shops, and asked for the synagogue. She looked at me, sur- prised, shook her head and walked on.

I then stopped an older man in a cloth cap, and put the same question to him. He thought for a few seconds. 'That way,' he said, and pointed down a street lined with low wooden houses. I followed it, but saw nothing which looked like a synagogue. The Catholic church, its façade covered in scaffolding, stood at the end of the road perhaps that was what he had meant.

An elderly woman was scrubbing the steps. She too had to think before answer- ing. 'I was not born here. You must ask the priest.' `And where is the priest?' `He comes back tomorrow.' She returned to her scrubbing, but then looked up. `You might try Boris Nikolaevich. Boris Nikolaevich knows many things about Kobrin.'

I wandered down another street. At the cinema, a poster showed a Technicolor cowboy in an ill-fitting hat. Beside the cin- ema stood a library with a sign in front: CLOSED. I looked at the piece of paper upon which I had written the name of Boris Nikolaevich's street, and decided to try it. His house stood among a clutch of other wooden houses, I knocked; a man with distinguished white hair and glasses opened the door. Boris Nikolaevich was a Russian, a descendant of minor Russian officials who had come to Kobrin to serve the empire. For many years, he had worked in Kobrin's one library. He knew how to read French, and in Kobrin he had the reputation of a man who knows about the world. Proudly, he told me of his collection of French stamps. `No one else has anything like it,' he said.

I asked him about town records, births and deaths and so on. 'Of course we have them,' he said. 'All the way back to 1945.' Before that it might get tricky, he said. Everything had been burned during the war.

While he spoke, he cleaned his finger- nails with a penknife, and complained about the price of potatoes. 'Last year they cost fifteen kopecks for a bushel, now they are one and a half roubles.' Potatoes, he said, had become a form of money. People traded potatoes — bags of potatoes, boxes of potatoes — for things like sugar and Paper, which were scarce. Life hadn't been much easier in Polish times. Before the war, there had been unemployment, and the best jobs went to the poles, not to the Russians. That was !'"Illy his brother had emigrated to France, in 1932.

. almost left too, but I was on a starva- tion diet then, I was not in good enough health.' He mentioned a famous doctor; had I read his book about the benefits of fasting?

'Even now I fast for one day every week, and last month I fasted for two days every Week. In my life, I have fasted over a thou- sand days. That is why I am so healthy. Would you believe that I am 87 years old? It was true, he looked much younger. I calculated backwards. He had been born in . As a child he might, just possibly, nav0e run into my great-grandfather on the street.

,I asked him about the Jews in Kobrin.

Yes, I remember them.' Boris Nikolae- vich sat back in his chair. More than half of K obrin's 11,000 inhabitants had been Jewish thpkil in 1939, he said. The Jews ran all Je „ In Practically all the docto were wish. In the centre of town, all thers build-

ings were owned by Jews. The houses on this street were owned by Jews.

`They were good neighbours,' he said, sighing. On 23 June 1941, the Germans came to Kobrin. On 24 June, the Germans round- ed up 150 Jews, took them outside town and shot them. Once in July and once again in August they did it again: each time 150 Jews, just people picked up off the streets. But then the Polish partisans began to fight in the woods around Kobrin, and the Germans had to find other methods. In October and November they began to organise ghettos. There were two: Ghetto A for richer Jews, Ghet- to B for the poor.

`I have always worked in the town library,' said Boris Nikolaevich, shaking his head. 'Before the war, most of my col- leagues were Jews. I told them to run away, to go to the forests with the parti- sans, but they wouldn't believe me. They wouldn't believe me, and they all went to Ghetto A. When the Germans sent the Jews of Ghetto B to Babi Yar, one of them — he had sat right beside me for years — poured benzine all over himself, and lit himself with a match.'

His family had also known a man called Goldberg. Goldberg and his friends had hidden in his mother's barn. Everything was fine for a few weeks, but Goldberg and his friends forgot to talk in whispers: `One night, our neighbours heard them arguing, and they knew they had to go, it was too dangerous. Goldberg had six gold tsarist coins: he told me that if a German caught him, he would buy his way out. Until now, we don't know what happened to him.'

Boris Nikolaevich shrugged. But he didn't want me to think that no one in Kobrin had fought back. During the war, the Nazis had knocked down the Jewish cemetery and put a stable on top.

`It's the gift from the people of Norway to the Eurosceptics.' 'One of the peasants who worked for the Nazis as a stable boy asked me to help him get poison: he wanted to poison the horses. I was friendly with the pharmacist at that time, so we did it. The Germans were per- plexed. Why were their horses dying? They brought in veterinarians to say what the problem was. The veterinarians did some examining, and after a whole day they announced to the Germans that the horses had not been poisoned. But the Germans were still suspicious, and they brought in another set of veterinarians. These said the horses had indeed been poisoned — it came out that the first doctors had been Czechs, and therefore not trustworthy. Afterwards, this peasant, my friend, ran to the woods and joined the partisans. Nobody suspected me.'

One or two of Kobrin's Jews had come back after the war, but, nowadays, a mixed lot of people lived in the town: a few Poles, a few Russians. The local people spoke a dialect which was really Ukrainian, not Belorussian. Kobrin, he said, was Belorus- sian by accident. But what was the differ- ence? Ukraine, Belorussia — what did it matter anyway?

I asked him about Applebaums.

He shook his head. He remembered no one of that name.

My eye drifted up to the print on the wall behind him. He followed my gaze.

`It is Goya — you know it? I like Goya a lot.'

The print was 'Reason Asleep, Dreaming of Monsters'.

I said goodbye. 'You'll find the syna- gogue on this street — you must have passed it on your way here.' He pointed the way. I traced my steps backwards, this time walking more slowly, stopping and looking at each of the wooden houses, one by one. I passed a garden where a young woman knelt, digging for something in the ground, and a house painted a surprising shade of pink.

They gave nothing away, they told no stories. They provided no access to the real past: there was nothing to learn here about my family. There was nothing left.

Then I saw the synagogue. It was a large yellow building, surrounded by overgrown shrubs and set back from the road. A long cable reached up to the round window where the star of David used to be; metal beer barrels, crates and the entrails of trucks had been strewn about the court- yard. The entrance was locked and barred with barbed wire. A sign hung from the gate: NO ENTRY. The building, it explained, was a brewery.

I started to climb the fence, but thought better of it.

This article is adapted from Anne Apple- baum's book Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe (Pan- theon, $24), which will be published in Britain by Macmillan PaperMac next spring.