Marc Chagall called Vitebsk "my second Paris." For
him the city neighboring his birth village Liozna is captured in memory that eludes
the devastation of the Great Purge and World War II, as he spent those years in
France and America. In a large series of works that the artist began after
his return to his hometown in June 1914, Vitebsk is depicted as a fantastical
dreamlike place.
The magical city of Chagall is radically different from
where my mother was born and spent her first four or so years. Both my mother
and Chagall were born in small villages outside of the city and bordering
Russia, though she never visited the region’s capital.
Images: Chagall's Over Vitebsk (at MoMA, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest); still from Come and See
The childlike innocence of Chagall’s work is at odds with my
imagined representation of the region of my mother’s tragic early childhood. My
mother narrowly escaped one of more than 600 Belarusian villages burned to the
ground. The only reference I have that even begins to depict what my mother saw
is from the 1985 film Come and See.
In 1943, two Belarusian boys dig in a sand field in search
of abandoned rifles. Young Flyora finds an SVT-40 rifle and the next day he
joins partisans who come and take him from his house against his distraught mother’s
wishes. Though members of my mother’s family and close friends were murdered
and tortured by partisans, the critically acclaimed film’s central character
offers insight into how innocence is quickly stolen, if not from a very
different perspective.
A fan of gory horror films, I find few movies difficult to
watch. I assumed this one was particularly painful since it depicts the
real-life horror my mother experienced of watching a village and its inhabitants
burned to the ground in a terrifying mass murder campaign.
“I understood that this would be a very brutal film and that
it was unlikely that people would be able to watch it. I told this to my
screenplay coauthor, the writer Ales Adamovich. But he replied: ‘Let them not
watch it, then. This is something we must leave after us. As evidence of war,
and as a plea for peace,’” said director Elem Klimov.
Klimov said ambulances had to be called to remove viewers
from theaters in the Soviet Union and at foreign screenings. During a
discussion after one viewing, an elderly German man acknowledged: "I was a
soldier of the Wehrmacht; moreover, an officer of the Wehrmacht. I traveled
through all of Poland and Belarus, finally reaching Ukraine. I will testify:
everything that is told in this film is the truth. And the most frightening and
shameful thing for me is that this film will be seen by my children and
grandchildren.”
Klimov, who died in 2003, never made any films after Come and See. "I lost interest in
making films,” he said in 2001. “Everything that was possible I felt I had
already done."
Adamovich fought with the Belarussian partisans as a
teenager, and Klimov was moved by a book I
Am from the Burning Village, comprised of first-hand accounts of survivors
like my mother. Innocent victims – especially young children -- are victims,
despite their ethnic background or political inclination.
Klimov also watched footage of survivors recalling their
experiences. “I will never forget the face and eyes of one peasant, and his
quiet recollection about how his whole village had been herded into a church,
and how just before they were about to be burned, an officer of the Sonderkommando
gave them the offer: ‘Whoever has no children can leave.’ And he couldn't take
it, he left, and left behind his wife and little kids... or about how another
village was burned: the adults were all herded into a barn, but the children
were left behind. And later, the drunk men surrounded them with sheepdogs and
let the dogs tear the children to pieces.”
These second-hand accounts are like those of my mother, who
tearfully recalls how so many loved ones were brutally killed.
“My aunt, at that time, was in school in Russia where they
had to learn German. The German soldiers took her and another 16-year old, and
they were asking who is living in this house and this house, and they had a
list of people who they were told to burn down the houses. She was 16, so of
course, she's going to say whose house it was. She was lucky because her father
was also a Partisan, and of course he wasn't there at that time, but he was in
their party. And my father was against the Bolsheviks and everything else, and
he was in a German zone. And so when the Partisans came after them they told
him whose house it was, they came to get my aunt, they wanted just her. My grandmother,
she ran after her daughter. And then they would go and take them a few miles
away from there, but they had to cross some kind of a river, and they were
going to be interrogated there by the Partisans, where their headquarters were.
But what happened, it became close to nighttime, and they had to get out of
that region because I guess that's when the Germans were coming or something,
so the Partisans said that we know what's going to happen with them, so they
didn’t want to waste the bullets, I guess. And so they used the other part of
the gun (rifle), the wooden part, and they beat their heads open. That's how
they were killed, and when my father saw that, it really affected his mental
state for the rest of his life. And so – [sobbing] then we had to just, I
guess, put them in ground and we had to leave there because the fighting
between the Germans and Russians would start.”
Most people truly begin to understand mortality and the
human condition when their first parent or close relative dies.
For my mother, losing a peer was perhaps the most shattering
glimpse into the frailty of life.
“I saw when the fighting was going on between the Germans
and Russians -- I'm not sure if it was Partisans or the or the, Russian Army. I
don’t know, I never asked my parents what army it was. But I know at that point
I just saw the Germans afterwards because they're the ones that took us as
prisoners after, so I really didn’t see any Russian soldiers after that. And
there was a wagon full of stuff and we were walking on one side, and this other
girl, about my age, was walking on the other side, and the grenade was thrown,
and she was very close to me, and she got killed, and I didn’t. And of course
there were other people that were killed but I remember her because she was a
friend of mine, you know? And that was very, very tragic.”
While Belarus remains a deeply troubled nation, widely
regarded as Europe's last dictatorship, modern-day Vitebsk Oblast is a thriving
tourist destination known as Belaruskaye Paazerye, or land of the lakes, replete
with rare plants and wildlife. The wasteland of my mother’s infancy now boasts
an excellent infrastructure connecting it with commerce in bordering Russia, Ukraine,
Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. Despite the political and social turmoil helmed in
Minsk by (Vitebsk Oblast native) President Alexander Lukashenko, modern-day
Vitebsk Oblast is closer to Chagall’s memory than my mother’s. The region’s two major theaters, philharmonic
society, 28 museums and the international Slavyanskiy Bazaar arts festival make
it a cultural destination.
My mother’s only travel was to concentration, labor and
displaced persons camps in Poland and Germany, while Chagall spent the bulk of
his career in Russia, France and the U.S. Still the fragmented images of
Vitebsk, “the soil that nourished the roots of my art,” in Chagall’s work
disguise, but do not erase, the darkest multiple personalities of a homeland
that always has been rife with strife.
Alexander Pushkin, who passed twice through Belarus: in May
1820, leaving for the southern exile; and in August 1824 on his way to exile
from Odessa to the village of Mikhailovskoye, died before finishing a novel, Dubrovsky, inspired by a friend, a nobleman
of Vitebsk Oblast.
Pushkin’s influence is found throughout Vitebsk, home to at
least two monuments, a street, a public garden and a bridge named after the
Russian poet. No doubt he contemplated the region’s conflicted character.
"The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten
thousand truths." (Pushkin, as quoted by Anton Chekhov in Gooseberries.)
