The Hand that Signed the Paper Read online

  I began to discover in upper primary what my uncle and father ‘did’ in the war; it was one of those things. I wasn’t a Nazi. None of my family were Nazis. We weren’t Germans. People just did certain things that could not be prevented. We were a typical enough family, although more political than most. My father voted DLP. I supported the Labor Party. I never argued about politics with my father. He didn’t care. I even helped the local branch with handing out how-to-vote cards on various polling days, and the local member once gave me a job reference. I did not get the job, but that wasn’t his fault.

  My mother was the true right-winger. She was a member of the National Party of Australia, Queensland Branch, and also handed out how-to-votes on polling day. Out of deference to such family division, on polling day the Liberals always obligingly set up their stall in between the Labor and National stalls. ‘Between the warring Kovalenkos’ one Liberal candidate commented wryly. Mother and I would glare malevolently at each other for the duration of voting, and then ride home in the same car. But my mother’s politics were excused. She was Protestant Irish, and believed in the flag and the Queen and such things.

  I contacted her from the University, from the public phone located under the sandstone Forgan Smith Building. ‘I’ve got to see Uncle Vitaly,’ I said. I know that she nodded, and partly covered the receiver with her hand, stifling sobs. ‘It’s something that you want to do,’ she said.

  Cathe nodded solemnly when I told her. ‘I thought you would. He’s your uncle.’ She laughed ruefully. ‘You’ll miss the Medieval Ball, though.’ I laughed. ‘I shall blot my perfect record.’ She took me by the shoulders. ‘I want you to understand... that... that I think it’s wrong to try them. That trying people for what they did in a war legitimises other wartime activities that are left untried. War is a crime, of itself. So I really hope that nothing comes of this, and everything just blows over.’ Her words comforted me for a moment, and I left the house surrounded by a wonderful sense of calm. It was only later, as I drove towards the coast, that I began to cry.

  The sunlight slants more precipitously, behind me an angry driver honks his horn. He wants the pump. I sit in the sun-warmed car briefly before starting it and driving along the access road onto the highway. I turn on the radio; the Logan FM station plays ‘Under the Bridge’. ‘I don’t ever wanna feel... how I felt that day... take me to the place I love... take me all the way.’ I wipe my eye. That song, for some reason, always makes me think of what my family did. ‘Under the bridge downtown... is where I drew some blood... Under the bridge downtown... I could not get enough.’

  Vitaly did unspeakable things. I have known about these things for some time now. How poor and hungry Ukrainians shot Jews for bread and sausage and vodka. How my father and my uncle became part of the machinery of the Holocaust. How my aunt married a senior SS officer. How people slaughtered without compunction. My brother Bret went to Vietnam, and came back nearly mad from what he did, with dreams about little gook children pocked with bullets and Vietnamese girls raped by both Americans and Vietcong. My father is sane. So are Vitaly and aunt Kateryna. None of them mad. Not now. Not one.

  Near Babii-Yar, a deep, sandy gorge, the Dnieper flowed under a bridge. This deep ravine that marked out a tributary of the great river was perfect for what the Germans wanted. Just perfect.

  I discovered the past when I was twelve. It was summer; next year I would start high school. I lay on the cool floor of our air-conditioned lounge, watching cricket. My parents were at the weekend markets, and I was burnt from spending the previous day in the sun. I had a sudden desire to locate the family Rubik’s cube, and spent the next half-hour searching energetically for it. Not on tiptoes in my cupboard. Not downstairs. Not buried beneath the reams of paper that littered the dining table.

  Finally, I found it in the top drawer of my father’s bedside table, in a place where I never normally ventured, beneath several fat envelopes. The envelopes were stuffed with old photographs. I hurriedly pulled the cube from the drawer and the contents of the envelopes spilled onto the floor and over the bed. The photos were the box brownie type for the most part—small, sepia, and delineated around the margins with a white border. A few were larger—handsome black-and-white studio shots of my uncle. My father. My aunt Kateryna beside an unknown man with white blond hair. The man had a handsome, wicked face.

  All the men were clothed in a black uniform marked at the collar with the runic insignia of the SS. I abandoned the Rubik’s cube in the drawer. Hurrying, I spread the pictures over the bed. The big pretty ones to one side. The little ones I tipped from the envelopes. In one, a group shot, a tall, expressionless man stood beside a youthful group of SS that included my uncle and my father. Their uniforms looked new and starched. They grinned at the camera, even though their officer did not. In front of them, a large machine-gun was set up on tripod legs. One crouched beside it. Its lethal muzzle ended somewhere outside the photograph. In another, uncle Vitaly sat at the end of a long ditch, a machine-gun across his knees, his hands draped over it, his legs hanging into the pit. He stared insolently out at me, a lock of white hair over one eye. The shot was underexposed, and I could not see what was in the ditch. Other pictures made up for this lack. Pits choked with bodies. Grinning men waving a flag that I later learned was the flag of the Ukraine. A photograph of a big factory with low timber buildings surrounded by barbed wire and pine brush. My uncle before the carved factory gates. My aunt in a smart wartime dress and hairdo beside the wicked-looking man. Beside them a chart with maps on it clipped to a board. A poor-looking man with a big star around his neck, being chased up the street by an SS man wielding a rifle with deadly intent. My father. My Father.

  THE PAST, someone has said, is another country, foreign, strangely inviting, beautiful. Other people live there, not us, so we are safe from it. There is our past, the stuff of gory war films—bad Hollywood, if you will. The nasty ones are in there, in the movies, at least. Mixed in with Shirley Temple and Bogart and Kate Hepburn. Extras mainly, not people, with helmets low down over their eyes so that you cannot see their faces. They drag Jews out of trains, shove them into gas chambers, line them up and shoot them. They are usually given one line—a barking ‘Schnell, schnell, schneller... los, los’—then they obligingly disappear. It’s good that they do: we are interested in the people who made the bullets, not the people who fired them. The latter make us uncomfortable, because, if we look too closely, we see sad eyes and tragic fates. They do these things because we believe they are savage people. They keep doing them because such savagery is endemic. They can wear a brutal mask easily. It feels good for the viewer that they seem to believe in their own savageness. At least, then, the two—watched and watching—cannot be confused, separated as they are by both time and appearance.

  KATERYNA: During the spring of 1933, there was no seed to plant for the wheat, no fodder for the animals; the communists had come to our village and taken it all in the previous year. People starved, and the streets of the capital were not the only streets strewn with the bodies of starving Ukrainians. Every village had a pile of fresh bodies awaiting burial each morning. The communists and Jews would step over them, eyes averted, on their way to work. Sometimes people would be shot by the communists for speaking in Ukrainian, but this was rare by comparison. Mostly the famine did its quiet work, and only kulaks were shot. The land, they told us, would then belong to everybody. In the beginning kulaks were defined as rich farmers, but after a while, ‘kulak’ meant any land-holder, then any crop-grower, and finally any Ukrainian. Executions were frequent. But the famine was always the fastest executioner, even after the communists and their organised Cheka came and took people—politicals and Petlyura supporters—away for the transports to Siberia. This was for resettlement, we were told, and no one ever saw them again.

  The dusty summer spread out under the bowl of the sky, and potbellied children sat in the unpaved streets, clothed in a cloak of flies. Th
e Ukraine has a deserved reputation for cold, but in these years, summer and famine were inextricably linked. Children were born dead, or only lived for a few hours in the hungry, sweating heat. Those who grew were never sent to school. The communists had given up sending us to school; we refused to learn the lessons they had to teach, and jokes about ‘stupid Ukrainians’ were very popular in Moscow then. Students in one high school lynched the teacher who beat them for speaking Ukrainian. For this, the entire village was deported. ‘The removal of dangerous Nationalists’, it was called.

  Skilfully, the communists hid their famine from the world, and all the visiting trade union leaders on junkets from Australia and America and Britain were shown only the successful kolkhozes around Moscow. In the maps supplied to them, the Ukraine was a white void—not even Kiev was marked. They returned to their own countries to champion the land of the proletariat, while our people starved. People have since wondered why we did not do more to resist, but it was very hard for us. Millions of us died in the famine. Carefully, they starved away our desire for national independence. The communists had both the money and the guns; we had neither. But, people reasoned, if someone were to come and give us either or both, then we would take revenge. Unholy, Godless and bloody revenge. We would kill every communist and Jew in the Ukraine.

  But I should tell you that we were not always bitter like this. The bitterness came slowly. We did not always starve, although we were always poor. Most of the time, we were able to tiptoe through our valley of sorrows upside down and imagine it a merry place. Things were no better or no worse after the first coming of the Bolsheviks, even though some people said that the sky would fall because of the terrible sacrilege of Godless atheists ruling Ukraine.

  Comrade Lenin broke up the largest estates, and gave even the poorest peasants some land. Nationalists and Democrats were shot, but they lived in the cities. If you were peasants like us, in the villages around Khmel’nik, you were safe if you kept quiet. In those days we had tremendous family gatherings, and I remember people coming to our farm from as far as Vinnitsa and Berdichev for an important event such as a wedding. My aunt Ludmylla and her husband Serhiy and their twelve children, my cousins, as well as my grandparents would come. Because my mother had only three children, Ludmylla would say blessings and prayers, and hope that some of her good fortune would rub off on ‘poor Natasha’. People danced. The women made beautiful things to eat, the men wore their best pairs of polished choboty. Little wooden toys would be carved for the children: beautiful toys that proved that Ukrainian craftsmen are so skilled that they truly can carve a spoon with an axe. My father and my uncle taught Vitaly to dance—I remember the three of them tripping lightly through the long grass. Vitaly was a very good dancer, even as a boy. Strong and quick and graceful.

  So, for this period, the communists left us alone. There was balance in the world. A little peace, enough prosperity to ensure a good wedding party at least. Only my father was sceptical. Often he would tell us to engrave the appearance of Ukraine somewhere permanent on our hearts, so that we could always call on it if we were deported: the time will come, he said, when the engraving will be all that you have. But people didn’t understand his scepticism. They considered his warnings morbid, out of step with the times.

  This is why what followed came so suddenly. One year, all of my cousins visited to celebrate the wedding of my father’s youngest sister. Two years later, all twelve children were dead. Comrade Stalin and Comrade Kaganovich, so little known to the Soviet peoples while Lenin was alive, became strangely prominent. It is hard to describe this change. At first, worshipping God was forbidden. If you were caught, you were shot. People who spoke only Ukrainian were thrown out of their jobs. Our land was requisitioned, and resistance was out of the question. In my village a group of about twenty farmers refused to give up their crop to the NKVD men who had been sent to collect it. They armed themselves with scythes and rakes. I shall never forget what followed. The NKVD came with a flamethrower and two machine-guns, chained all of these men together and locked them in a barn. Then they set fire to the barn. We had been ordered into our homes, but we could still hear the screams.

  This was how the hate started. As the years passed, the hate got worse. I didn’t see all of it because I was sent away to Komsomol school, but my brothers Evheny and Vitaly saw it, lived through it. But I have to say that I saw the beginning, in the main street of Khmel’nik, a little town like any other little town, choked with queues of tired, hungry people.

  THE LETTERS ‘SMERSH’ stand, in Russian, for the words ‘death to spies’. SMERSH men and women come into the town of Khmel’nik and arrest a certain Fyodor Kovalenko for the crime of nationalist subversion. We don’t know if this is a real crime, or only a fiction. They take him to the building that used to be a prison in Tsarist times. Now it has been converted into SMERSH offices. In the Civil War, Fyodor Kovalenko gave shelter to two fleeing officers of the White Army. The two men fled to Siberia. One escaped to Nationalist China, finally reaching Australia. The other lay low, and was eventually captured in Yakutia by NKVD in the winter of 1933.

  After six weeks of having his skull fractured, his balls crushed, his fingers cut off, he finally tells who aided him in his flight. So the SMERSH people come down to starving Khmel’nik to arrest Fyodor Kovalenko, farmer and nationalist subversive, who has been expecting them. He realises that he has no hope of survival, that he will be shot here or will perish in Archangelsk, so, as they arrest him, he resists, shouting as he is dragged down the summer street, past the potbellied children, the women laden with firewood. Fyodor was once a big, healthy Ukrainian, a fine baritone in the church choir. For a long time his voice was lowered to a whisper. Now he shouts, waving spindly arms. My brother and I each hold one of our mother’s hands. Vitaly is twelve. I am ten. Evheny is eight, and at home on the collective. My mother is pregnant. She says nothing. She queues quietly, waiting for bread. My father is shouting. ‘Long Live Petlyura! Long Live the Ukraine! God Bless President Roosevelt! May he blow Comrade Stalin off the map!’ He says the most inflammatory things possible. ‘Fight, you people. You don’t have to accept this! Fight! Fight! Fight Marx and the fucking Jewish Bolsheviks! Fight!’ My parents came into town to queue for different items. One in each queue, so that more food could be acquired. Mother says nothing. Vitaly says ‘I will fight’. ‘Not now,’ says my mother. My father goes, unquietly, raging. He is not by nature an angry man, and the little that I recall of him revolves around his soft voice, the sweet tobacco smell that lingers in his white whiskers. The shouting startles me, and people stare silently at my father and the two SMERSH men from their places in various queues. He had many relatives in Khmel’nik. Others were also taken, by famine, by SMERSH, by shootings in the streets. This was how the hate grew.

  AFTER A while, we began to hear about Adolf Hitler, and wild stories started to circulate. How everybody in Germany had enough to eat, and that they all had telephones and automobiles and radio sets. The communists at first denied the truth of all of this, saying that Hitler was an evil capitalist, but later, they began to say good things about him: that he had provided everyone with jobs, that the workers were happy. We accepted without question the revised opinion of Herr Hitler. People had learnt by now that the communists changed their minds on the slightest pretext.

  This did not stop them from deporting many of the Volksdeutsche to Siberia. The Volksdeutsche had lived in Ukraine since the time of Catherine. She had imported them to make Russia look like Europe; she needed their nimble, skilled fingers, their intelligence. She needed them to drag Russia ‘kicking and screaming’ into modernity. Being German herself, she did not like Russia as it was: she could take comfort from her own people. When they had done the tasks set them, she let them settle in Ukraine and Poland. They settled.

  Now anyone with a German name—even if his German blood had been almost completely diluted by Ukrainian—was at risk. Some hid their language a
nd their names and tried to stay in the villages; many were drafted into the Red Army, where it was hoped they could be made into communists. Comrade Stalin would regret this later, as they all changed sides when captured by the Nazis. Others were simply removed to Soviet Central Asia, to perish among the Tartars and the Tajiks, people both unlovely and unlovable to Comrade Stalin in Moscow. People watched, in Khmel’nik, as the town’s Volksdeutsche were put in boxcars and directed towards Vinnitsa, and thence to West Siberia. They looked at us sadly, shaking their heads. We wanted to help them, give them food. Already, in the city, they could see what had once belonged to them being given to Russian and Jewish colonists. Nothing was given to their Ukrainian neighbours. This was considered too dangerous. SMERSH shot a woman on the railway platform who tried to give a Volksdeutsche woman she knew some black bread and sausage. Her blood trickled over the cement, slow in the cold winter air, as the train pulled away.

  We starved less in the late thirties, and Comrade Stalin saw fit to come down to the Ukraine and bribe us with candies to support the party. But he still wanted our wings broken, speaking our language in a public place was still difficult. SMERSH still visited our poor country with worrying regularity. Even communists were not safe: purges were conducted, and sometimes the most loyal party members would be arrested. I think that SMERSH also had a quota, and once they ran out of kulaks they were forced to take their own.

  Thousands upon thousands of Ukrainian children were also taken from their parents and sent to Komsomol schools, sometimes when they were only infants. When they were taken this young, they forgot their land and their mother tongue. I too was enrolled as a Komsomol, and was taken away from my mother as much as possible. The communists felt that if you separated us from our religion and our stories, from the beliefs that defined us as Ukrainians, eventually you would make us merely good communists, good Russians. Eventually you would assimilate us, Russify us, make us like everyone else. This did not work with the older children. Besides, the communists did not want to educate too many Ukrainians too well, in case they worked out how to overthrow the system.