Free A Family Madness by Thomas Keneally

to my mother a certain relative safety, that she leaned over to my sister and me. “Not many will be saved from Minsk,” she told us. “When you pray you should consider what it means that you have been saved.”
    My sister Genia, fully adolescent by then, cast her eyes up at the luggage rack. Genia would be the one who resigned from the role of refugee earliest. My father and mother could not, for reasons I shall soon explain, ever cease to be Belorussians in exile. Because of certain guarantees I received the day Onkel Willi died, I traveled very calmly. My mother had no such comfort. She needed guarantees of safety and would never receive any. My father, as you will see, was in his manner a warrior.
    My mother was a native of the “big smoke”—to use an Australian term. Her family came from Minsk itself. My father was born a little further east, in the provincial city of Rogachev. Both families were clans of lawyers, always political. They lived in a Belorussia which had for centuries suffered partitioning. In modern times we have known only six weeks of independence. During the centuries of servile longing we were a “divine melon” (my father’s phrase) divided always between Poland and Russia. Citizens of Minsk used to joke that their city had changed hands one hundred and fifty times in recorded history. The Poles and the Russians may have considered themselves very different, but were like brothers in their intolerance of Belorussian language and culture.
    When my father was sixteen years old and was being taught by Polish Jesuits in Minsk, the delightful news of the fall of the Tsar, ever the enemy of Belorussian independence, reached the city. The German Army, who were then occupying Minsk, allowed my grandfather and various other Belorussian patriots to assemble and to found a Belorussian Republic. In its government my grandfather was Minister for Forests. Perhaps he thought he would for a long and tranquil decade govern Belorussia’s primeval thickets of spruce and hornbeam, oak and birch and alder and elm. Perhaps he thought that for many seasons he would have the regulation of the deer and the wolves, the lynx, the Belorussian bear and the herds of Zubr . Belorussians always thought like that, always believed that in the end the world would allow them to breathe. The Australians are more realistic, I notice. They believe that Asia—the Chinese, the Indonesians, the Japanese—will swamp them. Some welcome the idea, most fear it, but all expect it. The Australians are a young race who think like an old one. Whereas the Belorussians, whose country has rarely been more than a concept, a happy phantasm, have always thought with the dewiness of youth.
    My grandfather had no time to assert a forest policy before the Bolshevik Army came down the road from Smolensk. And the Germans, who had played a small game of holding off the Soviets by allowing my grandfather and his friends to form a government, now decided to play a bigger game, German staff officers arranging with the Red generals that as the German Army withdrew from the east, the Soviet armies should flood in and fill the gaps. They hoped that if they let the Reds in, the Reds would keep the Poles busy in the east—such was the ploy. It suited the Bolsheviks’ fantasy, which had to do with marching all the way to Germany to link up with rebellious German workers and soldiers. It suited the Germans, who knew the Soviets wouldn’t make it to Berlin, that the Red armies were too primitive to do more than waste themselves trying to beat a path across Poland.
    The Germans and the Russians having made peace, only some White Tsarist cavalry units were, by minor skirmish, holding up the Red advance. And as the Reds brushed these White troops aside, my grandparents on both sides fled west by train with their children. There could be no rest until, on lines clogged with the retreating Polish Army, they reached