Precerpt from In with the East Wind: A Mary Poppins Kind of Life - Belarus: Khatyn
Khatyn
Khatyn was a small rural village in what is now Belarus. On March
22, 1943, Nazi forces and local collaborators carried out a retaliatory
massacre there. They burned the entire village, locked the residents — mostly
women, children, and the elderly — in a barn, and set it on fire. Those who
tried to escape were shot. Only a handful survived—not unlike Belarus at large,
where, overall, about 25% of the entire Belrusian population perished during
WWII.
After the war, the Soviet government chose Khatyn as a national
memorial site, not because it was the only village destroyed, but because it
could stand for the hundreds of Belarusian villages that were wiped out in
similar ways. The memorial was built in 1969.
The design is stark and symbolic. Concrete outlines mark
where each home once stood. A bell stands at each outline, ringing softly
whenever the wind moves it, reminiscent of Pyotr’s peace bell, only less
hopeful—and haunting. A sculpture of the lone adult survivor, Yuzif Kaminsky,
holds the body of his son. The eternal flame burns in the center, representing
the villages that never rose again. It is a place built to hold silence, grief,
and the sense of a wound that never fully closes.
It was the silence I remember deep in the recesses of my
mind and deep in the depths of my heart—not the kind of silence that comforts
but the kind that feels like breath held too long. Khatyn lay open to the sky,
a hillside marked with neat concrete rectangles where houses once stood. Each
square was the footprint of a life erased, a family burned out of existence
during the war. Nothing remained but outlines, like chalk marks around bodies
long removed.
The wind moved through the memorial as if it knew the way.
Every so often it caught one of the small bells mounted at the corner of a
foundation, and a thin, trembling note rose into the air. One bell, then
another, then another, never in unison. It sounded like a village trying to
speak again, each voice faint, each one alone, echoes from the past.
I walked slowly, feeling the weight of what wasn’t there —
the missing doors, the missing windows, the missing laughter. The land held its
grief without spectacle. No plaques could explain it. No guide could soften it.
The place asked only that you stand still and listen to what the wind carried.
And in that quiet, I understood why Khatyn would stay with
me. It wasn’t a story of war so much as a story of absence—the kind that
settles into the soil and refuses to be forgotten. The bells kept weeping in
the wind, reminding the living to remember the dead.
And it was a place that generated stories. A few years after
my visit to Khatyn, I heard one of those stories in Moscow from a professor who
was the granddaughter of the woman involved in the story. It seemed that the
Nazis would march into a village, burn everything to the ground, and the move
on to the next village, progressing through the villages as if on a schedule, rarely
spending more than a couple of days in each place before totally obliterating
everything—and everyone—there. As the war progressed, people in some of the
villages, upon getting some, limited, advance warning, would flee to the birch
forests outside the villages, where the German soldiers would not follow them,
seemingly because they did not like the swampy land at that time of year.
I don’t recall the name of the village, if the professor even
mentioned it; it was so long ago. I remember some details of the story,
however, because of the compelling emotions they evoked. The residents of that
particular village fled, like other villagers before them, into the forest. With
little notice, they left with what they had; it was not a planned retreat.
Things were left behind—many things, all things, really. As the villagers
scattered themselves among the trees, one woman, surrounded by several children,
began crying, “My baby! My baby! I left my baby in the crib!”
She wanted to go back to rescue her infant, but the
villagers would not let her. She would reveal their presence. The soldiers
might not want to follow them into the swampy forest, but they just might do
it, anyway. No, the baby would have to be sacrificed for the sake of everyone
else.
She cried all night, consumed with grief and guilt. The villagers
comforted her even as they restrained her. Especially as they watched flames in
the distance as their village met the same fate as other villages.
When the skies cleared both from flames and any hangover
from night darkness, the villagers cautiously approached the village. Empty. Soldiers
gone. Buildings gone. Except for one little izba on the edge of town, a
hut-like log home, typical of the dwellings of the poor residents of the Belarusian
villages.
The woman who had forgotten her baby stood stunned. Her house
remained standing. How could that be?
She ran quickly to it and inside found the baby’s crib, with
the baby comfortably fast asleep. Beside the baby lay a mostly finished bottle
of milk. The mother started to cry when she spied something unusual on a chair
beside the crib: a German soldier’s winter shawl with a note attached in
German. One of the villagers who could read German, well, sort of, deciphered
it: “To the mother of this beautiful child.”
Volume 1: ABC Lands
by Dr. Betty Lou Leaver
For more posts about and from this book, click HERE.
For more posts by and about Betty Lou Leaver, click HERE.
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