Читать книгу Hoodwinked - the spy who didn't die - Lowell Ph.D. Green - Страница 7

IT WASN’T HUDSONS OR FORDS that came calling for you in Belarus. It was the “black crows.” The NKVD secret police in their black cars, engines fueled with terror, stalked the streets of our little town.

You never knew when it would be you hauled away to God-knows-where, never to be seen or heard from again. If they passed your house and stopped at a neighbour’s you cried with relief. The rank odor of fear and suspicion permeated the air we breathed.

Millions of my fellow countrymen in what was then known in the West as White Russia were murdered or disappeared during the years I was growing up. The history books talk about executions. They make it sound civilized. It was slaughter. The madness reached its peak in 1937, the year I turned 18.

That was the year Stalin ordered all individual peasant farms, which in most cases had been in the same families for generations, taken from their owners and formed into collective farms—kolkhozes they called them. Those who objected or even questioned the action were usually shot on the spot, their bodies left to rot.

Anyone attempting to bury the dead was considered either a traitor or something called an “inner enemy.” They were ordered to lie down beside the corpse and were either shot or, depending upon the depravity of the NKVD agents, buried alive by neighbours forced at gunpoint to man the shovels.

I watched in horror one day in our little town of Rahachow when a “black crow” pulled up in front of a house only a few metres down the street. Two of Stalin’s henchmen, armed with machine pistols, strode to the front door, knocked briefly and when there was no response shouldered the door open. In a heartbeat they reappeared dragging an elderly man down the front steps. A woman, her hair flying in all directions, holding a coat or large rag of some kind, suddenly appeared on the stoop behind them and began screaming oaths in German and Russian. As the entire street watched through trembling curtains, one of the “crows” kicked the poor old man into the street, then began methodically shooting him.

I have seen some horrible things in my life, but till the day I die I will never forget how his body jumped and jerked and shuddered as each bullet thudded into him. Calmly, as though they’d just finished a light lunch, both of the “black suits” climbed back into their black car and took a leisurely cruise down the street before disappearing around the corner. The old man’s body lay there for hours, the deathly silence on the street broken only by low moaning from somewhere inside the house and the sound of swarming flies and wasps gorging themselves on the blood and the horror.

It should not surprise you then that when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa and attacked the Soviet Union in June of 1941, many Belarusians, myself included, welcomed the Nazis as liberators. Some villagers, dressed in their finest, threw flowers at the Tiger tanks racing by!*

*FACT: It is true that, at first, many of those subject to Stalin’s oppression welcomed the Nazis. Pictures of flower-laden German tanks invading Belarus are on display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW, Washington, DC 20024-2126, or on their website at http://www.ushmm.org/.

It didn’t take long for us to learn that compared to the Nazis, “Uncle Joe” Stalin was a pussycat!

Barbed-wire fence surrounding the Minsk Ghetto, 1941. The sign warns: Anyone approaching the fence will be shot!