Chapter 22
The year 1950 came. In May, Kim graduated from the second year of river school and was called up for military service in a unit located in the suburbs of Kuibyshev.
By this time, Braina found out that she would only be able to get a certificate of her education on the basis of testimony certified by a notary. It became clear that this could not be done without her in-person participation, so she decided to go to Belarus and at the same time to visit Kim. With Genya’s help, she managed to find people in Minsk and Bobruisk who remembered Braina from working together. They willingly gave their testimony, and the coveted documents were finally obtained.
While in Minsk, Braina visited with Genya the house on Ostrovskogo street from which in November 1937 she was taken to the Soviet prison, and in 1941 fascist police drove Ida out with batons to her last journey. The brick house survived, and just as in the pre-war years, it was inhabited by the families of the bakery workers. None of them had survived the tragedy of the ghetto, but they knew where the firing pit was, and they accompanied the sisters there. On the way, the impressionable Braina involuntarily imagined herself in the place of Ida, condemned to death, and was so overcome by emotion that when she approached the ill-fated place, which really turned out to be a huge pit, she lost her senses…
“Black Obelisk” or “Monument on the Pit”
— this has always been the name of the first
memorial stele at the site of the mass
shooting of the Jews of Minsk on
November 7, 1941. By 1947 the people
themselves had raised the funds for this
monument. The famous municipal stonemason
Mordukh Spryshen carved a marble obelisk
from a tombstone from the old Jewish cemetery.
The inscription for it was written in Yiddish by
the poet Chaim Maltinsky. The Black Obelisk
in Minsk became the first monument to
Holocaust victims in the USSR. But the Soviet
authorities stubbornly ignored it and, in every
way, prevented the annual mourning events
near it. Only on May 9, 1969, a small group of
Jewish young people started to clean the
littered pit, and only at the end of October
1973, the Black Obelisk was officially secured.
The current monument was placed in the
place of the former one, without the Yiddish
inscription and with the wrong date of the
mass execution of the Jews of Minsk.
Upon arriving in Bobruisk, Braina, first of all, visited the weed-covered lot where their spacious house had stood before the war and where the years of her childhood and youth, warmed by her parents’ love, had been spent. Deep sadness gripped her at her parents’ ruined nest, where her elderly mother had been killed under German bombs. The place of her burial was never found. Without noticing the time, immersed in memories, Braina wandered to the cherished places where in her youth it was so wonderful to spend evenings with friends, discussing works of her favorite writers or singing Jewish and Belarusian songs! Here she met Joshka and fell in love with him, and here the beautiful Lenochka, the child of their love, was born!
Once leaving their native city, young, happy, looking forward to a bright future, they were full of serene confidence that this would continue for the rest of their lives. But it turned out that instead of happiness, they were destined for the unexplained and mysterious cruel repressions and the difficult war years.
As a result, after 25 years, Braina returned to the war-torn city alone, having lost almost her entire family and relatives, sick and prematurely aged from the hardships she had endured. But, despite everything, she preserved her natural zest for life and benevolence to people, her belief in the triumph of justice, and she still cherished the hope of meeting Joshka and Lenochka.
After Bobruisk she went to Kuibyshev to meet Kim.
He looked thin and tired. The military unit in which he had to serve was building an airfield at an aircraft factory. Two days a week were allotted for military training and four — for difficult excavation and concrete work. It was very upsetting for Kim that he was to serve not three years, as in the regular ground forces, but four, due to the fact that the airfield construction unit was assigned to aviation.
In Kuibyshev, Braina met her good pre-war acquaintance, Roza Alexandrovna Gorelik, who had been evacuated from Minsk in the early days of the war and never returned. She was very pleased with
Braina and extended an invitation to Kim to visit her during her leave. When they talked about Lena it suddenly turned out that Roza knew the address of the sister of Nata Tsaplinskaya, the same girl who had gone to the Kharkiv Automobile Institute with Lena in 1941. Braina immediately sent a letter to that address, asking Nata’s sister to inform her of the fate of her sister and her daughter.
Returning to Namangan, Braina applied to the city department of public education for a job as a teacher, and repeated fruitless visits to the offices began. But Braina did not give up, continuing to provide her needs with tutoring earnings.
The red tape took a lot of time and effort; Braina was tired and once again, out of habit, began to go for a break in the library reading room, where she could always count on the friendly attitude of the staff and a free table.
One day, flipping through the pages of the magazine “New World”, Braina found in it a new novel by writer Azhayev “Far from Moscow”. The courageous, honest, strong-in-spirit heroes of the work, convinced patriots of their country, their selfless work in the harsh conditions of the Far East moved her deeply: she imagined that Joshka could very well be one of them because she knew him just like that! The hypothesis that Azhayev met Joshka at one of the distant construction sites did not leave her mind, and she decided to write to the author about her impressions of the novel as if casually mentioning Joshka’s name.
Soon the writer responded to Braina with a warm, lengthy letter of thanks. References to Braina’s letter appeared in “Literaturnaya Gazeta” and “Rabotnitsa” magazines, where there was a controversy about the acclaimed novel. Upon learning of this, the library management asked Braina to prepare a co-author’s report for the readers’ conference on the novel “Far from Moscow.”
Braina’s interesting, emotional speech elicited applause among its participants. Apparently, there was someone from the public education department among them, because the attitude toward Braina in that department immediately improved, and soon she was appointed to the position of German teacher in an Uzbek school.
Since Braina did not know this language and the Uzbek children did not know Russian well enough, the lessons involuntarily turned into a verbal game in German, Russian and Uzbek, very amusing for the students. Braina had to go to great lengths to keep them from getting too enthused with her. And although these activities did not bring moral satisfaction, the teacher salary quite fit the modest financial needs of Braina.
At the beginning of 1951 came the answer to a letter that Braina sent from Kuibyshev to Nata Tsaplinskaya’s sister. To Braina’s amazement, the reply was written by Nata herself. On several pages, she reported in detail everything that had happened to her and Lena in Kharkiv up to the occupation of the city by the German army.
Nata herself had been forcibly deported to Germany for forced labor, and when she returned to Kharkiv after the war, she visited the house where Lena lived and learned from the landlady that Lena had once left home and never returned. In conclusion, Nata cautiously suggested that Lena might have survived the occupation in a place where no one knew her, and might be in Kharkiv, but for some unknown reason was not making herself known. This letter, which gave Lena’s exact pre-war address, so stirred her mother’s soul that she irresistibly wanted to be there.
In July, during the school vacations, Braina came to Kharkiv and, without much difficulty, found the house listed in the address on Lenin Street in an area called Shatilovka.
At the back of the fenced-off lot stood the house, unharmed and surrounded by the garden. Its owner, an old woman, was busy picking gooseberries from the bushes densely dotted with ripe yellowish berries. She invited Braina into the house, treated her to tea, and told her in detail that Lena, whom she immediately liked for her modesty, neatness, and politeness, behaved very carefully in front of the Germans, leaving the house only to work or to the grocery store.
But when the Germans and the Polizei drove all the Jews out of town to the settlement of the tractor factory, she was very sorrowful. All the other tenants of the house took notice. Lena’s only document was her student card, she spoke Ukrainian without an accent, and during the census, she was registered as a pupil of the orphanage, Ukrainian by nationality.
There had been no sign of trouble when all four girls, who shared the same room, went to the labor exchange for another re-registration, but only three of them returned. They told the landlady that in addition to a local Ukrainian official, a German in military uniform was present in the office, and he detained Lena, suspecting that she was Jewish.
The landlady knew nothing more about Lena’s fate. To Braina’s remark that Nata had not informed her of what had happened at the exchange, the landlady frankly confessed that in that troubled time just after the war, fearing trouble, she had preferred to answer a stranger’s questions about Lena that her lodger had not returned home one day for some unknown reason.
Feeling broken and devastated, Braina made her way back. On the train, lying on a shelf and turning away from her fellow passengers, she silently sobbed, mourning her dearly loved, infinitely close spiritually, tender and affectionate daughter. The last spark of hope to meet her one day in this world had gone out…
Grieving thoughts about the tragic fate of Lena and scenes arising in the mother’s inflamed imagination of her suffering, brought Braina to a state of hopeless boredom when life seems devoid of meaning. The strangers who were in the same compartment with her could not ignore the fact that she had not eaten or risen from her seat for many hours. In response to their cautious inquiries, Braina gradually began to talk and told them about her grief. Her companions not only sympathized but, probably trying to calm her down, vied with each other to tell about their own losses during the last war. It turned out that it had taken a close relative from each of them. This spontaneous expression of sympathy and support from strangers brought Braina out of her grief-stricken stupor. She realized that she must, like these people, come to terms with her grief and continue to live for Kim’s sake and for the hope of Joshka’s return.
When she returned to Namangan, however, Braina was not soon able to bring herself to do the usual daily chores, despite the soothing, heartfelt letters of Genya, Kim, and Nata. Now and then, forgetting everything, she would sit for hours at the table in deep sadness, laying out on it the few letters, poems, and photographs received from Lena in the years of her camp imprisonment. Again and again, she reread the stirring lines of her letters and poems, gazing into the dear, infinitely dear face of her daughter…
Only the beginning of a new year at the school, and literary evenings in the city library of which she was now a regular participant, distracted Braina from mournful thoughts, but already the acute pain of irreparable loss would never leave the mother’s heart.
More than ever before, at this time Braina needed her wise and strong Joshka so much! Only he could alleviate the weight of her loss, lessen her heartache. But in the long years following his arrest, Braina learned nothing of his fate except an oral report from a State Security Committee investigator in 1937 about his standard sentence: 10 years’ imprisonment without the right to correspondence. Under fear of persecution and repression, the totalitarian regime that reigned in the country precluded relatives from contacting the authorities to inquire about the fate or even the whereabouts of their loved ones who had become political prisoners.
Braina had heard that after serving their assigned term of imprisonment, those convicted of important political articles usually add at least five years of strictly supervised exile. Deciding that Joshka had suffered a similar fate, she waited patiently, never losing faith in the inevitability of his release, dreaming of returning to Bobruisk together and hoping to reunite her family where they had been so happy in their youth.
Braina wrote to Kim about it, wanting to know his opinion.
He received his mother’s intentions with fervent approval and enthusiasm. The sudden aloofness that had arisen at their first meeting had long since disappeared, replaced by sincere sympathy for his long-suffering mother and an awareness of the filial duty of care to her. And to his father, Kim had always retained feelings of enthusiastic love and heartfelt affection. The bright hope of restoring a friendly, caring, and cultured family with parents who were spiritually close to him became for Kim a saving moral support in the difficult conditions of barracks life. Roughness, vulgarity, profanity, and hardcore antisemitism dominated the everyday life of the illiterate peasant boys from western Ukraine, who constituted the vast majority of his battalion’s soldiers.
On his days off from work and training, Kim saved himself by reading or playing chess, writing letters, and watching movies. On the rare days when he was off duty, he would visit Roza Alexandrovna Gorelik, with whom he became very friendly. In her unpretentious household, there was always something that needed his help. At dinner and conversations with this wise, experienced, and wise woman, Kim would rest his soul and return to the stuffy atmosphere of the barracks enlightened.
Kim during his military service. Kuibyshev, 1950.