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Authors: Thomas Keneally
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a safe place for such memoirs. The names of your godfather Ostrowsky and Abramtchik and other Belorussian leaders appear often in histories of that period. There is a book published recently and written by an American intelligence officer of the era which complains that these men were given undue protection by the American Central Intelligence and by the British and French, that Ostrowsky and Abramtchik and Stankievich and all the others are war criminals and should be tried as such. In books of this nature Papa always merits at least a footnote because of a certain massacre carried out by Belorussian police and the SS on the Staroviche-Gomel road in 1941 .
Again, we knew very young that events are subtle and that âwar criminalâ is a relative and shifting term. It was a term used with a straight face by Stalin, whose crimes against the Belorussians and Ukrainians make the SS seem almost indulgent. Nonetheless I consider it my last daughterly duty to send these journals to a far continent where they are not likely to cause comment or serve as evidence. I place them therefore in the care of a loyal son. My advice to you is nonetheless to burn them. There will be too much in them about Onkel Willi, and that awful man Bienecke, and all the rest. I remember you in that six months we spent in Berlin at the end. You were in a daze, which was merciful given the level of bombing. But it was not a happy daze. It terrified Mother. Remembering that child, my advice to you is at least to store them unread and at best to burn them. You and I know how there are vipers nesting in those pages .
I hope you and your children are well. As for me, though childless, I have a loving husband. Father thought him a crook and a child molester, but he has been an honorable man all these years .
The journals are on their way under separate cover .
Yourâbelieve meâaffectionate sister, Genia
8
R ADISLAW K ABBELâS H ISTORY OF THE K ABBELSKI F AMILY
I am moved at this late hour to produce a history of my family. My purpose is to mark the inroads the struggle for Belorussian freedom made upon the lives of my parents, and so to create the background for my own attempt to prepare a true Belorussia of the spirit here, on this earth which will so soon become a wilderness. I wish as well to place my fatherâs journals in a suitable context.
Let me say first that in Belorussia itself, in certain parts of Berlin, Paris, New Jersey, where Belorussian exiles live, it would be a matter of surprise that my father ended in Australia. For he was, while still young in political terms, a minister of the Belorussian government and a familiar of the great Belorussian patriot Ostrowsky. Most of his government colleagues would spend their later years in South River, New Jersey, as intimates of various intelligence and counterintelligence bodiesâthe Office of Policy Coordination for one. Others lived in Paris, trusted employees of the French Secret Service. My father, far from running a research group at a nice address in Rue de Granillers or speaking at anti-Soviet seminars in London or Edinburgh, would finish his life as a guard (retired) on the Government Railways of New South Wales.
When my father came to Australia with me in the late 1940s, it was the theory that he would be a fund-raiser among Belorussian refugees in Sydney and Melbourne. The money he raised in this distant latitude was to stand against the day when the Belorussians would return east to their homeland. Money would also be needed by the Belorussian government-in-exile, still largely scattered around various Displaced Persons camps in Germany. There was always the risk that under Soviet pressure they would be arrested by the Allies and forced to stand trial for various incidents which had taken place in our homeland between 1941 and 1944.
My father was also meant to make friends in Australia of the fledgling Australian security and intelligence groups. There was
Again, we knew very young that events are subtle and that âwar criminalâ is a relative and shifting term. It was a term used with a straight face by Stalin, whose crimes against the Belorussians and Ukrainians make the SS seem almost indulgent. Nonetheless I consider it my last daughterly duty to send these journals to a far continent where they are not likely to cause comment or serve as evidence. I place them therefore in the care of a loyal son. My advice to you is nonetheless to burn them. There will be too much in them about Onkel Willi, and that awful man Bienecke, and all the rest. I remember you in that six months we spent in Berlin at the end. You were in a daze, which was merciful given the level of bombing. But it was not a happy daze. It terrified Mother. Remembering that child, my advice to you is at least to store them unread and at best to burn them. You and I know how there are vipers nesting in those pages .
I hope you and your children are well. As for me, though childless, I have a loving husband. Father thought him a crook and a child molester, but he has been an honorable man all these years .
The journals are on their way under separate cover .
Yourâbelieve meâaffectionate sister, Genia
8
R ADISLAW K ABBELâS H ISTORY OF THE K ABBELSKI F AMILY
I am moved at this late hour to produce a history of my family. My purpose is to mark the inroads the struggle for Belorussian freedom made upon the lives of my parents, and so to create the background for my own attempt to prepare a true Belorussia of the spirit here, on this earth which will so soon become a wilderness. I wish as well to place my fatherâs journals in a suitable context.
Let me say first that in Belorussia itself, in certain parts of Berlin, Paris, New Jersey, where Belorussian exiles live, it would be a matter of surprise that my father ended in Australia. For he was, while still young in political terms, a minister of the Belorussian government and a familiar of the great Belorussian patriot Ostrowsky. Most of his government colleagues would spend their later years in South River, New Jersey, as intimates of various intelligence and counterintelligence bodiesâthe Office of Policy Coordination for one. Others lived in Paris, trusted employees of the French Secret Service. My father, far from running a research group at a nice address in Rue de Granillers or speaking at anti-Soviet seminars in London or Edinburgh, would finish his life as a guard (retired) on the Government Railways of New South Wales.
When my father came to Australia with me in the late 1940s, it was the theory that he would be a fund-raiser among Belorussian refugees in Sydney and Melbourne. The money he raised in this distant latitude was to stand against the day when the Belorussians would return east to their homeland. Money would also be needed by the Belorussian government-in-exile, still largely scattered around various Displaced Persons camps in Germany. There was always the risk that under Soviet pressure they would be arrested by the Allies and forced to stand trial for various incidents which had taken place in our homeland between 1941 and 1944.
My father was also meant to make friends in Australia of the fledgling Australian security and intelligence groups. There was
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