A Crime in the Family by Sacha Batthyany

Author:Sacha Batthyany
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2017-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

12

That afternoon we flew from Moscow to Yekaterinburg, where we spent four days searching for anything that remained of the camps. We had a ramshackle yellow minibus, a driver who looked like the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, and a humourless interpreter called Svetlana who accompanied us on our tour. Over the last few years, she told us, more and more visitors had come to this region: Italians, Finns, Japanese. ‘They want to know what life here was like for their fathers and grandfathers.’ Snow lay on the ground outside, not metres deep but enough to cover everything. ‘It is quite mild for the time of year, minus fifteen degrees,’ said Svetlana. ‘There are days when it’s difficult to breathe because the cold air hurts your lungs.’

Yekaterinburg is in the Ural Mountains that divide Europe from Asia. It is 8,500 kilometres from there to the other end of Siberia, Magadan on the Sea of Okhotsk. In between lie tundra, Lake Baikal, and steppes that seem endless, full of gnats in summer and under the permafrost in winter.

We drove into a small town called Revda, where my grandfather had spent a few months in captivity in 1951. ‘There’s not much to see in this place,’ Svetlana told us. She had been here once before with a couple of Germans. Only in the north of Siberia, in the middle of the forest, did a few former watchtowers and the remains of barbed wire still stand. ‘As if human beings had been living there a few weeks earlier,’ I read in an account by someone who had walked through the snow for days until he came upon huts and original helmets. The Siberian snow preserved everything, this author wrote. Even the atmosphere of the time was still perceptible.

However, our yellow bus stopped not at any watchtowers but outside a poultry farm surrounded by a wooden fence, and when we got out we sank ankle-deep into the slush. ‘Your grandfather was somewhere here too,’ Svetlana told me.

‘Here?’

Had we come thousands of kilometres to stand beside this fence? My father coughed, and looked for his cigarettes. He had been smoking again since we landed in Moscow. He felt nervous, he had told me after coming out of a tobacconist’s with a few packets of Marlboros. That cough, the slight rattle in his throat that I heard now while the acrid smell of chickens rose to my nostrils, reminded me of my childhood: the packet of Marlboros in his shirt pocket under his sweater, the sound as he removed the silver paper. I looked at the farm, and pictured thousands of undernourished chickens in there, sitting on perches covered with droppings and pecking out each other’s feathers, while they joylessly laid small eggs to end up in the frying pans of people who lived on the seventh floor of concrete apartment blocks without any balconies.

Once again it struck me as strange that there were no memorial tablets anywhere, nothing indicating what had happened here in the past.

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