A day in the death camp

Joe Lowry spends a harrowing last day in Belarus, at the site of the Maly Trostinets extermination camp

Partizansky Prospect, Minsk 2004.

“Over there is a wonderful bread factory”, said the octogenarian chairlady of the city Red Cross branch. “And there’s the tractor factory” (its ornate entrance recalling more a Mogul palace). “That was the tank factory, and there’s where they made rifles.”

Will she ever say anything bad about her city, I wonder.

“And over there, in those trees, was an extermination camp where a quarter of a million people died”. The words hit me like a stone.

Partizansky Prospect, Minsk 2010

Six years pass. Six years connected to Minsk through my wife and her family, who, like every family in Belarus shrank by 25 per cent during the war, the great patriotic war, which was neither great nor patriotic for many. The same partisans for whom the long, dull prospekt was named, hated by many, worse than the Nazis for their brutality, their oppression of peasant families.

But I read (present tense) more about the war. I read a massive tome on Stalin and another on the Nazis and on Hitler. The war, I begin to realise, may have spared Ireland’s soil but it splashed Belarus’ in blood. Every inch of the fertile land bubbled and oozed with rotting entrails, brain material, and bright red blood of soldiers and civilians. It soaked into the land, forever permeating it, befouling it, cursing it with a greater poison than even the millions of tons of radioactive waste dusted onto it in 1986 when nearby Chernobyl spilt its guts on the jinxed land.

And I move to Minsk. I know all about Babyan Yar in Kiev, where I have spent many years, how the Nazis threw sweets to the children they had machine-gunned, how the voices under the bulldozed dirt cried “Mummy, the sand is in my eyes”. I saw and gasped – really, my breath left my body in a whoosh - at the doll monument, whose limbs, akimbo, are welded on at unnatural angles. A broken doll, tricking the eyes.

The Holocaust is alive and well in Kiev. Well chronicled. Unforgettable. With a Jewish lobby noisily keeping the memory, even with the Holodymyr, the great Stalin-created famine of the 30s arguably claiming more lives.

But in Minsk, poor Minsk, where not a wall seems to have survived the neither great nor patriotic war, only clues remain. An internet site shows some horrors, and reveals that the pretty, re-antiquated main square in the old town was once Adolf Hitler square. That the Nazis brained Jewish babies against street corners in the Minsk ghetto (right).

But no memory seems to remain of that abysmal place, buried now under hotels, tower blocks, malls. (No Polanski films, no anniversaries a la Warsaw). Where people were allocated two square metres each, not including children. Which was cleared in a massive mass murder.

And I realise, that the smiling faces, or the strife-worn faces, the pretty faces and ugly ones I see every day on the Metro, at work, in the local shop, are the same – two generations on - as the ones that had the foulest, scariest, most repugnant jobs of all. When the Nazis left Minsk, civilians and prisoners, were used to find and burn up to 100,000 bodies.

Maly Trostinets. As fell and as foul Belsen, as grim as Auschwitz, this was the last generation of concentration camps. A death camp. While some sites pronounced “Arbeit Macht Frei”, there was no need for such an illusion in Maly Trostinets. A train went into the forest, disgorged its human cargo (many of whom were already dead) and the work of extermination began. (The condemned were transported from the “General Governorate” directly, or via a spell in the squalid Minsk Ghetto).

From holocaustactionreseachproject.org: “The killing process was conducted as follows: most of the victims were lined up in front of pits, 50 meters long and 3 metres deep and shot to death. After the executions the pits containing the victims were levelled by tractors. The operation was conducted by a unit of thirty to one hundred SS men commanded by an officer named Rider.

“Beginning on the 10 May 1942 and continuing every Tuesday and Friday Jews were brought to Minsk from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Austria, Germany and driven by truck towards Maly Trostinets. Some of the trucks were gas vans, and after they had been gassed a sonderkommando took them out of the gas vans and threw them into deep pits.

“One such transport destined for Maly Trostinets was from Theresienstadt in Bohemia Moravia. On the 4 August 1942 a train with a thousand Jews left the Theresienstadt camp. Six days later it reached Maly Trostinets where it stopped in open country.

“Forty “experts” were removed from the train at Minsk. The remaining 960 deportees were ordered out of the train and into vans for the next stage of their journey, and were driven off towards the Blagovschchina forest. The vans were gas vans, once they reached the forest the doors were unlocked and the bodies of the gassed deportees were thrown into open graves.

“Of a thousand Jews sent from Theresienstadt to Maly Trostinets in a further deportation on the 25 August 1942 only twenty-two of the younger men were taken to work at an SS farm. The rest entered the gas vans and were murdered.” (photo above called "Tormenting Jews in Minsk" from the Holocaust research project archive).

My time in Minsk passes, and I vow, before I leave, to see Maly Trostinets, or what is left of it. We set out on an early autumn day, the leaves still green at the edge of the city. Jouncing over the unkept asphalt we get lost several times before stopping at the end of the road. In eyesight are the 70s apartments that ring every former Soviet city, almost overlooking these anonymous scruffy few fields, lanes, hedges.

And then I see it. A simple concrete structure, that from a distance looks almost plastic. “Dedicated to the Soviet citizens that perished here”. There are flowers, someone still cares. (I am glad to have had my phone to take a picture; there is nothing on Google.)

It’s one of those moments. The sun is warm, a light breeze stirs some dust, a rangy dog mooches around. There’s plastic bottles scattered hither and yon, and the poplars sway gently. The sort of day when I first saw the World War One graveyards as a teenager, the sort of day “The Green Fields of France” was written for:

“But young Willie MacBride it all happened again, and again and again and again and again.”

No drums beat, no fife plays. The silent soundtrack in my head a poignant reminder that genocide, or ethnic slaughter surrounds us all, marking the worst our species is capable of. Defining us. From Ireland to Armenia, from Ukraine to Belarus, Poland to Rwanda, to the countless flashpoints – Kashmir, Casamance, Palestine, Darfur, the Niger Delta, Kyrgyzstan.

And the horrible, sickening thought – if the gun was in my hand and it was them or my family…

I mutter a prayer. No tears come. This place is not for the living.

/JL

Through the Eye of a Needle

My mate, a career bureacrat goes apoplectic. He slams his gin and tonic down on the marble tabletop. “WHAT! You mean the Red Cross gives these… these… junkies free needles so they can fill themselves full of heroin? Well that’s it. You’ve just lost my respect”.

It’s true. The Red Cross gives injecting drug users free needles so that they can continue their habit.

Safely.

I spent much of yesterday in small town called Slutsk in mid-Belarus to see just why.

Let’s be clear. Drugs are – according to the book and film Trainspottting – great fun but they destroy lives. Nikolay and Irina are two cases in point. All their money goes on “Semechki” as the home-made poppy-seed paste is called. Their families have long since kicked them out. They work, they live, just to use. Their sober hours are spent wishing they’d never started, till the rats start scratching in their brains and no other thought but “shot” is entertained. Then the release, the bliss, the love. Till it wears off and the hate-it-need-it-love-it” cycle starts again.

But amazingly, Nikolay and Irina have purpose in their lives now. Every day they come to a shabby apartment on the edge of Slutsk (pop 70,000, levelled in the second world war), under the shadow of two massive chimney stacks, and start their work.

Each has 40 clients who inject several times a day. Nikolay and Irina bring the used needles (each with a residue of narcotics in them, which without a special agreement between the Red Cross and the police could carry a jail term), they leave the needles for destruction and go out, back to the alleys and tower blocks where their peers are waiting.

“No one I work with uses a dirty needle now, but we all used to”, says Nikolay, ansting to get out the door and bang up. “We know what AIDS can do and we don’t want to catch it.”

That’s the beauty of harm reduction. It’s more than just needles, it’s swabs, condoms, vitamins, special chocolate bars that strengthen the blood, but essentially it’s about needles. If someone’s going to use no power of persuasion will work. An infected needle injects the virus straight and deep into another person who can pass it on and on and on through sex, drugs and rock and roll. Well, ok, not rock and roll, but sex and drugs for sure.

One truly impressive feature of the program is the volunteer manager. She’s about 64, short, silver-haired and looks just like any of our mums. And that’s the secret. She is someone’s mum. She sees the harm drug injection does to her community and she will do what it takes to limit its spread.

Nikolay and Irina know the streets, know the users, know the risks. They are trusted in a way no police, partner, parent or pastor could ever be. That’s why they go to schools and tell kids what life as a user is like. They don’t say “just say no”, they say “this is how it is, you choose”. Irina gives a wistful sigh and says “if only this programme had existed 20 years ago I wouldn’t be in the mess I'm in now”.

But I’m not naïve enough to think that this will persuade my bureaucratic buddy. So here’s a list, a cold, impassionate list, as to why harm reduction is the only game in town, why it works, why we do it.

The first seven points are my own, from personal observation, and then follow the humanitarian and legal/human rights arguments.

1. “Let them die” is not an option for the Red Cross
2. It works. Everywhere that needle exchange has been tried, it works. Where reducing the supply and locking up users (so-called social evils programmes) are tried, the HIV rate, the crime rate, the usage rate all increase. See chapter 5 in this report.
3. It puts health workers in contact with a naturally secretive community
4. Contact between health workers and users makes usage safer and may result in users seeking to come off drugs
5. It helps users feel useful, wanted, trusted.
6. It keeps needles off the pavement
7. The Red Cross emblem is not only for the battlefield or prison. Everyone can avail of its protection, its neutrality, a non-judgemental, safe haven
8. Currently, it is estimated that there are more than 10 million people globally who inject drugs. Of these, 2-3 million people are estimated to be HIV-positive. HIV can rapidly spread through drug using populations and can stabilize at high prevalence rates. Studies indicate that in the absence of preventive measures the prevalence rate can rise up to 40 per cent or more within 1-2 years of introduction of HIV into a community.

9. Transmission of HIV also occurs through sexual contact both between IDUs (injecting drug users) and with other sexual partners, including through sex work, facilitating the transmission of HIV to their children and into the general community.
10. The right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, is reflected in Article 25(1) of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights; Article 12 of the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; Article 24 of the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child; and Article 12 of the 1981 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women
11. The right to non-discrimination is enshrined in Article 5(e)(iv) of the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. This by definition applies to people who inject drugs, including HIV-positive IDUs.
12. In May 2000, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights adopted a general comment on the right to health which proscribes, any discrimination in access to healthcare
13. In the Declaration of Commitment, unanimously accepted at the 26th UN General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS, 2001, states made specific commitments relevant to IDUs: By 2005, ensure that a wide range of prevention programmes is available in all countries, particularly the most affected countries, including expanded access to essential commodities, including male and female condoms and sterile injecting equipment. By 2003, all States will have eliminated any laws, policies and practices that discriminate against people living with HIV/AIDS and other highly vulnerable groups.
14. The above outlines the legal basis for states to respect, protect and fulfil, all IDUs’ human rights. This includes comprehensive harm reduction programmes

15. In keeping with the fundamental principles and the role of the Red Cross and Red Crescent in protecting and promoting the health of the most vulnerable populations, IDUs as a vulnerable population merit the strong and privileged voice of social conscience. The Red Cross can lobby governments to fulfil IDUs’ rights to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.

Excuse me, I have to buy my friend a large G and T.

/JL

Still living with the fall out

“That explains the hairstyle.” The almost inevitable response when I tell people outside of Belarus, Ukraine or parts of Russia that I’ve been to Chernobyl four times. (I’m bald as the proverbial coot… although I never understood why a coot got picked on. The Russian, bald as a knee is a lot more accurate. But I digress).

Four times I’ve stood next to “it”, the remains of Reactor number 4, which exploded with the force of a hundred Hiroshimas 23 years ago this month. Last week I was rattling the collection box/banging the drum for the Red Cross Chernobyl programmes (yes, there are still many needs) when I found myself saying that Chernobyl is an icon, the explosion (or the first cognizance of it) a generation-defining moment, like the Kennedy assassination for my older pals, or 9-11 for my younger ones.

The fact is, 23 years ago hundreds of tons of radioactive material was spewed into the atmosphere (I tried to write “puked”, and “vomited” but it looks too gross. “wet-farted” would be le mot juste, but let it be spewed).

Radioactive iodine, with its half-life of eight days, did it’s work and then literally faded away. In those eight days, millions of thyroid glands in the affected region – no one knows exactly how big that region is, but we work across half of Belarus, much of west Ukraine, and the bordering region in Russia, covering seven million people – sucked in an invisible time bomb.

Years went by and then the thyroid woke up, and started doing thyroidy things, like announcing puberty. And then the radioactivity ingested (sucked, gobbled, imposed) in the week beginning 26 April 1986 did its thing and started to show up as nodules and cancers.

Now, 19 years after we started screening, using mobile labs that can boldly go where no other endocrinologist goes, we are finding 200 cancers a year (that’s one every day the teams go out to work) and the science suggests we are entering a peak. If one case of cancer a day doesn’t sound like much, consider this: there were NO thyroid cancer specialists in the region before 1986 and thyroid cancer was rare as rocking-horse droppings. It was almost never seen in young people – now it’s cutting a scourge through a cohort aged from 23 to 60.

And that’s one cancer, from one radionuclide. Let’s not even talk about the hundreds of tons of strontium cesium or plutonium which will be with us for the next… oooh… 23,000 years. No, let’s not talk about that, especially if we are “the international community” which aims to “minimize” the effects of the Chernobyl disaster. Don't forget that nuclear power is big big business, and Chernobyl ("couldn't happen today", "safe clean and cheap don't you know") is an inconvenient reminder of what happens when the fuel rods hit the fan.

Now, can someone explain to me how nuclear weapons – clean or dirty - can be developed without nuclear power as we currently know it?

Joe Lowry blogging from Chernobyl for 'Head Down Eyes Open'

The photo above shows a young boy being screened for unusual nodules or thyroid activity. One of the most positive features of the International Red Cross's Chernobyl Humanitarian and Relief Programme is that it reaches places where the local authorities have few facilities. As such, it provides vital moral support. In the picture above the Mobile Diagnostic Laboratory (MDL) has come to the tiny Russian hamlet of village of Medvedovo, some 140 kilometres from Chernobyl but right in the middle of the path taken by the radiation cloud. The previous photo is of Chernobyl's nuclear power plant as it looks today and the first photo at the top of the post is of an abandoned school inside the 'dead zone'.

Human trafficking “set to rise”

This new poster in the middle of the Belarusian capital Minsk encourages people at risk of trafficking to “know before you go” and warns: "Leaving to work abroad? Get information on the employer!"

Government officials and international organizations in Eastern Europe are warning of a dramatic increase in human trafficking as the recession begins to bite.

The number of victims of trafficking in Belarus is showing a steep rise already, according to data gathered by the Red Cross Red Crescent, International Organization for Migration (IOM) and local authorities.

More than 800,000 citizens of Belarus are “missing”, presumed to be working – voluntarily or otherwise - in Russia which has an open border with its smaller neighbour. In Ukraine - a transit, source and destination country for modern-day slavery - fears are growing of a new wave of emigration as industrial output shrinks (by 30 per cent since September). In Moldova, Europe’s poorest country, one quarter of the population has migrated and things can are set to get worse.

Tempted to migrate

A recession brings new business opportunities for the traffickers, explains Lars Linderholm, the newly-appointed facilitator for migration issues in the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’ Europe zone office. Migrants lose their jobs in western Europe and return home where a cold welcome awaits them. Eastern Europe’s nascent middle class, with its mortgages, car loans, and maxed-out credit cards may, for the first time, be tempted to migrate.

An advertisement in a newspaper, a friend’s story of foreign streets paved with gold, or a flyer in a nightclub can quickly trap the unwary into months of misery and degradation on a building site in Moscow, a brothel in the UK or backbreaking agricultural work.

Although IOM’s figures show that 99 per cent of people in this part of the world are aware of the phenomena of human trafficking, only 15 per cent think they are vulnerable – a precious state of affairs for the traffickers.

Work off the debt

Natasha, from Mogilev, Belarus’ second-largest city, has a typical story to tell. This articulate mother-of-four had recently become sole provider for her family, and decided to answer an advertisement to work in a factory packing frozen vegetables just outside Moscow. On arrival she handed over her passport and was informed she had to work off the debt she incurred to get the job.

At the end of a month working 16 hours a day, with three toilet breaks and one meal, sleeping on the factory floor, she went looking for her salary. She got nothing, except threats of sexual violence.

It was the same after the second month, when her health was starting to fail due to the intensity of the work and stressful conditions. “We escaped in a car we flagged down and I went home. The police ignored me, treated me like a whore and then a friend referred me to the Red Cross Red Crescent.”

Trafficked persons

The Belarus Red Cross, working with IOM and the authorities, provides a full rehabilitation service for trafficked persons like Natasha through its five “Hands of Help” centres around the country. When trafficked persons are referred to the centres by the authorities, they are given health checkups as well as psychological support, legal advice, addiction treatment if necessary, accommodation and vocational training to help get them back to work and reintegrated into communities whose first reaction is often to shun them.

The medical statistics speak for themselves: since 2006, 20 active TB cases were diagnosed (in just one centre), along with cases of syphilis, gonorrhea, HIV/AIDS and other sexually-transmitted disease (STD). Almost 90 per cent of trafficked men and women return with some sort of STD.

In Natasha’s case, the local Red Cross centre even got her into chemotherapy for the cancer that she developed shortly after her ordeal. “Who helped me? Only the Red Cross,” she says, tears in her eyes.

Ready to volunteer

Now she’s back on her feet, a waitress in a busy local bar, and ready to volunteer for the Belarus Red Cross to prevent “others being as stupid as me”. She is full of ideas: public lectures, videos in schools, leaflets campaigns, a hotline: all things that local Red Cross chairman Andrei Nikitin would love to expand if he had more funds.

And Natasha has a whole new reason to be concerned. Her eldest daughter, an economics student, recently asked for permission to go to work in Moscow with “a friend”. Natasha told her the story of what mama was really doing in 2005, and the girl stayed home.

Psychologist Natalia Domarenko works at the Mogilev Hands of Help Centre. In January, she saw 17 trafficked persons in January, and she also expects the numbers to rise sharply now. Although 75 per cent of her clients are women, she estimates that an equal number of men and women are trafficked, with the majority of men duped into slave labour on building sites. (In Russia it is not illegal for an employer to retain someone's passport, nor is it illegal to employ private security to seal off building sites, keeping the workers inside).

Share their problems

“Women will talk, will share their problems”, she says. “But men don’t want to. Men have only one doctor: Doctor Vodka.”

Tatiana is another of her clients, an attractive woman in her mid-30s with an impish smile. She’s been home for 14 years, but is still recovering from her year-long ordeal when she was passed from apartment to apartment, man to man in Moscow. Her huge handbag stays clutched over her stomach the whole time we are talking and while her face smiles, the memories dart like demons across her eyes.

Like many 20-year-olds, Tatiana was looking for life, money and fun, and had heard stories from friends about the money to be made selling leather goods in Moscow’s markets. So when a friend of a friend put her in touch with a good job and free transport she didn’t think twice.

In touch with the Red Cross

“But as soon as I got to Moscow, and was put in that apartment I immediately understood the situation.” Eventually she took one of the few chances presented to her, and left. The police were kind, put her in touch with the Red Cross and now – long, lonely road travelled - she’s one of the top ten hairdressers in Mogilev, with an eight-year-old son who is the one and only man in her life.

As for the friend who went to Moscow with her? “I heard she got into drugs. She’s lost.”

Tatiana and Natalia are just two of the 500 trafficked persons helped by one branch of the Red Cross in one city, in one tiny corner of the continent. No one knows how many other men and women are living in torment, unable or ashamed to return, getting deeper and deeper into the mire of drugs, drudgery and depression.

Child trafficking

While there is at least some worldwide data on trafficking of men and women for sexual and labour exploitation (although no doubt seriously under-estimated) there is almost nothing on child trafficking for labour, begging and sexual exploitation.

It’s a question that is disturbing Ana Ravenco, the president of Moldovan anti-trafficking organisation La Strada, which has worked closely with the Red Cross Red Crescent.

“We can’t find children via hotlines or information campaigns. Children don’t call hotlines. Once they are trafficked they are often gone forever.”

La Strada, IOM and the Red Cross Red Crescent all report a trend towards “soft” trafficking, where the “simulation of a safe environment” is used to lead people to believe they have choices and to make irregular trafficking look like regular migration.

Domestic violence

One way to tackle trafficking (particularly in women and children), she believes, is to tackle domestic violence in all its forms – physical, economical and emotional. “I would say 100 per cent of [those affected] are also victims of violence. Once women have economic independence it is easier for them to get away from an abusive environment.”

La Strada is establishing a “trust line” for victims of domestic violence. Meanwhile, the Moldova Red Cross has just begun an information campaign to bring domestic violence out into the open. This is a good initiative in a country where a familiar adage runs “a woman who isn’t beaten is like a house that isn’t cleaned”.

Lars Linderholm is determined to put trafficking back on the agenda. “One of the most serious problems we face is lack of data”, he says. “That’s in terms of the scale of the problem, the actual response, and the potential the Red Cross Red Crescent has to be more involved.”

Lars sees trafficking as a problem for all parts of Europe, both on the demand and supply sides. He will encourage the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement to work closely with the authorities and with specialist organizations to inform, detect and rehabilitate victims of a crime that shames us all.

This article is written by Joe Lowry, IFRC representative for Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine and also appears on ifrc.org