Tomorrow is Yesterday: A Novel of Wartime Belarus (1968)

The story leaps forward. After the war Mary Karaway drifts across a ruined Europe, through hunger and the displaced persons’ camps of Germany, dodging the commissions that send refugees back to the Soviet Union, until she gives up her refugee status, finds work as a farm maid and waits for the storm to pass. Then, through the International Red Cross, she traces a long-forgotten uncle, Lavon, who emigrated before the First World War and now farms the Canadian prairie. He brings her over.

Her gratitude soon meets a wall. Lavon’s wife Lida, who lost her only son in Normandy and takes her views from the Communist press, has decided that every refugee is a fascist collaborator, and Mary’s accounts of life under the Soviets are waved away as propaganda. One day Lida drops a small newspaper on the kitchen table, a paper put out by Moscow’s Return to the Homeland Committee, and from its pages a face from the war stares back at Mary. The article ends with a Toronto street and house number. Alone in her room with the small silver cross she has kept through everything, Mary prays for guidance.

Glossary and notes:
displaced persons (D.P.s): refugees living in the camps of post-war Europe
repatriation commissions: Soviet missions, assisted by the Western Allies, that sent refugees back to the USSR, often against their will
M.V.D. (МВД): the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs
Return to the Homeland Committee: a Soviet body in East Berlin that urged émigrés to return and published papers attacking them
The novel moves here from wartime Belarus to the years after the war, leading back towards the Toronto of its opening chapters. Content note: this chapter mentions wartime deaths and suicides among refugees.

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Miensk (Менск), 22 June, the day the occupiers call Liberation Day. On Twenty-fifth of March Street the Belarusian and German flags fly side by side over a reviewing stand, where the General Commissar von Gotberg watches the parade: German SS and police, then the new Belarusian Home Defence, the BKA, and four hundred young cadets in black uniforms, cheered by a crowd standing among the ruins. Beyond the city, the Soviet tide is already pouring across the Dniapro.

In the crowd stands a village teacher who now goes by the name Vera Shulava. For four months she has taught in the capital and shared a flat beyond Niamiha with her colleague Alena Maroz, a witty, light-hearted young woman who grew up in a state children’s home and seems to take nothing seriously. Alena has taught Mary to smile again. But Haradok and Viciebsk have just fallen to the Soviets, and no one knows what has become of Yustyna, Maxim or the inspector. After the parade Mary wanders alone through the rubble, past the empty opera house, to the poplars of the old Pedagogical Institute where she and Valodzia first spoke of love.

Glossary and notes:
Ostland: the German name for the occupied Baltic lands and Belarus
Operation Barbarossa: the German invasion of the Soviet Union, launched on 22 June 1941
Drang nach Osten: German, “the drive to the East”
BKA (Беларуская краёвая абарона): the Belarusian Home Defence, a Belarusian force raised in 1944 under German authority
SS/Polizei: German SS and police formations
Maxim Bahdanovich: Belarusian poet (1891–1917)

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School Inspector Vasil Trakhimovich has two battles on his hands in Haradok County: an office with no firewood, and a letter from the district commissariat in Viciebsk demanding results in recruiting schoolchildren for trade schools in Germany. He has spent two years rebuilding Belarusian-language schools left in ruins, more than half of them are now burnt or closed, and he has no intention of handing his pupils over as cheap labour.

That afternoon Yustyna brings him in secret to see Mary. Wrapped in a borrowed housecoat by the stove, Mary asks him whether there is any way, in an occupied country, to bring a man to account for what was done to her family. The inspector answers in a roundabout way, with the story of Reverend Stanislaw Hadlewski, the late General Inspector for Schools, and an old proverb about lions and vultures. Then he turns to practical help: papers under a new name, clothing from the Belarusian Mutual Aid, and a teaching post far from Haradok, which he hopes his friend Zarkievich can find.

Glossary and notes:
Samaakhova (Самаахова): Belarusian self-defence units permitted under the German occupation
Belarusian Mutual Aid: the Belarusian welfare organisation under the German occupation
Gestapo: the Nazi secret state police
Lebensraum: German, “living space”, the Nazi plan to colonise lands in the East
Ausweis: German, an identity card or pass
Content note: this chapter mentions a killing in Gestapo custody.

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Two hard weeks in Agatha’s small wooden house on the edge of Haradok. Mary lies ill with a dry, racking cough, and the women dare not call a doctor: medicine is scarce, the hospital is full of soldiers, and one careless word could cost Mary her life. Agatha brews her herbs, and Yustyna, already struggling on a teacher’s pay, borrows money to feed her friend and sits by her bed every evening. Their plan is to take Mary, once she is stronger, to the school inspector Trakhimovich, who may find her work and a new name.

As her strength returns, Mary’s spirit lags behind. She is withdrawn and forgetful, and her thoughts drift from tears into apathy. Watching sparrows squabble in the snow outside her window, she sees again the faces of the people who have done her harm, and Maxim’s angry question comes back to her: why it should be right for a scoundrel to kill the innocent, and wrong for others to defend themselves. With no law in the occupied land to turn to, Mary begins to weigh what justice could mean for someone like her.

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Haradok (Гарадок), a February evening under the German occupation. Hurrying home before the curfew, the teacher Yustyna Murashka meets her twelve-year-old son Maxim running the other way with news he swears is true: Mary Karaway is lying in his mother’s bed. The whole town believes Mary dead, and a requiem has already been sung for her in the church.

At the house of the old landlady Agatha, Yustyna finds her friend gaunt, gray-haired and feverish, brought to the door that morning by a peasant. Between fits of coughing, over a cup of lime-blossom tea, Mary tells everything that has happened to her since the night in Shuly. Yustyna sees at once how dangerous it would be if the wrong people learned that Mary is alive, and she swears Maxim and Agatha to silence. But the freckled, headstrong Maxim, so like his late father, has questions of his own, and he will not be hushed. A chapter of reunion, of the friendship between two teachers who studied together in Miensk, and of a boy grown up too fast in wartime.

Glossary and notes:
lime blossom: linden flowers, brewed as a herbal tea for colds and fever
requiem: a church service for the dead

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In Haradok, after the children have gone home one February afternoon, the teachers of the seven-grade school sit in a smoke-filled staff room while their principal, Todar Shpilka, presses them for results. The German commissar of education, Herr Budke, expects volunteers: pupils to be sent to trade schools in Germany, with free lodging, food and first-class instruction, or so the county inspector, Mr. Trakhimovich, has been assured. The children have been canvassed, and the results disappoint. The Grade Seven teacher, Mikola Runovich, asks why the children are being sounded out behind their parents' backs, and whether the teachers are being made into recruiters for the German labour machine.

Yustyna Murashka listens with one ear and stares at a bullet hole in the windowpane, its cracks radiating like the sun's rays in a child's drawing. A widow whose husband died on the Finnish front, she lives with her twelve-year-old son Maxim in two rented rooms in old Agatha's house, and she cannot imagine giving him up. Walking home through the slush before curfew, she thinks of the people the war has taken from her, among them her dear friend Mary Karaway, whom she believes dead.

Glossary and notes:
seven-grade school: a school teaching pupils up to the seventh grade
commissar: here, the German civilian official in charge of education in the district
Finnish front: the Soviet war against Finland in 1939–40
Ausweis: German for an identity pass
Schutzpolizei: the auxiliary police the Germans raised in occupied Belarus, under German command

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The lottery at the feast has done its work. Half-conscious from drink and exhaustion, Mary endures what the men do to her while the tune of the Yablachka plays behind the curtain. Then Kola, the youngest partisan, who drew the last ticket and with it the order to take her to the pit at the edge of the forest and shoot her, sits down on the edge of her bed.

Kola is a collective farmer's son who once studied agriculture at the Hory-Horki Academy. He still believes in the Kremlin's promise of a better future, but he has no stomach for needless killing, and he suspects the whole evening was Lara's idea. Rocking the bed to fool the drunken men beyond the partition, he and Mary talk in whispers, and his kindness feels to her like a gift from God. But Kola must have a witness, and Sciapan, the one who holds his liquor best, offers to come along.

Snow is falling as Mary walks ahead of them across the moonlit clearing toward the wall of the forest. With every step she remembers a winter long ago, when her mother took her to cut a Christmas tree.

Glossary and notes:
Yablachka: "Little Apple", a popular Russian song tune
Hory-Horki Academy: the agricultural academy at Horki in eastern Belarus
samahonka (самагонка): home-made, home-distilled vodka
Content note: this chapter describes rape, and a woman being led out to be shot.

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Sciapan, Lara's tall, taciturn adjutant, pulls the covers off Mary's cot and hands her a bundle: a fine blue dress and a sweater. She is to make herself pretty, he says, for a celebration of last night's victory, where she will have the honour of meeting the commander. Weak, starving and frightened, Mary follows him through deep snow to another abandoned forest warden's house.

Inside, a lamp blazes over a table loaded with roast pork, sauerkraut, black rye bread and a huge jug of double-distilled samahonka (самагонка). Around it sit Lara and the men from the night raid, Kola, Misha, Patapich and Grisha, and at the head of the table the unit commander, Alaksiey Piatrovich Karpatin, bald and grizzle-bearded with piercing dark eyes. Karpatin plays the genial host, all fatherly courtesy and false sweetness, and insists that his honoured guest must drink to everyone's health before she may eat. Mary pleads that she does not drink. The partisans put it to a vote. The commander has his own methods of persuasion, and the evening that follows is a game whose rules Lara has known all along.

Glossary and notes:
samahonka (самагонка): home-made, home-distilled vodka
Alaksiey Piatrovich: Karpatin's first name and patronymic
Larisa Siamionawna: Lara's first name and patronymic
Fritz: soldiers' slang for the Germans
Content note: this chapter describes a woman forced to drink at gunpoint, and the planning of sexual violence and a killing.

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Back in the partisan camp, Mary's sleep is all nightmares. Her daughter Alenka is torn from her arms again; Lara's face mocks and threatens her; her own dead children merge with Yanka's little boys, whose killing she witnessed only hours before.

When she wakes, Mary goes over that night and realises she has seen something rare. The youth leader's defiance before his killers brings to mind Kastus Kalinowski (Кастусь Каліноўскі), the great Belarusian rebel who faced a Muscovite gallows at twenty-six and called on his countrymen to fight for their freedom. Mary, who loves history, has often wondered how martyrs really behave at the end, and she decides Yanka was one of the few true ones. Her faith in her own people grows stronger, though doubts about his choices still nag at her.

Then her thoughts turn to God. She remembers her pious mother's warnings, and how as a girl in the Red Pioneers and the Kamsamol, in a country that made a hero of Pawlik Marozow, she gave up prayer altogether. Now, in the half-dark of the dug-out, she tries to pray again in words of her own.

Glossary and notes:
Kastus Kalinowski (Кастусь Каліноўскі): leader of the 1863 uprising against Russian rule, hanged by the Russian authorities
Pawlik Marozow (Павлік Марозаў): a Soviet boy held up as a hero for denouncing his own father
Red Pioneers: the Soviet organisation for schoolchildren
Kamsamol (камсамол): the Communist Youth League, the Soviet party's organisation for young people
Content note: this chapter recalls the killing of a family, including children, in nightmares and memories.

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Still stunned by what Lara has told her, Mary sits on the straw of the rear sleigh, three armed men beside her, as Lara's squad gallops out of the forest into the February night. They pass Kalinawka, where only brick stoves and chimneys still stand above the snow; the Germans, Sciapan says, burned the village and everyone in it after Christmas.

The target is a homestead on a hillside above a village. It belongs to Yanka, the county leader of the Belarusian Youth Association, an organisation that has nothing to do with politics; to the partisans he is a fascist and a Gestapo agent. Lara's tall, silent adjutant Sciapan deals with the farm dog. Misha, Patapich, Kola and Grisha guard the doors and windows, and the squad knocks, claiming to be police from Haradok. Inside are Yanka's wife Sonia, his old father and two small boys, about five and three. Yanka, a man of about forty, faces Lara and her men with his head high and tells them exactly what he thinks of Moscow's hirelings and of Russian and German predators alike. Standing by the door, Mary cannot keep silent either.

Glossary and notes:
Belarusian Youth Association: the Belarusian youth organisation of the occupation years
Gestapo: the Nazi secret state police
Larisa Siamionawna: Lara's first name and patronymic, a formal form of address
Content note: this chapter describes a beating and the killing of a family, including young children.

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