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some contact in this regard. The Australians, like most Western countries, were very frightened of being infiltrated by Communists masquerading as refugees. If the Australian files were looked at, it would probably be seen that for some twenty years my father was an adviser to the Australians on the political probity of this or that Belorussian immigrant.
    But the true reason for my father’s flight to the antipodes was that by his mid-forties he was already exhausted by politics. It is scarcely too dramatic to say that history had looted him. As well as that, through the incidents I am now going to consider in this history, he had by the time he immigrated to Australia lost all his political influence among those arch and crafty Belorussian politicians and patriots. Even as a teenager I knew and understood this. My father was being retired by his colleagues, sent like the early British convicts to a distance from which he was unlikely to return.
    Before I look at the European causes of my family’s decline, let me say that my father achieved Australian visibility only once, in 1955. In that year Australian Belorussian communities were visited by an old political enemy of my father, Mikolai Redich. Redich had been dispatched on a fund-raising mission. His task was—as they say in this country—to “ginger up” the Belorussians here. One winter’s evening that year, after Redich had delivered a lecture in the suburb of Ashfield and was returning home with my father to Parramatta, a Sydney suburb where he was being accommodated by old friends from the Displaced Persons camps, Redich fell from a train at Lidcombe station, suffered extensive injuries, and died almost at once.
    It was remarkable that at the inquest numerous Australian officials appeared to testify to my father’s good character. But among the Belorussian community here there was much gossip about the cause of Redich’s death, and this event marked the beginning both of my father’s decline in health and of our increasing estrangement from other Belorussian refugees in the city of Sydney.
    Trains have figured crucially in the Kabbel family history. For all of us they have been vehicles of exile. At the center of my own history I place our escape from Minsk, together with the families of other Belorussian officials, in a train especially provided by the SS. This train rolled out of Minsk some five days before the Russians captured the city in June 1944. I was then eleven years of age. Aides of General von Gottberg, German Kommissar of Belorussia, waved us all off from Minsk Central. My mother was not impressed by this show of SS formality. She would not forgive von Gottberg’s crowd for failing to attend the funeral of Oberführer Willi Ganz, her favorite guest among the Germans, her confidant and—with my father’s approval—closest friend. Oberführer Ganz had been Onkel Willi to me. His body lay in the Catholic cemetery in Staroviche—it was von Gottberg’s fault that it had never been shipped home. It would now fall to the Russians. His mute grave would go unmarked, or even be desecrated. It had to be admitted, as my father, until recently police chief of Staroviche, pointed out to my mother, that Oberführer Ganz had been buried in an autumn of heavy rains and fierce partisan activity, both factors making a muddy hundred-mile journey by von Gottberg unreasonably dangerous. She had not been persuaded however.
    The young and highly polished SS men seeing us off from Minsk seemed to imply by the joviality with which they shook hands with our President, Radislaw Ostrowsky (my godfather as it happens), that we were off to some Baltic beach for the summer, perhaps that same one at Puck where we had spent the war’s first autumn waiting for Warsaw to fall. My parents of course knew better than that. For them it was not the first flight from that ancient and revered city of the Belorussians. For