FLASHBACK! Mir, Belarus 2015

The memorial stone in Mir (Source: own photo)

Attending school in Denmark in the 1970s and 1980s, I was taught plenty about pivotal moments in Western European history, but almost nothing about Eastern Europe. I thought nothing of this omission at the time even though Eastern Europe is in many ways closer to Denmark geographically and culturally than, say, the United Kingdom, France, Austria and Switzerland, let alone Spain, Italy and Greece.

The few things we were taught about Eastern Europe were very bad and/or had a direct bearing on life in the West, such as the Russian Revolution of 1917, the horrors of Joseph Stalin, or Cold War flash points like the Berlin Airlift and the Hungarian Uprising. These events were invariably presented as exogenous shocks to life in the West, thereby conferring upon Eastern Europe an impression of instability and unpredictability. No attempt was ever made to put the events into their broader Eastern European historical, social, and political context.

When I look back, this cursory and misleading treatment of Eastern Europe in our school curricula was odd; I now recognise it was mainly due to the Cold War. Between 1945 and 1991, Europe was divided into East and West. The division was literal in the sense of the Berlin Wall, but also deeply ideological. Ordinary people from the two sides rarely, if ever, met. 'They' did not trust 'us' and 'we' did not trust 'them'. Our politicians, and theirs too, in their infinite wisdom, believed it best that children be kept in complete ignorance about the other side.

As a result, I, along with millions of other kids in Western Europe, left school with a huge gap in my knowledge about Eastern Europe, white spots on my European map much like the white spots that used to mark uncharted areas on African maps from the 19th century.

Only decades later - long after the Cold War ended - was I able to make up for the deficiencies of my education by travelling to the Eastern Europe. although my adventurous parents deserve credit for taking my brother and me on road trips through East Germany as far back as the late 1970s. At a very young age, I sensed that something was different about East Germany although I could not quite say why. I also remember that many buildings still bore the scars of war.

Years later when I had the maturity and the means to travel independently, I put together a plan to visit all the countries in Eastern Europe. I began with Finland, then went to Poland, and then onto the Baltics. Next, I visited the Balkans, Czech Republic, Moldova, Slovenia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, and eventually Russia itself.

On one of my Eastern European 'raids', I was accompanied by my brother and my father, who are equally keen country collectors. We hired a car in Budapest and set off across the vast plains of eastern Hungary to visit Romania and Slovakia. Along the way, we stopped near Debrecen for birding and to view relics from World War II. We passed through small towns with storks' nests on top of every telephone pole. In one especially lovely village with large shady trees, we enjoyed dark-red goulash served in a black cast iron pot. Throughout the trip, I felt like we were travelling some fifty years back in time and the echoes of World War II were ever present. This was not just a ‘Hungary feeling’, because I have similar feelings in almost every country I visit in Eastern Europe.

My father and I on the 'raid' in Hungary, here near Debrecen (Source: own photo) 

By 2015, only a few boxes still remained to be ticked on my Eastern European country list. One of them was Belarus. Belarus had been trying for some time to open up to the West and the government had even issued a few sovereign bonds. In my capacity as an emerging markets investor, I had met Minsk officials in London on a few occasions. They seemed friendly enough and I was getting curious about this strange country at the very heart of Eastern Europe.

Belarus at the heart of Eastern Europe (Source: here)

In the course of my Belarus research, I stumbled upon a young man on Facebook, who offered his services as a tourist guide. I wrote to him and we agreed terms. I secured a visa, bought a ticket to Minsk (via Vienna), and set off on 14 August, 2015. My guide - call him Andrei - picked me up at the airport and took me to my hotel in downtown Minsk. We agreed to meet the following morning and go to the small town of Mir about 100 kilometres south-west of Minsk.

"Mir is interesting", he said before bidding me good night.

Early next morning, Andrei pulled up in front of the hotel in his battered old car and we set off for Mir along Minsk's wide avenues. Over the centuries, numerous armies from Napoleon's Grande Armée to Hitler's storm troopers have passed through Minsk on these very roads. It is almost as if the city was designed to facilitate invasion.

As we left Minsk behind, Andrei began to tell me about himself. His parents had been Russian KGB agents stationed in Vilnius, Lithuania. When the Cold War ended, they had transferred to Minsk, because Belarus was (and still is) the last country in the former USSR still to run along the lines of the old Soviet system. When he finished school, Andrei joined the secret service in the hope that he would get to travel, but his hopes were soon dashed when he was given a desk job in Minsk with no prospect of foreign travel. One day, he decided to chuck in his job and try his luck as a tour guide instead.

"If I cannot go abroad then maybe foreigners can come to me", he said.

Due to limitations on private enterprise in Belarus, Andrei's tour agency was a one-man operation. As a keen amateur historian, Andrei had found a niche in catering for tourists with an interest in Jewish history even though he was not Jewish himself. His interest in the Jewish history of Belarus had been sparked by stumbling upon abandoned Jewish villages in the course of his travels around the country. He quickly realised that there was business potential in arranging tours for wealthy American Jews, who wanted to trace their roots in Belarus.

"Nearly all Jews that remained in Belarus during the war were killed by the Nazis, but many had left for America before the war. Their descendants now want to learn about where they came from", he said. "Unfortunately, there are almost records, because the Belarus government never cared about the history of the Jews, so I decided to do some digging myself".

Andrei explained that countless Jewish villages were emptied of people at short notice during the war. Often, there were no survivors, so no one ever returned to these villages. Over time, trees and bushes took over and they were forgotten. Andrei had found some old maps dating back to before 1939, which he used to locate the abandoned Jewish villages. He had managed to convince a Western client to (illegally) smuggle a drone into the country, which he would fly over the areas, where the old Jewish villages were supposed to have been, finding the forgotten hamlets through gaps between the trees below.

'Andrei' and his drone (Source: own photo)

"I remember the first time I found a village!", he said with obvious excitement in his voice. "After retrieving my drone, I worked my way through the trees and the dense undergrowth until suddenly I found myself in the middle of a small town", he explained. "Most of the houses were intact even though no one had been there since the Germans retreated in the summer of 1944. Some of the houses still had furniture inside, many still had linen on the beds, others had plates and cups on the tables. In the attic of the one of the houses, I found a German machine gun pointing out of a small window. It had apparently been abandoned in a hurry by the retreating Germans".

As we approached Mir, Andrei brought me up to speed on Belarus history about which I knew next to nothing. He said that slavic tribes had begun to settle in the region in the 9th Century. Around the 13th Century, the area was annexed by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which later became the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1795, Belarus became part of the Russian Empire and then part of the Soviet Union in 1917.

Like many other countries in Eastern Europe, Belarus suffered enormous destruction during World War II. When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the Soviet Union counter-invaded Belarus from the east within weeks. The Russians quickly implemented agricultural nationalisation, redistributed land to peasants, and established collective farms, while Belarus' political and social elites were purged, including teachers, landowners, and civil servants.

Soon, however, the Russians were forced to retreat by the advancing Germans and the 3-year Nazi occupation of Belarus began. During the occupation, some 2–3 million people, or one in every three Belarusians died at the hands of the Nazis. After the war, the country fell back into the Soviet orbit until independence in 1991. In 1994, Alexander Lukashenko was elected president and promptly turned Belarus into a centralised, authoritarian dictatorship with heavy reliance on Russia. It remains so to this day, a model of what Putin wants for Ukraine.

By now we had arrived in Mir, a small town whose main attraction is a castle erected in the 16th century in late brick Gothic style. Ownership of Mir Castle passed down through generations of feudal serf-owning noblemen until the town fell under Soviet control in 1939. Today, Mir Castle is one of the few remaining architectural monuments from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth period.

Mir Castle (Source: own photo) 

In addition to its castle, Mir has a darker claim to fame; the town was once a major centre of Jewish religious learning in Eastern Europe until the Jewish population was all but wiped out by the Nazis.

In the 1920s, two-thirds of Mir's then 5,000-strong population were Jews. Mir also had a large thriving Roma community, which made a living from horses. Intellectual life revolved around the Yeshiva, which was a site of study of the Talmud, the Torah, and Jewish law located inside Mir Castle. The Jewish population of Mir gradually declined in the 1930s due to emigration, but the castle was still an important place of learning and there were still 2,000 Jews living in Mir when the Nazis arrived on 27 June 1941.

The German army reached Mir a mere 35 days after the start of Operation Barbarossa, so the Jews of Mir had little time to escape. In fact, the Jewish population in Mir increased by about 900 souls immediately prior to the arrival of the Nazis due to an influx of Jewish refugees from nearby settlements and Poland.

Within three months, all Jews in Mir had been resettled within a ghetto in town. On 9th November 1941, the Nazis, aided by local Belarusian collaborators, massacred 1,600 Jews and Roma in the woods outside Mir. The remaining Jews and Roma were imprisoned in the castle until they too were liquidated on 13 August 1942. In total, more than 2,800 Jews and Roma were killed during the German occupation of Mir.

Prior to the final liquidation, a group comprising 150-300 mainly younger Jews managed to escape to the castle to join the Bielski Brothers partisans in the woods. The escape was the brainchild of Oswald Rufeisen, a Jew, who had infiltrated the German police as an interpreter. Some 65 escapees were soon caught by local police and executed. Many others died due to the tough conditions in the forest. In the end, only about 50 Jews from Mir survived the war, mainly due to Rufeisen's assistance. Oswald Rufeisen also survived by hiding in a convent run by Polish nuns. In gratitude, he converted to Catholicism. He sought Israeli citizenship after the war, but was initially refused entry. Eventually he was allowed into Israel and in time acquired citizenship through naturalisation. He died in Haifa in 1998.

"There is one more place I want to show you", said Andrei after our visit to the castle. As we made our way along Mir's cobbled streets, we passed small colourful cottages and gardens with fruit trees behind low wooden fences. On the porch of one of the cottages, we saw an old woman taking in the sun. She was short and round with a scarf tied around her head. Her swollen legs were resting on a low stool. Andrei greeted her and politely inquired if he could ask her a few questions. When he came back some minutes later, he said, "I always try to talk to the babushkas. Some of them remember the war, but they won't be around for much longer".

Mir cottages (Source: own photos) 

The woman had told Andrei that she was a young child during the war. She remembered the Russians coming, then the Germans, and then the Russians again. She had hidden with her siblings and her parents under the floor boards. She said both sides had been equally bad.

We continued out stroll and soon came to a small ravine surrounded by birch trees. Inside the ravine was a neglected blue and yellow memorial, which had been built in 1998 to commemorate the final liquidation of Jews in Mir. The killings had taken place on this spot. We stood in silence as we contemplated the horrors that had happened here.

The Mir Jewish memorial (Source: own photos) 

Today, Mir is home to some 2,500 people, half of the town's pre-war population. There is no industry, no centre of Jewish religious learning, and no Roma horse industry. Nor are there any descendants of Mir's once-thriving Jewish and Roma communities. At a time when many Western democracies are bending over backwards to get rid of immigrants, Mir offers a reminder of what happens when cultural cleansing is taken to its ultimate extreme.

The End