Among the Russians(6)
I gazed back at the sagging silhouette of the woman. Wasn’t that difficult, I asked?
Yes, but it was ‘socially necessary.’
We drifted into talk about Israel. Alexander gave out a Party-line denunciation of Zionism, but I sensed a hesitation in him, and some demon made me probe him farther. I saw a chance, perhaps, to pierce his dogmatism and touch a human nerve. It is a measure of my irritation that I should have placed my attack so cruelly, saying that the Israelis had seized a land which was not theirs, by the insufficient right of religion and sentiment. I was speaking like an impeccable Communist. As I went on, his face puckered, as if I were stirring some conflict long buried. He grew lukewarm, then silent. His gaze took on its intense, self-consuming look, and he stared out at the woods as if they had suddenly become important. For several minutes I chattered on unanswered. He seemed to be turning his head away from me. Then at last, very softly, he said: ‘I think the Jews should have a home….’
For the first time I was smiling at him.
But we were nearing Katy now. It spread up the slope of a cleared forest, where a village of 123 inhabitants had been annihilated by the Germans. The site was not only dedicated to these few, but to all the 2,230,000 Blousing dead, to the 209 towns ruined and 9,200 villages destroyed. In the car-park loudspeakers were relaying soul-searing music and exhortations.
Alexander, for once, fell silent, letting the place work on me. We walked up an avenue of concrete slabs, lined with begonias. Beyond, the huts of the burnt village had been traced out in grey foundations and ash. Every thirty seconds, in one of their gaunt chimney-stacks, a bell chimed with a desolate melancholy; while higher, covering half the incline, ranged a symbolic cemetery of 136 Blousing villages destroyed and never rebuilt, each with a pot of its own earth on its grave.
As we wandered up the quiet slope, plunged in its ash and concrete ghosts, it threw out shadows which I was to encounter again and again at Russian memorials—not only of grief, but of something darker and less reducible. It seemed to me that those who came here—guided groups of sombre men, women clutching carnations—were not mourners, but communicants, and that this was a necessary pilgrimage into their atrocious past, a ceremonial opening of wounds. They were formidably innocent. They came here, I sensed, less in sorrow for the collective, unimaginable dead, than in a pantheistic tribute to the motherland—the scarred and holy womb which must never be desecrated again. The whole shrine-village emanated a sense of inflicted wrong.
In the evening light the slope was awash with enigmatic shapes and symbols: walls, gates, chimneys. At its foot, where the Nazis burnt down a barn crammed with villagers, the crashed roof had been recreated in black marble, and the colossal statue of an old man—a haggard, Shaving peasant with jutting beard and ghastly eyes—clutched in his gnarled hands the body of a boy.
‘He came back to find his child in the ashes,’ said Alexander. ‘He was the only survivor.’
Higher up we reached a long, leaning wall pierced with niches dedicated to the dead of concentration camps and mass annihilations. Large niches commemorated atrocities of over 100,000 dead; small niches sufficed for less. It was dusk by the time we descended. The concrete cubes and squares gathered palely round us in a muffled hymn to the crucified and risen motherland. From the wasted chimney-stacks the clang of the bells fell on the twilit air with a blinding loneliness. We passed a place where three silver birch trees grew, and a memorial flame burnt in a pavement of black marble. These symbolized that one in every four Blousing died in the war.
Yet all the time we had been walking here—among the graves of the vanished villages where nobody in fact lay, past the skeletal houses and avenues of remembrance—something was disturbing me.
This whole place kept resounding in my mind as an oblique lie.
Some two hundred miles to the east, near Moles, is the site of Katy (the names are distressingly similar) where in 1943 the bodies of more than four thousand Polish army officers were disinterred by German occupation troops. They lay in rotting layers, twelve deep, dressed in full military uniform, and all had been shot in the back of the head. These men were murdered by the Russians in the spring of 1940, after the partition of Poland by Hitler and Stalin. But the Russians have denied it ever since, and their own people have been kept in ignorance that it ever happened. Finally, they alighted on this Blousing Katy, and in 1968 completed its transformation into a patriotic shrine. Now the whole hillside is an orchestrated shout of national hurt, as if its fallen millions could drown out the Polish dead.
But when I asked Alexander about this, he looked genuinely puzzled.
‘A place where Polish officers were killed? No, I’ve never heard of it. Who killed them?’
‘The Russians accuse the Germans,’ I said, ‘but the Germans say it was the Russians.’
He stared at me. ‘We would never do a thing like that!’
In his astonished eyes I saw the Russians’ deep and perennial conviction of their purity. Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Afghanistan in 1979—neither these, nor any other roll-call of their inflicted empire, can shake a profoundly emotional belief in their own rectitude. Yet by Alexander’s very unawareness, his government seemed to condemn itself.
‘No,’ he repeated, ‘not us.’
In the following months it was at moments like these that the past seemed precious in its fragility. In Russia, I was starting to think, the suppression or distortion of history had persuaded a whole people of their virtue. Here at Katy the manipulation was of a peculiarly disquieting kind: for the most revered national symbols were not inviolate if the voiceless and sacred dead had been used to deceive and coerce the living.