Common Occurrence Reads as Shock and Horror to a 21st Century Audience

Too much of history is told from the perspective of those who fought battles, ignoring the greater impact on civilians and therefore on society and culture in general. This is especially true of World War II, as social history didn’t emerge until the 1960s. In 2001, historian Sönke Neitzel discovered, at the British national archives, nearly 800 pages of unedited and only recently declassified, transcripts of covert recordings from holding cells, bedrooms and camps that housed prisoners of war. He then found about twice as many reams of the same at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

Neitzel and social psychologist Harald Welzer used a careful study of these documents to unleash what came as a surprise to most readers: soldiers in the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the German navy and military in general, behaved with callous, inhumane brutality against civilians. In their 2012 book, Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying, Neitzel and Welzer use the transcripts from tape recordings of some 13,000 inmates over four years to reveal the kind of details that I’d heard firsthand since childhood.

“I used to shoot at everything, certainly not just military targets.  We liked to go for women pushing prams, often with children at their sides.  It was a kind of sport really,” boasted Oberleutnant Hans Hartigs. His is among the less graphic and grotesque admissions. A junior officer junior officer bragged about what he and his fellow soldiers did to a woman they thought was a Russian spy: “We beat her on the tits with a stick, clobbered her on the ass with a pistol, then all eight of us had her, then we threw her out and as she lay there, we threw grenades at her.”

You’ll recall I wrote about my mother telling me: “When we still were in Russia (Belarus) where my brother died, the German soldiers would cut off the breasts of young women that would not submit to them, and in the wintertime they would tie them to the sled naked and parade them around so other women would see what happens to them if they do not submit to them. At that time, I didn’t understand what it was. I only figured it out afterwards, when my mother was telling other people, but it still was really terrible to see that.”

Reading that quote in a post I’d written triggered additional memories for my mother. The Partisan soldiers were just as cruel and brutal as the German soldiers to my family.

She recalls when she and her parents were living close to the tiny village of Lemnistsa, in an area that was patrolled by German soldiers during the day and by Partisans at night, “quite soon after Germans occupied Vitebsk Oblast.”

The Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 under Operation Barbarossa, and German forces occupied Vitebsk Oblast on July 11. Soviet forces seized the initiative from the Germans after the battle of Stalingrad in late 1942 and early 1943. The Soviet army liberated Vitebsk on June 26, 1944.

My maternal grandmother took my mother and her younger brother “Mishinka” (affectionate for Michael or Mikhail) to Lemnitsa to get some food my family had planted there. “When we got there the Partisans came and they sort of arrested my mother. My father came home from the Soviet Army on leave just before war started. He didn’t go back so they called him a traitor. The Partisans called my mother a spy for the Germans, and detained and interrogated her. They were about to kill my mother and she said ‘just give me one promise, if you kill me, you kill my children with me.’ There were a lot of scenes my mother had seen where a mother would be dead and the child would be crawling over her trying to breast feed.”

My mother uses the term scene to describe a real-life atrocity my grandmother witnessed on a daily basis, and to me they play as if they are graphic movie scenes. It often is less painful for me to imagine my mother’s early childhood from a cinematic lens: a grainy, black and white moving image that seems far more distant than it really was. I’ve never studied filmmaking, save for a graduate level non-film course where we made a short film with still images, and managed to earn an undergraduate minor in studio art without ever taking a photography course, and I express images through words. Still I see everything that is told to me and everything that I imagine as moving image, often passing by too quickly for me to effectively capture with the articulation and detail it deserves.

“There were three ladies whose husbands were Partisans and they came and said ‘if you kill this woman we will not work for you,’ so the Partisans let her and me and Mishinka go. These ladies knew when Germans would be on watch and told my mother when to escape and she took us when it was getting dark and she was carrying Mishinka. The Partisans saw us, but we were far enough away that when they shot at us they didn't kill us. Some Russians working for the Germans were called Politsay and they let us get back to the German zone. My father was there and he didn't come with us because they would have killed us. He was working for the Germans (as a forced laborer.)”

My mother, along with her mother and brother, made it safely back to the German zone in Vitebsk Oblast, but a solider wanted to take my grandmother back to the Nazi headquarters believing she was a spy for the Partisans “My mother said she was not leaving without her children and finally they took us in a horse driven carriage and the German soldier took her to the commandant and said she was a spy for the Partisans and that she went to tell Partisans how everything is situated on German zone.”

That same solider had taken my maternal grandfather’s cousin and his wife and it wasn’t until my grandmother was being questioned that she learned they had been killed just for being under suspicion of spying for the Partisans because their daughter was a girlfriend of a Partisan solider and was in the Partisan zone.

“My mother took me and Mishinka in her arms to some kind of a river and was going to drown us and her.”

Just as my grandmother walked toward the water with her two young children, pulling a prayer (or “holy letter”) from her pocket to read as she walked to their death, “this man appeared who happened to be my uncle’s friend, deugushka (grandfather) Sidorka, and he was a cook for the Germans, a slave laborer, and he said she was not a spy. He said, ‘if my signature if not enough I will give my life for her she is not a spy. The commandant said to ‘take this woman and never bring her back.’”

Grave Matter: The Privilege of Proper Burial

Many, if not most, Americans I know generally put off planning for funerals, picking burial plots and selecting tomb stones as long as possible. I’ve known people who have had to make final arrangements for elderly loved ones, something unthinkable for my mother and her parents. Leaving that responsibility – financially, emotionally and socially – to another person would be cruel, unfair and well, unthinkable. Beyond the added benefit of the cost savings that comes with paying in advance and the comfort of knowing that everything will be executed properly, there is a compelling reason why people like my mother and her parents take pride in such morose tasks. My mother’s brothers – among dozens more family members and childhood friends – were dumped into mass graves that have never been marked, unearthed or in any way recognized as burial places.
 

Of all the villages I’ve researched in Vitsebsk Oblast, Lemnitsa is by far the most elusive. My (for lack of proper term) cousin, Tanya Grishayeva (her paternal grandfather was my maternal grandfather’s younger brother), who was born in Mozyr, Belarus, and now lives in Minsk, helped me cobble what little information – mostly photographs -- is out there.

Perhaps one day the government or an organized group in search for bodies of fallen soldiers will get around to excavating Lemnista, the burial place of my mother’s three brothers who died in infancy. In September 2011, the remains of soldiers of the Red Army were discovered near the village of Noviky, Vitebsk, as part of the CIS International Memory Watch 2011. The effort includes volunteers from Belarus and Russia seeking unearthed remains that will be re-interred in one of the mass graves in Vitebsk Oblast.

For now, the village of Lemnitsa seems lost in time, with a grainy image of a 19^th century

water mill that was destroyed and mention of a church in honor of Saints Kosmy and Damiana (Orthodox Saints Cosmas and Damian, or Kosmas and Damianos in Greek) built in 1836 but destroyed around 1910, among the little evidence such a place exists.

There is a haunting consolation that comes with learning that the ghosts of brothers (in some stories, twins) Kosmy and Damiana share my uncles’ burial place. Their history represents a trinity of stories, one for each of my mother’s brothers: Pyotr (Peter), Mikhail (Michael) and Ivan (John.) The Holy Trinity is a key belief in the world’s second-largest (yet most often neglected and ignored by the West) Christian church, and the theme permeates culture, literature and secular life. By the 4th century, a polarity developed between Eastern and Western Christians over their respective understandings of the Trinity. The West viewed God primarily as one essence (the Trinity of Persons being conceived as an irrational truth found in revelation), while the East considered the tri-personality of God the primary fact of Christian experience. The Cappadocian Fathers (Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil of Caesarea) were accused of being tri-theists because of the personalistic emphasis of their conception of God. Modern Orthodox theologians tend to emphasize this personalistic approach to God.

Orthodox Christians celebrate three different sets of saints by the name of Cosmas and Damian, each with their own feast day:

·      Saints Cosmas and Damian of Cilicia of Arabia on Oct. 17. Legend claims the brothers were beaten and beheaded together with three other Christians: Leontius, Anthimus and Eutropius.
·      Saints Cosmas and Damian of Asia Minor or Mesopotamia on Nov.  1. This story offers some solace with the twins sons of Saint Theodota dying peacefully and being buried together at Thereman in Mesopotamia. Note that my mother’s brothers Mikhail and Ivan were twins.
·      Saints Cosmas and Damian of Rome on July 1. In another Christian tradition, the brothers were martyred outside Rome by a jealous pagan physician during the reign of Roman Emperor Carinus (283–284).

St. Michael's Church in Munich as well as the convent of the Poor Clares in Madrid claim to have the skulls of Cosmas and Damian. For Orthodox Christians like my mother, the need to worship and believe in the authenticity of such relics is powerful. Imagine as a young child not only watching all three of your siblings suffer and die, but also to never know exactly where they were buried or have any way of paying proper respects.

This makes the opportunity to choose and arrange for your own final resting place something of a privilege. I do respect anyone’s desire to decide how their own body will be treated upon death and how they will be remembered. But I always shudder when I learn of people who bury loved ones without any sense of tradition or ritual, assuming that is what the deceased had intended. I believe that those who want no ceremony or guests clearly state such desires long before their demise, and such requests are to be honored. But the notion of simply cremating or arranging for burial without even a dinner featuring the departed’s favorite food or a gathering of some kind, albeit secular and informal, is to me a form of neglect.

Most of the images that exist online of Lemnista are of a railway station connecting the village to routes into Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania. A photo of the passenger building at the station is especially eerie, as there are two rectangular cement-enclosed flower beds in the parking lot that resemble the open grave covers filled with flowers at the cemetery at Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, N.Y., where my mother’s parents and my father are buried.