Read Online Vera by Stacy Schiff - Free Book Online Page A

windows,all the cars in Russia having been requisitioned by the Bolshevik authorities. Sonia Slonim, who would have been about eight, reported that her father was arrested, then sentenced to death, from which sentence he was narrowly saved. * Lena Slonim, then about eighteen, and who at least in the eyes of her sisters would adopt an indifference bordering on ambivalence about her background, made no reference whatever to any such events, dramatic or otherwise. Véra, a year younger and afflicted with a pathological addiction to literalism, often at the expense of truth, recalled that the family “not so much decided to flee as had to do so after a long nocturnal search by a band of soldiers who had come to arrest my father (who was not sleeping at home in anticipation of arrest).”
    Slonim traveled immediately to Kiev. The women in the family, along with a servant, escaped aboard a freight train to Véra’s maternal uncle’s home in Byelorussia, then held—it was the end of World War I—by the Germans. This was easier said than done. The trains had no fixed destinations; theymight stop for a day or more without warning. When they did no one knew where they were, much less in whose territory they stood politically. Although the Slonims’ papers were perfectly valid, they were stopped and held at the Byelorussian border. They could do nothing but sit in the car and avoid attracting attention, which they did, nervously, well into the night. Finally the train began moving, slowly at first; it was unclear whether they were heading forward or back. After a mile or two they looked out with relief to see German helmets, then an emblem of order. A German officer befriended Véra and Lena and saw to it that their papers were properly stamped, for which service he was rewarded with a hugely welcome bar of soap. When the Bolsheviks arrived the women again fled south, to Odessa.
    The nightmarish journey to Odessa represented one moment of her life in which Véra Slonim cast herself as the heroine of the tale. This was a story she could be persuaded to tell. The Slonim women and their forty-three suitcases boarded what she described as one of the last trains for the Crimea; certainly none followed directly behind it, as both Véra and Lena remembered the rail ties being pulled up for fuel. In their freight car they were joined by followers of Simon Petliura, the Ukrainian nationalist leader and a notorious anti-Semite. The pogroms of 1919 were at their height in the Ukraine that fall, claiming somewhere between fifty thousand and two hundred thousand fatalities, for which Petliura’s troops—who did not distinguish between Bolsheviks and Jews—have generally received credit. Asleep on her bags on the floor, Véra was awoken by the sound of a militiaman roundly insulting a Jew, whom he threatened to throw from the train. When the delicate seventeen-year-old girl spoke up in her fellow traveler’s defense, the separatists were so taken aback they changed their approach completely. Politely they escorted the Slonim women through their next series of adventures. Along the way through the Ukraine the train stopped at an inn run by a Jewish family, the bar of which was overrun by returning White troops, uneasy allies of the Petliurists. Concerned that the travelers would be disturbed in the expected ruckus, the innkeeper sent his thirteen-year-old son to a brothel to secure some legitimate distraction for the men. At dawn the hotel porter threw sand at their windows to wake the Slonims, who escaped with their friends the Ukrainian separatists. It was the soldiers as well who advised the women to avoid Kiev, where they had hoped to rejoin Evsei Slonim; the separatists knew the city was about to be taken. While Véra and her family traveled on to Odessa, Petliura’s men delivered word of the detour to Slonim. On the train through the Ukraine the soldiers broke into song; when one