Travel Tips

For all its similarities, it is worth emphasizing that Belarus is not Russia. Belarussian is, in fact, a separate language, though most people speak both. They are, not surprisingly, closely related, but Belarussian has some "extra" letters, its spellings tend to more closely reflect actual pronunciation, and some words are, in fact, completely different. In my case, it mattered little. I can read the Cyrillic alphabet with little difficulty--it's used in both languages. (The biggest difference may be in the pronunciation of one letter: in Russian, it is "g" and in Belarussian it is "h." Thus, the city is Grodno to the Russians but Hrodno to Belarussians. My grandfather's last name would have been Gurwitz to Russians but Horwitz to Belarussians.) I speak Russian only sparingly. Fortunately, between my small vocabulary, my little Berlitz book, and my knack for pronunciation (and, I think, for charades), I managed without much problem--even though English is spoken by very few people in Belarus.

My train arrived at 7:28 a.m. on a Monday morning. I had the great good fortune to be met by Frank and Galina. They had been recommended to me by a number of people. Together, they run a variety of projects devoted to providing social and medical care for the Jewish community. If the local community is even half as lucky as I was, they must be exceedingly well cared-for. Galina would be my guide. She is all the things a wonderful guide should be and also speaks nearly perfect English (with an English accent). Frank (an American) told me at one point that her prize for being the top English student in university was a trip…to Moscow! Not only is she a Jewish native of Minsk, she has escorted hundreds of people like me and has a great knowledge of local (meaning Belarussian) history. Even though she had never been to two of the three places I wanted to go, her knowledge inevitably turned out to be applicable and instructive.

The train station sits at one end of downtown and, as we drove to my hotel, I was impressed by the spaciousness of the city. This was particularly so after Moscow, but would be true, I think, in any event. Minsk is, for better or worse, a great example of Soviet planning. The vast majority of the city was leveled during World War II and only a few pre-war structures of any significance remain. The broad main boulevard, praspekt Franciska Skaryny (after the first printer to print works in Old Slavonic and Belarussian), is lined with immense structures of almost uniform lack of appeal. One dreary gray façade sits next to another for most of the length of the boulevard. Part of the saving grace is sidewalks at least triple (or more) the width of ordinary walkways. They not only make for much less crowded pedestrian traffic and they also serve to reduce the scale of what surrounds them.

At one end of Skaryny, near the train station, is Independence Square, an immense public space encircled by equally immense buildings (including the main government offices and two universities). The government building sits behind a colossal statue of the gesturing Lenin. Each side of the pedestal beneath him is emblazoned with a frieze of the energetic proletariat. There are no skyscrapers--most buildings seemed no more than fifteen stories or so--and one can even find parks scattered around downtown without looking too hard. My hotel, the Oktyabrskaya, is just north of the heart of downtown, two blocks away off praspekt Skaryny. Across the street, behind a large grassy lawn with plenty of evergreens, sits the relatively plain presidential residence and executive offices (actually, it looks like any other uniform, government building anywhere). Beyond that, a real park!

The Oktyabrskaya is not an Intourist hotel. For reasons I never figured out, they are located a ten minute cab ride away, pretty much by themselves. My hotel was the former Communist Party hotel. This was where visiting officials and dignitaries stayed. And, though it didn't occur to me before I came, that meant one thing: very few people there needed to speak English and almost none did. The English-speakers-surprise!--were in the Intourist hotels. But after spending a week in Minsk, my guess is that there aren't a lot of English speakers in Minsk, period. I found the slightly gloomy observation in my guidebook to be accurate: "There are no tourist information offices in the formal sense anywhere in Belarus…." No tourist information offices, no guidebooks (mine, which devoted over 700 pages to Russia and an additional 170 to Ukraine, covered everything there was to cover about the entire country of Belarus in exactly fifty pages!), I couldn't even find postcards to mail, much less souvenirs to buy. It's simple, I suppose: except for Jews visiting the land of their ancestors, few tourists visit Belarus.

Jews began to show up in Belarus about five hundred years ago. Although they soon played an important role in commerce and a few actually became wealthy by the late eighteenth century, the vast majority of Jews were poor. Nevertheless, their numbers grew. In the half-century between 1847 and 1897, their Jewish population tripled to over 750,000, making up nearly 15% of the region's total population. Jews even formed the majority in some of the big cities such as Minsk, Vitebsk, and Bobruisk, and fully three-fourths of the population in Pinsk.

Russian law prohibited Jews from farming. Still, they often engaged in occupations either directly or indirectly related to the land: they often dealt in timber (either logging or shipping or milling) from the abundant forests around them, as did my great-grandfather. An 1897 survey of Jewish occupations showed that the greatest number of people were involved in making clothes, something that could be done at home. Next most numerous were those engaged in the most historically Jewish occupation of all--trade. Jews were peddlers, too. But these jobs most often meant subsistence, not wealth. The widespread poverty throughout the Pale of Settlement (the name of the only Russian region open to Jewish residence) was often an inducement to emigrate to the Ukraine or southern Russia and, beginning in the 1880s, to the United States.

Chasidism was a new religious movement arising in the eighteenth century and even in my grandfather's day, a century later, it was still considered revolutionary and religiously liberal. Its opponents, known as mitnagdim (the "Opposers"), were traditional Orthodox Jews. The two groups differed in their emphasis on book learning, the classic approach to Judaism. Chasidim viewed Judaism in a new light, stressing personal experience and even mysticism as alternative routes to God. They often changed ancient customs and introduced new or different rituals. Disagreements were fundamental, often vitriolic. Because the leader of the mitnagdim lived in Vilna (Vilnius) in Lithuania, it became the center of opposition to Chasidism. As a result, the mitnagdim and their traditional view of Orthodoxy were the dominant practice in the north and west of Belarus, including Minsk and Lapichi.

Chasidism wasn't the only new notion in Jewish thought. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Zionism--a political, not a religious, movement to establish a Jewish state--and various socialist movements began to spread. Some of these groups even established self-defense organizations to protect the Jews during the wave of pogroms that occurred throughout the region at the turn of the century.

During the first years of Soviet rule, Belarussian Jews found themselves in an exceptional situation. Nationalist feeling was beginning to develop among the peasantry and the Belarussian government tried to encourage it by reducing the use of Russian where possible. Thus, official policy had the interesting result of encouraging the use of Yiddish. For a while, the slogan "Workers of the World, Unite!" was even inscribed in Yiddish (in addition to Belarussian, Russian, and Polish) on the emblem of the Belarussian Republic! In the early Soviet state, Jewish cultural and social life actually flourished, a fact reflected in the population. As late as 1926, 407,000 Jews comprised over 8% of the population in Belarus. Many Jews continued to live in the biggest cities: they comprised over 40% of the population in Minsk, Gomel, and Bobruisk.

The growth of Soviet power obviously meant radical changes for the Jews. The Soviets abolished private trade and restricted small artisans, forcing some Jewish emigration into Russia, especially to Moscow and Leningrad. By 1939, the number of Jews in Belarus had decreased to 375,000. The history of Soviet rule and its effect on the Jews is much too complicated (for me, anyway) to summarize; it's worth pointing out, though, that the Soviet government initially sponsored or promoted Jewish educational institutions and the use of Yiddish. Eventually, all non-Russian institutions faded and, toward the end of the 1930s, those remaining were liquidated even as Stalin began to purge Jewish intellectuals. In September 1939, the USSR annexed western Belarus with its several hundred thousand Jews. Soviet authorities immediately began to eliminate all signs of religion and crush the Zionist movement. Soviet efforts were suddenly in-terrupted at their height when, ignoring their highly publicized non-aggression pact, Nazi Germany invaded the USSR on June 22, 1941.

German tanks entered Minsk six days later. By mid-July, the Germans controlled almost the en-tire Belarussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Approximately 80,000 Jews lived in Minsk and by July 15, 1941, all were registered. Soon after, a notice required all Jews to move into the new "Jewish Quarter." One and half-square meters were allotted per person, not including children. Jews were also brought into the ghetto from many of the towns around Minsk. Before long, as refugees from western Belarus, Poland, and even Jews from Germany, were moved in, the ghetto population climbed to 100,000. As with virtually all ghettos under Nazi control, conditions were abominable. With food and heat never assured, the Jews of the ghetto had few concerns beyond simple survival. The first major pogrom took place on November 7, 1941, resulting in the death of about 13,000 Jews. Each time a new "shipment" brought more Jews, the existing population had to be reduced. Starvation and disease contributed to the ongoing pogroms and by October 1, 1943, only a few thousand Jews remained. On October 21, 1943, the Gestapo surrounded the ghetto one last time. All the Jews were loaded into trucks and taken to Maly Trostenets, a nearby extermination camp. The buildings were then dynamited, just in case someone remained in hiding.

Maly Trostenets is a name unknown in the West. We've heard of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Mauthausen, and Dachau. But after Auschwitz and Majdanek, this was the largest death camp in all of Europe. Maly Trostenets was a small village, the site of a collective farm, outside Minsk. Here and in the four death camps set up by the Germans in eastern Poland, almost every deportee was murdered on reaching the camp: not only the young and the old, but the able-bodied as well. Most of the victims were lined up in front of very long pits and shot to death. After the executions, the pits containing the victims were leveled by tractors. Unfortunately, despite my reading, I did not know of Maly Trostenets before I left.

I doubt whether anything remains except, perhaps, trenches. So I can't report on this camp. But I did have occasion to see other examples of Nazi "efficiency." Sadly, I saw them in Lapichi, the shtetl where my grandfather Harry was born in 1889.

Locating Lapichi is not difficult. It can be found at latitude 53º26', longitude 28º33' within the Pogorel'skaya volost' of the Igumen uezd in the Minsk gubernia. But that kind of geographic precision tells us little about it.

There are maybe 1,000 people in Lapichi today. (One local told us 1,500, but given the number of houses, that estimate seems exceptionally high.) Like hundreds, if not thousands of similar small villages throughout Belarus, Lapichi is a poor place located in the middle of a great plain. It sits roughly halfway between Minsk and Bobruisk, a city about 150 miles further southeast. Once, it is said, it was on the main road to Bobruisk but that ended long ago when the new road was built. The highway leading southeast out of Minsk passes through unremarkable scenery. At one time, the entire region would seem to have been forested. In fact, more than a third of the country is still pushchy, large uninterrupted tracts of forests. In this part of the country, firs and pine trees are plentiful, with occasional plots of birch and alder. Indeed, the huge stands of forested land together with small hills and lakes are testimony--even to a rank amateur like me--to the fact that this region was formed by glaciers. The highest point in the entire country is only some 1,100 feet. Occasionally a monument or memorial to some event or person from the Great Patriotic War interrupts the gentle hills, but little else.

And, speaking of the Great Patriotic War--the name by which they know World War Two--a digression is in order, I think. This visit prompted a far better understanding and appreciation for Russia's (and Belarus's) role in the war. We in the United States make a big deal about the American contribution to winning the war and I don't mean to denigrate it in the least (especially since my Dad fought in it). But the United States lost fewer than 300,000 killed and it was fought thousands of miles away. More than twenty-one million Russians died, fully one-third of them civilians. Twenty-one million. And it was fought right there. On their territory. Their homes, their towns, their villages. Occasionally, we see pictures of little old Russian men marking old anniversaries with their uniforms on, their chests filled with rainbow colored medals. I used to laugh at these funny pictures. No more. Having been there, having seen the battlefields, even just briefly, brings home the cost of that war in a way little else can. You cannot go anywhere in Russia or Belarus without seeing monuments, markers, and actual evidence of the war: embankments in the earth where guns or tanks were placed or, in the case of Lapichi, the trench in the middle of the forest where that the Jews were forced to dig before they were murdered. The forest is still there. And, sixty years later, so is the trench. And the gun emplacements. "Chilling" isn't really the right word. I guess "impressive" is. You cannot help but be impressed by what the war cost these people, this country.Driving through some forest, past the Svisloch River (pronounced SVIS-lutch), a side road leads north. It looks just like every side road that has appeared before.

The road is good but probably more from minimal use than upkeep. A few miles later, the farmland breaks to disclose a village. After another mile or so, the road passes a few homes and then splits. If you continue straight, there are some more homes before the land becomes farmland again. Eventually, the road will reach the next village. The spur curves gently to the right and leads into the village of Lapichi proper. Immediately on the right as one follows this road into the village is a large empty lot. Something is happening here, though, for it is fenced and there is evidence of some activity. In fact, the village has finally decided (or is finally able) to rebuild the Russian Orthodox church that was destroyed sixty years ago. During the war, partisans fighting in the forest a few miles behind the church were able to determine that a single German soldier was barricaded in the church, directing German artillery. The partisans mortared the church, destroying it completely. I'm grateful for their accuracy. If their shells had overshot the church, they would have destroyed ulitsa Grozdianskaya 13, the home across the street where Moses Aaron Horwitz and Chaya Ruchl Drazin raised seven children, including my grandfather. (Galina thought that the street name and address were probably exactly the same a century ago.)

Moses Aaron--or, as he was known in the official voting records for 1905, Moshe Shimonovich (his father's name was Shimon)--was born in Smolevichi in 1859, another small village a few dozen miles northeast of Minsk. He was a small man. In 1907, he would swear to the following in his Declaration of Intention to become a naturalized American citizen: 5'6" in height, 138 pounds, black hair, and brown eyes. And what the clerk of the court deemed a "dark" complexion. Amazingly, although little remains from before the war in Smolevichi, the small Jewish cemetery survives…abandoned and ignored in a small stand of fir trees. At least half of the gravestones are fallen, many overgrown and yet it is precisely the complete absence of care (and absence of vandalism) that makes it such a poignant place.

No Jewish cemetery survives in Lapichi. Pavel and Boris, two of the villagers we met while in Lapichi, said that the Germans destroyed it. Unlike hundreds, if not thousands, of other villages in Belarus and western Russia, the Germans for some reason paid particular attention to the shtetl of Lapichi. Unlike what happened in hundreds, if not thousands, of other villages in Belarus and western Russia, the Germans did not delegate mass murder in Lapichi; they did it themselves. Sometime in the spring of 1944, they ordered the Jews of Lapichi out of their homes and marched them into the forest a few kilometers down the road. At gunpoint, the Jews were ordered to dig a long, narrow trench. More than six decades later, the trench survives. Passing seasons for the greater part of a century have seen grass grow, leaves pile up, and snow fall. But the trench is clear for anyone who knows where to find it.

We had stopped Boris on the road to ask for his help in finding the house. In Chicago, he would look like a typical homeless person. Grizzled with several days' worth of unshaven beard, he was of average height and of indeterminate age, though he must have been at least in his 60s. His clothes looked as if he'd slept in them for weeks. He was willing to answer our questions, though he told us that the last person in Lapichi who had a good memory of life before the war had died a few months earlier. His stories came from what his parents told him. He volunteered to take us to the place in the forest. We all climbed into our van and drove five minutes to where the road enters the forest. The firs stand quite tall, but slender--the age of the forest is difficult to discern, although it has been here for at least a century. As we walked, he told the story of the Nazis roundup of all the Jews in the village. How they were marched here and ordered to dig a trench. No more than a few feet wide, yet hundreds of feet long, the Jews were murdered after they finished the trench. The Soviet government installed a small memorial stone nearby which, like countless others, attests only to the murder of "brave, patriotic Soviet citizens."

Almost seventy-five years after he left Lapichi as a child, my grandfather's younger brother Abe wrote a memoir of growing up in Lapichi at the turn of the century. Included in his absorbing stories are two diagrams. The first is a map of the entire village; the second a floor plan of his house. The village map is sometimes quite accurate. It is, as might be expected, often correct in the details and but off on larger things--like the location of the Svisloch River. But one reason the Horwitz house can be found nearly a century after the family left for America, is that Abe pinpointed its location precisely: across the street from the Orthodox Church, probably the most important building in any Russian village. Our initial difficulty in finding the house wasn't the fault of Abe's map. Who could foresee that the Orthodox Church would be a vacant lot?

As we wandered about the village, Galina offered some pointers to looking for the house. Jewish homes in the Pale, she said, were characterized by certain details of construction: they often had foundations that rose above ground level. They always had three windows facing the street. And they usually sported decorative elements at the roofline. One other custom ensures the longevity of homes in the area: old or decrepit homes are often knocked down with the specific intention of rebuilding them. And given the cost of building materials, reconstruction usually duplicated what had gone before. So if a Jewish house were later occupied by non-Jews and happened to be knocked down, it would usually be rebuilt so that it nearly or completely resembled the original structure.

Knowing that the house was across the street from the Orthodox Church, we began by looking for the church itself. Though Lapichi may have been heavily Jewish (an 1897 census reported that 736 out of 750 residents were Jews), it was also large enough to support an Orthodox Church for the peasants in the surrounding countryside. Neil and Ruth Cowan have pointed out (in <i>Our Parents' Lives: The Americanization of Eastern European Jews</i>) that: "Many American descendants of Eastern European Jews have the impression that 'in the old country' most of their ancestors were poor. Thus it comes as something of a surprise to learn that as poor as the Jews may have been, many of them employed servants--Christian servants--who were, by definition, even poorer." I have never heard that my great-grandparents had any servants; my point is simply that, as poor as they may or may not have been, poverty was a distinctly relative thing, even in the poorest villages. Abe provided a vivid account of a Russian peasant's home at the turn of the century:

"My mother had need to visit a peasant on a business matter one afternoon and took me along. It was my first trip to the peasant country. We passed a goodly number of peasant farms and their log cabins with their thatched roofs sloping to about eight to ten feet from the ground. The walls were made of round logs sealed with moss in between and in the front at the foundation there was usually a low earthen embankment forming an outdoor shelf to sit on…. When we entered the one-room cabin we were graciously greeted by the owner who spoke in Russian to my mother for some time, giving me an opportunity to fully explore my surroundings. The place was spotless and everything was in perfect order. On the right was a good sized loom…. On the opposite side of the room was a bed and hanging above it somewhat toward the head of the bed was a basket holding an infant in swaddling clothes. Further along towards the back of the room was a table and chairs. The walls were decorated with ikons in strategic places with good effect."

I had brought Abe's map of the village with me. As we puzzled over the map, we stopped another villager, Pavel. A big man in his 50s, he was intrigued with the notion that an American would come all this way to find the village of a grandparent. His fascination with the American and a desire to help led him into the van now. Along with Boris, Galina, and Vlad (our driver) he pored over the map, trying to place the house. Soon, the location of the Orthodox Church made everything clear. "The church was here, but…." And then, it was merely a matter of walking across the street and looking carefully at the few houses there. (As it turned out, Pavel lived next door. He told us that his father had bought their house from a Jewish family in 1926. He was too young to remember the neighbors well, although he recalled that they were Jewish. Then, in a scene I've read about happening to others, he lamented the disappearance of the Jews. Life was more interesting, livelier, in Lapichi when the Jews were there.)

My great-grandparent's house was easily the smallest and plainest, sitting behind a simple wooden fence.. The main clapboards are what once must have been a mustard color, now quite faded. In Abe's day, the home would have been constructed of logs, chinked with moss against the cold. (In fact, bright colors seem the norm; many of the houses we passed were either brightly colored or showed signs that they had been, once.) The three windows facing the street (just as Galina had said) and corner posts are trimmed in an equally faded blue. Underneath the windows and just over them are vertical clapboards, painted a reddish-brown. The roof is corrugated metal.

While we waited out front, another local friend (this one an official in the local agricultural co-operative), went around to the back door (actually, the only door) and knocked until he got us in.

The couple who lives there now, in their 20s, are only tenants--and had the look of being unceremoniously awakened--they generously allowed us in and encouraged me to take as many photographs as I wished. Since my grandfather Harry and his brothers and sisters were born in this house, I would love to say that it is a cozy, inviting, rustic place. It isn't. The only word that came to mind then and seems appropriate still, is hovel. Part of my impression, no doubt, is due to the general mess and clutter of the present tenants. But the fact remains that it is small--even with an extra room or two added on, it would be seem impossibly small for a family of nine. Even assuming that my great-grandmother kept an immaculate home, nothing can change the rude construction of the home or general poverty of the village. Even a beautifully kept, clean and inviting home can be drastically inadequate. And when modern "conveniences" such as electricity and running water are taken out, the true nature of what life must have been like in that home in that shtetl in that part of Russia a century ago begins to become evident.

The same year that my great-grandparents married, 1880, Russia's Minister of the Interior, Count Nikolai Ignatiev sent a memorandum to Czar Alexander III discussing the reasons for recent pogroms and suggesting new laws that might help.

"The principal source of this movement [the recent pogroms], which is so incom-patible with the temper of the Russian people, lies in circumstances which are of an exclusively economic nature. For the last twenty years the Jews have gradually managed to capture not only commerce and industry but they have also succeeded in acquiring, by means of purchase and lease, a large amount of landed property. Owing to their clannishness and solidarity, they have…directed their efforts…towards the exploitation of the original inhabitants, primarily of the poorest classes of the population…. Having taken energetic means to suppress the previous disorders and mob rule and to shield the Jews against violence, the Government recognizes that it is justified in adopting, without delay, no less energetic measures to remove the present abnormal relations that exist between the original inhabitants and the Jews, and to shield the Russian population against this harmful Jewish activity…."

Alexander II--the father of the present czar--had been, if not a friend to the Jews, clearly a progressive ruler. He had relaxed many restrictions applicable to them and initiated a period of tol-eration which his sudden assassination in 1880 allowed Ignatiev to declare a failure. Even as the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires were eliminating their restrictions on Jews, the Russian government enacted a series of "temporary" measures which became law on May 3, 1882, including: