Dyadya Misha and the Holy Archangel Michael

 “I really don’t think I remember much of my childhood except a horrible war. And when the war sort of ended, but it wasn't ended yet, the Germans were still there and they had let us open some churches. My brother Mikhail, Michael, was still alive at that time, and that's when he was baptized in the church, when it opened.”

“Oh, it was a beautiful, big church. I saw angels singing on top of the church, but when I was telling someone that I saw angels, they said I probably just heard people singing.”

Tears well up as a girlish smile emerges and Lubachka unearths some joy from the recesses of a brutal early childhood. Lubachka is affectionate for Luba, which is short for Lubov, which means love. Luba is my mother. Named for a Holy Martyr, who at age 9, was tied to a wheel and beaten with rods until her body was covered with bloody welts.  She and her older sisters, Faith and Hope, survived being burned over an iron grating, then thrown into a red-hot oven, and finally into a cauldron with boiling tar.

Did Lubachka see angels?

Maybe.

Maybe it was the hunger or the dehydration causing hallucinations.

Maybe it’s something none of us can explain and some of us want to believe. The word angel is derived from the Greek word angelos and the Latin word angelus, both meaning messenger. We all hear messages.

I hear voices, though they’re far from divine. I hear voices when I’m asleep. I hear voices when I’m paring down a few thousand words of analysis, emotion, and research into a thousand never-quite perfect words, in an hour before I race out the door to school for pickup, halted suddenly by the slow flow of leisure parents who have been lingering outside the building for hours, complaining that they won’t be able to head “down east” until Thursday this week.

I hear voices when the subway stops between stations for a sick passenger in another car and swim team practice is about to let out and I have to get the puppy and walk her over to the rec center to meet my son.

I’ve heard a voice, just a few times, that told me if I meander into rush hour traffic while an 18-wheeler and a MTA bus blow through a red light, that nobody would suspect suicide when I’m flattened into the pavement.

Sometimes I’m floating or cutting through gentle waves in the Caribbean Sea, or pushed up against a throng in a nostalgic trance on the floor at a show, and the voices stop. They always pick up again when I can’t sort out which anxiety is keeping me awake and there’s few precious hours before daylight.

Maybe it’s my Dyadya Misha, my Uncle Mike, telling me it’s OK. Maybe he’s trying to break through my stubbornness and ego to remind me that I have to be more forgiving of my mom, not because she sees angels or hears voices, but because we all hear voices.

Maybe I should listen. We invoke Saint Michael for protection from invasion by enemies and from civil war, and for the defeat of adversaries on the battlefield. He conquers all spiritual enemies. Over all the Nine Ranks of the Heavenly Powers, the Lord appointed the Holy Archangel Michael (his name in Hebrew means “who is like unto God”), the faithful servitor of God, as Chief Commander.

At least little Michael, Mishinka, lived long enough to be baptized. In the Orthodox faith, babies are baptized about three months after birth. Mishinka was immersed in sanctified water a little later, as there was no escape from holding places in camps to do it secretly. Lubachka’s two younger brothers died in infancy, unbaptized.

Did angels appear when Mishinka’s frail body was tossed into a mass grave?

Most of Lubachka’s loved ones were dumped into unmarked pits, some with limbs mangled and dismembered, genitals violated and mutilated, but essentially in tact to resemble the remains of a human form. Others with brains blown out by the stock of a rifle, to save bullets. Hitler explicitly ordered a surge in ammunition production in early 1940, for fear of the shell crisis that’s widely blamed for toppling the Kaiser’s armies in the autumn of 1914.

The most traumatic memory isn’t the moment of Mishinka’s death, it’s a moment of regret.

Lubachka’s memory impetuously blinks back on, like a light bulb dangling from a frayed wire, to retrieve another visceral early childhood experience, one she’d likely repressed.

“I do remember something which I'm very upset about. My little brother Michael became sick because there was this one room where we lived with four or five families because we all lost our houses and everything. But it was not where I was born in Vitebsk Oblast near the Russian border. It was somewhere farther away, closer to what is now the Polish border. My mother was in quarantine because she had typhoid fever, and my little brother Michael was still breast-fed at that time, and she wasn’t with us and the two of us were left there, and this one woman in another room had a cat, and it was a cold, a very, very cold autumn day.”

“It was very cold outside. And, of course, he wasn't dressed, he only had a shirt, like some kind of an undershirt. The woman with the cat came and threw him outside, and I wasn’t able to pick him up or anything because I was too small. And then that's when he got very sick. For what seemed like a long time, he was very sick, and there was another girl that was my age that lived in that room, and we were playing cards, and my little brother would cry, and I would get very angry at him because he was disturbing me. To this day, it tortures me that I was angry at him. That I did that.”

“The woman with the cat, she was Polish, and her daughter had affairs with the German soldiers, so they had everything. We didn’t have anything.”

Everything, in this instance, means enough clothing to cover a full body or enough food to keep children alive.

The cause of Michael’s death remains unknown, but the timing spurs a rush of atrocious memories. In the mind of a child, Mishinka was ill for a long time, but his feeble breath lingered and his weak heart ticked only a little longer than that of his twin Ivan and their youngest sibling Pyotor.

“When my little brother Michael died, that's when my grandmother, my father's mother, and his sister were very brutally killed.”

Michael died in “either October or November. I don’t know. I don’t know what year it was. Maybe 1944, probably 44. And the thing is, we were living at that time where the German soldiers were, but my grandmother, my father's mother, and his sister that were killed, they were killed in a place the Partisans watched in the daytime, and the Germans would be there at night. The Partisans were there, or the Germans, I don’t remember. But anyway, somehow, I do sort of remember going to the graveyard, and they were all, as far as I know, all killed and just buried in one, unmarked grave. But the graveyard was where we lived before the war started.”

Lubachka can’t recollect how or why they’d returned to the border of Smolensk.

“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 they had a list of people and they were told to burn down their 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 took 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. They didn’t want to waste the bullets.”

“So they used the other part of the 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 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 was about to start.”

“And then when we got back to the place where we lived, and the second day, or I don’t know, maybe it was the same day, I don’t really remember. I was outside. And I saw my brother who was all in white, that's not the way he was buried. I guess I don’t know what he was buried in, that I don’t remember, but I saw him outside and to me he had represented an angel.”

Some two decades before my mother told me this story, I was standing over the open casket of her father, my degushka, my grandfather, at a monastery in rural Herkimer County, New York, a home for decades to the Shastokovich family for two generations.

Maybe I hallucinated. I’m certain there was an apparition in the form of a body outlined in bright light. There wasn’t enough sunshine pouring in through the stained glass windows of the cavernous church to explain what I saw.

I was tired. I had barely slept for days. I rarely sleep enough. Those voices keep me awake.

And when the time of our demise shall approach, and of our liberation from this body of clay, leave us not, O Archangel of God, without defense against the spirits of evil under heaven, who surround us to close off the ascent on high for human souls; so that, guarded by thee, without stumbling we may attain unto those glorious habitations of Paradise, where there is neither sadness nor sighing, but life without end.

On Being (Bela)Rus(s)ian

I’ve been struggling to figure out the story behind the photos I posted of my grandfather and his father holding numbers. Online research is useless, and none of the dozens of professors and other experts of Slavic studies and history I reached out to have any clue. The replies, at least have been cordial, save for one from a non-academic that raised an irrelevant point that plays into something I’ve been meaning to write about.

“Those men on them (the photos) do not look like Belarusian types very much,” said the would-be source, a journalist who covers Belarus and other countries for a global news organization. 

His reply, for a number of reasons, offended me. As I attempt to let go of my toxic emotional response, I recall so many random and unrelated comments that have rattled my own cultural identity.

Just four days before receiving this journalist’s email, my son Michael Alexander, who is half Italian-American, and I were at a Japanese restaurant in Dumbo where we have lunch every Monday after school and before his art class.  It was packed that day, so we sat at the sushi bar. As Michael Alexander grabbed and devoured a piece of white tuna from my plate, the sushi chef smiled and said: “Russian boys are good and strong because they like fish.” He looked shocked when I told him we both were born in the U.S., insisting that “you both look very Russian.” His observation was meant as a compliment, applauding me for “teaching him right, even in America.”

Dozens of times I’ve been approached by people, usually blonde women around my mother’s age, who speak to me in Russian, asking for subway or walking directions. They’re all surprised when I tell them, in Russian, that I was born here. When I first moved to New York and was apartment hunting, the longtime Ukrainian landlords in the East Village called me only Natali, the Ukrainian diminutive for Natalia. (Natasha is my legal name, but I was baptized Natalia.) They’d assure me “you don’t look Russian at all. You look only Ukrainian.” Meantime, the well-heeled Russian-born brokers wanted me to move to the Upper East Side, insisting that’s “where all the Russians are. Don’t worry, you do not look Ukrainian or Polish at all, just Russian.” I won’t even get into what all of them say when I mention my mother was born in Belarus.

I joke that I was born to hate myself, the embodiment of Slavic ethnic strife. My father was born in the U.S. to a Polish mother and a Ukrainian father.

Few non-Slavs even knew what a Belarusian or a Ukrainian was throughout my early childhood. I recall few things from what I considered to be a lousy “world cultures” class in 7^th or 8^th grade at a private girls’ school in 1980s Massachusetts. I hold a grudge to this day and blame the teacher for perpetuating myths about cultures he apparently hadn’t studied beyond the simplistic and poorly written textbook we used. “All Russians look like this,” he told the class pointing to a photograph of a young girl with dark hair and dark eyes. I stayed after class to tell him that there isn’t an archetypal look that is Russian, since the world’s biggest country is home to some 160 cultures and very few, if any, inhabitants can trace their heritage to just one. He laughed and patted me on the back, but said nothing other than “you’d better not be late for your next class.” I’d risked a “red dot” for being late for my next class, but the other teacher wasn’t the petty type who made such threats and enforced Soviet-inspired punishment. My grade in his class slipped slowly after that, even if my test scores never dropped.

Naturally there is more to being Russian or Belarusian or Ukrainian or Polish, or a mix of those and likely other ethnicities, than appearance. Escalating national and ethnic tensions are making headlines now, after protesters in Ukraine's capital Kiev knocked down a statue of Vladimir Lenin on Sunday. But Belarus is an even stranger place with far more strife and instability that’s fueled by corruption and its repeated role in war after lengthy and gory war.

My grandfather may have interpreted the journalist’s comment that “Those men …  do not look like Belarusian types very much” very differently as he identified himself as a Russian, not a Belarusian. As I’ve mentioned, he, my grandmother and my mother all were born in Belarus, just over the Russian border. That they were persecuted and that many family members and close friends were killed by Belarusian nationalists, is clearly part of the staunch Russian pride.

It is challenging for me when people attempt to claim me as their own, based on ethnicity as well as religion and cultural heritage. Living in New York, I hear “you’re Jewish like me, right?” as much as “you look Russian, “ or “you look Ukrainian” or “you look “Polish.”

I grapple with what all this means, as it pertains to my mother’s history.

Even a cursory scan of the history of Belarus should quickly dismiss any claim to a pure ethnic identity or “look.”

Stone Age settlements have been discovered in the Gomel region, with sites from the Palaeolithic period unearthed in the village of Yurovichi (Kalinkovichi area) dating back some 26,000 years. Bronze Age artifacts have been found throughout Belarus and at the start of the Iron Age there were three main settlements in Belarus around the basins of the Dneiper, Dvina and Pripyat rivers.

Colonization by the Slavs began in the early centuries AD, eventually replacing the Baltic culture. East Slavs formed the first political associations, or unions of tribes, in the 6^th and 9^th centuries. The first records from the Polotsk Duchy in what is now modern Vitebsk Oblast and the northern part of the Minsk Oblast date back to the 9^th century. Polotsk dominated until the 13th century when the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Rus and Samogotia – which spanned modern Belarus, Lithuania, the Kiev, Chernigov and Volyn areas of the Ukraine and western Russia from the Baltics to the Black Sea – rose to power in the 13th century and only began to crumble after multiple wars in the 16th century.

In 1569 the Grand Duchy and the Kingdom of Poland signed the Union of Lublin to create Rzeczpospolita (the traditional Polish State). This ushered in a period of turmoil, which included a war with Russia (1654-1667) and the North War with Sweden and Russia (1700-1721). Battered by its rivals, Rzeczpospolita eventually lost and in 1772 the western provinces of Belarus were annexed to the Russian Empire. In 1795 Rzeczpospolita was divided between Russia, Austria and Prussia.

Under the first Russification efforts, what was Belarus became a place of ongoing conflict and confusion with revolt under Tadeusz Kostushko’s leadership (1794), the Napoleonic invasion of Russia (1812), the Polish Revolt (1830–1831) and the Great Rebellion, headed by Kastus Kalinovski (1863-1864). During this period, Belarusian students in Saint Petersburg began organizing what set the foundation for the first Belarusian national political party formed in 1903. The Stolypin agrarian reforms, a series of changes to Imperial Russia's agricultural sector launched in 1906, resulted in mass displacement of the peasant classes until 1914, including 33,000 people who were moved from Belarusian territory to Siberia.

During World War I, German and Russian forces fought bloody battles on Belarusian territory, until March 3, 1918, with the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Then came the Russian Revolution and the Belarusian People’s Republic declared independence in March 1918, which lasted until the German withdrawal at the end of the year. The Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic was created Jan. 1, 1919.

After the Russo-Polish War (1919-1921), the Riga Peace Treaty resulted in the partitioning of Belarus between the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic and Poland. All of Belarus was under the New Economic Policy (NEP), implemented by the government of the Soviet Union from 1921 to 1928 and representing a temporary retreat from its previous policy of extreme centralization and doctrinaire socialism. Meantime, the Polish part of Belarus was subjected to Polonization from 1921-1930s. In 1922, the Belarusian SSR became a part of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

It only got worse ahead of my mother’s birth. Soviet economic policy and the introduction of collective farming caused famine in Belarus from 1932-1933. During the Great Purge (1936-1940) more than 86,000 Belarusians suffered political oppression and more than 28,000 were sentenced to death. (My mother was born in 1936 or 1938.)

The Red Army moved into West Belarus on Sept. 17, 1939, two weeks after World War II started. In June 1941, the Great Patriotic War began and by September Belarus was fully occupied by the German army. By the end of 1941, the Belarusian Partisans surfaced and ballooned into the biggest movement in Europe before 1944.

Little has changed, at least in terms of attitude and perception.

A new analytical paper "Belarusian Identity: The Impact of Lukashenka's Rule" released today by the Centre for Transition Studies suggests that President Alexander Lukashenko rejected the ethno-national model of state suggested by his predecessors in the early 1990s and restored a Soviet style “statist nation” run by a centralized bureaucracy. After being elected in 1994, Lukashenko launched a policy of Russification, selecting Russia as a strategic priority for foreign relations in a supposed effort to recover from the economic crisis. A year later he initiated a referendum to introduce Russian as a second official language in Belarus, with the vast majority, or 83.3%, of voters supporting the initiative. The Constitution of Belarus declares the equal status of both languages, but Russian dominates all facets of life and public organizations and officials generally speak Russian.

Since the early noughts, all major Belarus-based media broadcasts are aired in Russian, and there are no all-Belarusian language universities. The study data shows the even as more residents identify themselves as Belarusians, the use of the Belarusian language has eroded, and a Russian-speaking Belarusian nation has emerged. When asked “What unites you with other people of your nationality?” Belarusians refer more to territory and state, than to culture and language. The majority consider the origin of Belarusian statehood in mediaeval Polack and Turaŭ princedoms and the Great Duchy of Lithuania, not in the Belarusian SSR. Still the same people have embraced symbols, such as national holidays and the red-green flag, introduced by Lukashenko’s regime.

“The Belarusian nation, unlike most European nations, did not emerge along ethno-national lines, with an indigenous language, culture or a solid nationalist historical narrative. Rather, it consolidated as a result of a Communist experiment which lasted for 70 years. It experienced many of the major disasters of the 20th century, including both the Stalinist terror and the horrors of World War II. This turbulent path has impacted Belarusians profoundly and, after 20 years of independence, the Belarusian nation is still trying to find its way,” wrote the paper’s author, Vadzim Smok, a researcher at the Institute of Political Studies 'Political Sphere' based in Minsk and Vilnius.

Smok looks to people like my cousin Tanya, who just began teaching after graduating from Minsk State Linguistic University (MSLU) to effect dramatic social change.

“Younger generations will play a crucial role in the future development of the Belarusian nation. They communicate by the Internet, which remains a free and open space for communication and exchange of ideas in Belarus. They did not undergo Soviet indoctrination or experience its relentless propaganda and tend to prefer to work in the private sector, meaning they are less and less tied to the state. These people look much more free and democratically minded then their parents, and quite soon they will rule the country,” Smok concluded.

For now, I’m still entangled in what my mother’s birthplace means for my family’s identity. Do I have a Belarusian “look”? Do I care? Apparently I do.

My Marvel Avengers’ obsessed (his father’s student) son, the one who was mistaken for a “boy from Russia,” had wanted to be Spider-Man this past Halloween but I insisted he also try on a Thor costume. The saleswomen swooned, with two singing in unison “He IS Thor!” Perhaps that means that he has the “Bealrusian look,” which could be more Old Norse than anything else. In 2010, archaeologists found the remains of an ancient Viking (or what East Slavs call Varangian) settlement in Vitebsk Oblast, where my mother and her parents were born. 

                                                   (Photo credit: Dave Stewart Photogrpahy)

Said Marc Chagall, the Vitebsk-born artist with an extremely complicated ethno-cultural identity, “The soil that nourished the roots of my art was Vitebsk."

A Brief Period in Lublin Has A Lasting Impact

My mother has lived in the same split-level ranch atop a steep hill on a quiet cul-de-sac that empties into a town nature preserve which was an active apple and peach orchard throughout my childhood. She has many excuses for not moving out after my father died in 2002, all while acknowledging that it is a burden to clean a three-bedroom house (where she lives alone) and to maintain a large lawn with many trees. My mother is not the type to hire a housekeeper, ever. (Her mother worked as a housekeeper for many years, including when I was an infant and I went to work with my babushka while my mother studied.) As stubborn and strong-willed as they come, my mother also is reluctant to hire anyone to clean the gutters, rake the leaves, mow the lawn, shovel the snow, trim the shrubbery, clean the garage, haul large objects to and from the basement or perform myriad strange cleanup tasks that arise from the wave of unusual weather events, including tornadoes that touched down in 2011, that have hit Western Massachusetts in recent years.

My Western mind insists she’d be better off in a nice condo with other self-sufficient retirees where she could trade manual labor for activities that don’t require a hard hat. But my Eastern soul sympathizes and understands that for my mother moving comes with a lot of baggage that you can’t hire someone else to haul. (Save for a really great therapist.)

By the time she was four years old, my mother had moved to three neighboring, yet warring, countries: Belarus, Poland and Germany.

Now the ninth largest city in Poland and regarded as a European cultural capital, Lublin was a very different place when my mother and her parents were forced to relocate there.

Majdanek, a concentration and forced labor camp, and briefly a death camp, located about three miles outside the city, opened in September 1941, initially for Soviet prisoners of war. It is estimated that 360,000 people, including 120,000 Jews, died or were murdered at Majdanek. The inmates represented 54 nationalities from 28 different countries, including the Soviet prisoners of war and Jews from Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, France, Hungary, Belgium and Greece, as well as non-Jews from Belarus, Ukraine and across Poland, who were taken to the camp as political prisoners and slave laborers. 

“I remember the house, the room, that we lived in,” she recalls. “It didn’t have a floor. It was a dirt floor. That much I remember. And the people whose house we were living in, that woman had a baby and they had a christening and they had food there, and drinks, and so I came up to the table and I took what I thought was a glass of water, but it was actually vodka! Homemade vodka!” 

Laughing, my mother says she was “Four, something like that, four and a half. I don’t know, maybe even five. I don’t really remember how old I was. But I do remember we were living there, and one of my aunts (my mother’s sister, Marta) was living in another house close by, but we could see it out the windows.”

“It was really a big chaos. The Germans would come and try to kill us, and the Partisans, I guess, would try to kill us. They used to take usually men. Men would be hiding and I just remember –- sort of remember -- how they would take someone and there'll be like two soldiers on each side and one walking with a gun after them. And it was just very, very terrible. But then one time, when they were taking us further and further, towards Germany, we had to sleep outside. I only had one set of clothes, which I wore all the time, I slept in it … It was like a jumper, I guess, and some kind of a shirt or blouse underneath and I guess I did have a coat. I must've had a coat because it was cold at times. We lived that way for a long time, and I got lost one time from my mother and father.”

The passing of time for this brief but life-altering period in my mother’s early childhood was measured only by changes in weather and the deaths of her brothers and other friends and loved ones. 

“We at that time somehow had a cow, and I was holding onto the cow and they pushed me away, and this must've been after the spring, after my brother died … There was grass on the ground and the cow was eating the grass, and then after looking and looking for my mother, I didn’t find her, and I just laid down in the grass crying, but I was still holding onto the leash of the cow, and then my mother found me. But then after, shortly after that, the Germans took the cow away from us, too. They took everything. Whatever we had, we didn’t have anything anymore.” 

The next thing my mother recalls is boarding a freight train when she was about five years old.

Lublin changed rapidly and dramatically when the city was taken by the Soviet Army on July 24,1944, and it became the temporary capital of a Soviet-controlled communist puppet government, the Polish Committee of National Liberation. The Polish capital was moved to Warsaw in January 1945. After the war, Lublin’s population quickly grew and it became a major scientific and research base and home to large automobile factory. After the war, Jewish Holocaust survivors in hiding or in Soviet territory had re-established a small community for a short time but most quickly left Poland for Israel and the West. Survivors like my mother and her parents were herded to a displaced persons camp in Germany.

Sole Surviving Sibling: The First Four Years

My mother’s mother, Alexandra Dimitrievna (Dimitrieva) Grishaev, was born March 3, 1913, in Dubrovka, a village in Vitebsk Oblast. My mother’s father, Grigori Ustinovich Grishaev, was born Nov. 18, 1907, in Lagi, also Vitebsk Oblast. Both villages are located near the Russian border, and my maternal grandmother would walk to Russia's Smolensk Oblast to attend services at the closest Russian Orthodox church. The oblast (which means administrative region) borders Russia, Latvia and Lithuania, and is a major railway center with stations for lines between Russia and Ukraine, Russia and Poland, and Russia and Lithuania.

Her maternal grandparents were Dimitri and Matrona, and her paternal grandparents were Ustin (Justin) and Natalia. She only recalls that they were born “in Russia someplace.”

My mother was the oldest sibling, the only girl and the only survivor. Her brothers all died as infants, and are still remembered as such in daily prayers. She doesn’t recall exactly when or where her brothers were born.

In her words: “One of my brothers was born a year or so later than me. His name was Pyotr, which is Peter in English. And my mother had twins; they were probably like two or three years younger than me. One of them was Michael (Mikhail) and one was Ivan, which is John. And actually one of them didn’t live that long. And I, for some reason at that time, liked the name John better. And when they were lying on a bed or something I used to switch them because I thought my mother and father wouldn’t know the difference. [laughter] (My parents)  said something that one of them was weaker, and probably wouldn’t live too long, but they knew (I was switching the babies).” 

All the boys shared names with tsars from the House of Romanov: Michael I, ruled from July 26, 1613, to July 14, 1645; Ivan V (jointly with Peter I) ruled from June 2, 1682, to February 8, 1696; Peter (I) the Great ruled from June 2, 1682, to November 2, 1721. My babushka (mother’s mother) had predicted that Mother Russia would rise again, and would be ruled by a Tsar Michael, the first tsar. My mother told us this after my husband Mike and I named our son Michael Alexander. In the 18th and 19th centuries, three Alexanders ruled Russia as emperors. Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich Romanov (married to Natalia Brasova) was the youngest son of Emperor Alexander III of Russia, and at the time of his birth, his paternal grandfather (Alexander I) was emperor of “All the Russias.” Michael was fourth in line to the throne following his father and older brothers Nicholas and George. After his grandfather was assassinated in 1881, he became third in line. When his father died in 1894, he became second, and then the heir to the throne when George died in 1899. The birth of Nicholas's son Alexei in 1904 would have edged back Michael one spot, but Alexei was a hemophiliac and was expected to die. When Nicholas abdicated on March 15, 1917, Michael was named as his father’s successor, but he refused the throne until ratification by an elected assembly. He was never confirmed as emperor, and he was sent to prison and murdered following the Russian Revolution of 1917.

I’m not a historian and have no authority here, but people in general have very strong opinions about the Russian royals and often present passing and erroneous comments as fact. An older woman (with no trace of a foreign accent) I’d encountered in a Manhattan elevator informed me that my son “has a regal name.” “You know,” she said. “Alexander was tsar of Russia.” I smiled and said, “Yes, and Michael was the first tsar of Russia.” She grimaced, bowed her head, and informed me, “No, dear. I don’t think so.”
 
The births and deaths of the tsars are widely, if not always accurately or consistently, documented. Any evidence beyond memory of my mother’s brothers may exist only in their unmarked graves, which may or may not remain today.

Says my mother: “I don’t know how my brother Peter died. I don’t know anything about that. He was an infant. And John died when the war was almost to start, it was like 19 … I don’t know … when the Second World War was starting. And John died soon after that. And Michael … we did not have any, hardly any food, to eat, and he got very sick. There were no doctors. He had pneumonia. And he was 2 ½ when he died.” 

My mother says her brothers were buried in the tiny of village of Lemnitsa in Vitebsk Oblast, some 158 miles northeast of Minsk. There is nothing online but serial maps of Lemnitsa, searching in English or in Russian. It’s as if it exists only as a tiny pinprick on the massive expanse of a geographic region and only in the memory of the few survivors like my mother.

For my mother, Lemnitsa serves literally and figuratively as a giant grave, where nearly all members of her family perished along with all its other inhabitants. “That's where also my father's mother and sister were harshly killed, and his sister was 16 at that time,” my mother says. “That's where they are buried, too.” 

When asked for earliest childhood memory, my mother bites her lip as tears trickle down her cheeks, chin and neck. She’s able to compose herself enough to reveal this rare moment when she was about three years old. 

“Afterwards, when we moved into this house that was built, and I was very little, we didn’t really have that much food, usually, always, you know. And the people across the street, they had these … they made them for me… it was like hamburger meat or  meatballs. Just a little bit of meat and potatoes. And they gave me some. I thought that was the best thing I ever had.”

“And the other thing that I remember myself -- I really don’t remember too much of my childhood at all -- I do remember someone giving me candy one time, and ironically, I must've really wanted the candy for some reason, but I really don’t think I remember much of my childhood except a horrible war. And when the war sort of ended, but it wasn't ended yet, the Germans were still there and had let open some churches, and my brother Michael was still alive at that time, and that's when he was baptized in the church when it opened.” 

She doesn’t recall the name of the church or the priest, but she speaks of a mystical experience, which punctuates her lifelong passion for Russian Orthodoxy and guilt, even now, over her tardiness to liturgy, even when she’s ill. The girlhood hunger for faith was as intense as the need for food to survive. My mother still thinks this way. It’s an inescapable passion. 

“Oh, it was beautiful, big church,” she boasts, the tears drying, her eyes glistening with delight and a smile spreading quickly across her face. “And I think, in my opinion, I saw angels singing on top of the church, but when I was telling someone they said I probably just heard people singing, and because there were probably paintings (of angels), so it was like a very large church. Yeah, to me it looked very good.” 

She doesn’t remember anything about the cupolas, or onion domes, whether they were wooden or gilded. “I don’t remember the outside. I just remember the inside of it. And, oh yes, there were a lot of people!” Most were strangers, bonded only by faith in Orthodoxy or at least a transfixion with the church itself, finally erected, open and serving a safe place to seek refuge for the soul or body. “I was too little. I didn’t really know anyone there. The church was full.” 

My mother’s memory shifts suddenly to retrieve another visceral early childhood experience, one she’d likely repressed. 

“And then I do remember something which I'm very upset about. When my little brother was sick, Michael, I was a little bit older, and well, actually, before he got sick, the reason he got sick is because there was this one room where four or five families of us lived because we all lost our houses and everything. But it was not where I was born or where I lived, it was somewhere farther. (Possibly closer to what is now the Polish border.) And what happened is, my mother, she was in quarantine because she had typhoid fever, and my little brother was still breast-fed at that time, and because she wasn’t with us and the two of us were left there, and this one woman that had a cat in there, and it was a cold, a very, very cold autumn day. It was very cold outside. And of course, he wasn't dressed, he only had a shirt. Like a T-shirt, some kind of an undershirt on, and she threw him outside, and I wasn’t able to pick him up or anything because I was too small yet, too. And then that's when he got very sick. And he had to leave late in the night. I don’t know if it was like a crib or something like that, for a long time he was very sick, and there was another girl that was my age that lived in that house, and we were playing cards with her, and my little brother would cry, and I would get very angry at him because he was disturbing me, and so that actually to this day tortures me. That I did that.” 

I hate too push my mother when she tells this story, but I am compelled. If I don’t ask now, I know it will be forever lost, existing only as the pain she felt compounded by all the other pain that she endures every second of every day. I ask her about the woman with the cat.

“The woman with the cat, she was actually in the other room, but she was Polish, and her daughter had affairs with the German soldiers, so they had everything. We didn’t have anything.” 

I push mother more, even though I can sense from her curt response that it isn’t something she wants to elaborate. I ask her about the daughter, her age, her name. 

“Well, I don’t know. She was a woman at that time because she did have a daughter, I think. She was not a young girl. She was probably in her twenties. No. No, I don’t remember that woman's name. And then at the same time, when my little brother Michael died, that's when my grandmother, my father's mother, and his sister were very brutally killed.”

Michael died in “either October or November. I don’t know. I don’t know what year it was. Maybe 1944, probably 44. And the thing is, we were actually living at that time where the German soldiers were, but my grandmother, my father's mother and his sister that were killed, they were in a killed (by the Partisans) in a place that in the daytime, the Germans would be there at night. The Partisans were there, or vice versa, I don’t remember. But anyway, somehow, I remember, I do sort of remember going to the cemetery, and they were all, as far as I know, all killed and just buried in one grave. And but it was the cemetery, where we lived before the war started.” 

My mother says they were killed by the Belarusian Partisans, resistance fighters who fought the Nazis and collaborationism during World War II. 

“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.” 

At this point, we pause during an emotional discussion so my mother can collect her thoughts. 

“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. And then when we got back to the place where we lived, and the second day or I don’t know maybe it was the same day, I don’t really remember, I was outside. And I saw my brother who was all in white, that's not the way he was buried. I guess I don’t know what he was buried in, that I don’t remember, but I saw him outside and to me he had represented an angel. That, I think, I just made up. No one was able to tell me that. I think that I remember myself.” 

My mother pauses again. 

“I think I do remember, 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.” 

Perhaps a combination of the survivor’s guilt and the desire to block out such a traumatic childhood memory made my mother forget the girl’s name. 

“And then, after that, Germans were moving us from one place to the other. And I remember we lived in Poland for almost like nine months. In Lublin, which was going back from the Russians to Poland.”