Jewish, Rovno 56 percent, Pinsk 64 percent, Brest-Litovsk 44 percent, Gomel 44 percent, Bobruisk 40 percent, Staroviche 31 percent. And were they good Belorussian nationalists? They couldnât give a damn. Stayed put and did business no matter who came to town. Anti-German by sentiment, anti-Belorussian because they considered our hoped-for nation a pale of barbarous peasants. No question that there were partisan cells among them, and that if the slightest thing went wrong with the German offensive against Moscow, those cells would become dangerously active. An alien mass in the midst of the endeavor of our two races, German and Belorussian. Taken as read by us nationalists that there could be no Belorussian Republic while this unreduced mass remained. Reminded him further that we followers of Ostrowsky had always made ourselves clear on that point to the Reich Security Central Officeâwe were in this whole affair for the sake of Belorussian independence. So I knew who my people were. Was sorry if he was having temporary trouble identifying his.
Mentioned too that I could understand his natural instinct to rush down to the ghetto and spread the word through his cobbler. Two possible results: the cobbler still unable to believe it, andâstrangely for such an artful raceâthe Jews have always found it hard to believe the worst of the Gentile world; second, the cobbler spreads the word and causes a riot. Truckloads of Belorussian police, German Field Police, Special Action people and a few Wehrmacht units waiting by in the alleys off Bryanska Street to guard against exactly such a disturbance. So whole thing would be done whichever wayâeither brutally and frontally as a result of an indiscretion by Sergeant Jasper, or mercifully and professionally tomorrow.
Finally told him not to be self-indulgent. How did he think I felt? At ease? With the supreme test of my soul, my manhood, due to begin at 3:00 A.M. the following morning? Ganz and my wife and children, together with Kuzichâs family, to leave very early, at first light, for a picnic in the other direction. If he thought he would have a problem tomorrow, he ought to join them.
Very angry with him when he did not appear at the dinner table but later turned up in the hallway after all the senior officers had gone off to their beds. Apologized and said he had stayed on in my office, as Iâd suggested (though I didnât mean for the whole damned dinner), and fortified himself with liquor. Promised he would be at his desk at police headquarters the next morning.
Now 11:30. Will go into tomorrow on two and a half hoursâ sleep. Suppose thatâs true of all history, that itâs achieved on inadequate rest.
12
R ADISLAW K ABBELâS H ISTORY OF THE K ABBELSKI F AMILY
Staroviche was a city and oblast, or province, sitting southeast of Minsk in a bend of the Pripet River. However hackneyed the sentiment, I can say that there I spent the three happiest years of my childhood. We lived in a solid and ornate villa. It stood in its own garden and, whatever was happening beyond its brick walls, was its own adequate planet. Only in the summer of 1942 did my mother and sister and I leave it to holiday near Riga on the Baltic. Even though increasing anarchy in the streets of Staroviche would reduce its usefulness to us, we enjoyed too the expensive Hoetsch automobile which went with my fatherâs status as police chief of the city and region, and a chauffeur named Yuri, who wore the blue uniform of the Belorussian police. Since children do not watch the calendar, the summers of the garden in Drozdy Street seemed longer than whole decades now, and the winters with their early darkness hardly shorter.
Our best friend in the three years our family lived in Staroviche was Oberführer Willi Ganz. Ganz was Kommissar of the oblast, or (as the Germans said) the Bezirk , of Staroviche, the same region of which my father was Belorussian police chief.
Mentioned too that I could understand his natural instinct to rush down to the ghetto and spread the word through his cobbler. Two possible results: the cobbler still unable to believe it, andâstrangely for such an artful raceâthe Jews have always found it hard to believe the worst of the Gentile world; second, the cobbler spreads the word and causes a riot. Truckloads of Belorussian police, German Field Police, Special Action people and a few Wehrmacht units waiting by in the alleys off Bryanska Street to guard against exactly such a disturbance. So whole thing would be done whichever wayâeither brutally and frontally as a result of an indiscretion by Sergeant Jasper, or mercifully and professionally tomorrow.
Finally told him not to be self-indulgent. How did he think I felt? At ease? With the supreme test of my soul, my manhood, due to begin at 3:00 A.M. the following morning? Ganz and my wife and children, together with Kuzichâs family, to leave very early, at first light, for a picnic in the other direction. If he thought he would have a problem tomorrow, he ought to join them.
Very angry with him when he did not appear at the dinner table but later turned up in the hallway after all the senior officers had gone off to their beds. Apologized and said he had stayed on in my office, as Iâd suggested (though I didnât mean for the whole damned dinner), and fortified himself with liquor. Promised he would be at his desk at police headquarters the next morning.
Now 11:30. Will go into tomorrow on two and a half hoursâ sleep. Suppose thatâs true of all history, that itâs achieved on inadequate rest.
12
R ADISLAW K ABBELâS H ISTORY OF THE K ABBELSKI F AMILY
Staroviche was a city and oblast, or province, sitting southeast of Minsk in a bend of the Pripet River. However hackneyed the sentiment, I can say that there I spent the three happiest years of my childhood. We lived in a solid and ornate villa. It stood in its own garden and, whatever was happening beyond its brick walls, was its own adequate planet. Only in the summer of 1942 did my mother and sister and I leave it to holiday near Riga on the Baltic. Even though increasing anarchy in the streets of Staroviche would reduce its usefulness to us, we enjoyed too the expensive Hoetsch automobile which went with my fatherâs status as police chief of the city and region, and a chauffeur named Yuri, who wore the blue uniform of the Belorussian police. Since children do not watch the calendar, the summers of the garden in Drozdy Street seemed longer than whole decades now, and the winters with their early darkness hardly shorter.
Our best friend in the three years our family lived in Staroviche was Oberführer Willi Ganz. Ganz was Kommissar of the oblast, or (as the Germans said) the Bezirk , of Staroviche, the same region of which my father was Belorussian police chief.
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