Free A Family Madness by Thomas Keneally Page A

Warsaw. Even there Polish newspapers carried the terrifying dictum of the Soviet General Tukhachevski: “The way to Germany lies over Poland’s corpse.”
    But Warsaw was as far as he got. The Poles at last burst out along the Vistula south and west of Warsaw and then advanced until they were within a short ride of Minsk itself, the city that lies at the heart of Belorussian dreams. Then the Allies stepped in. In those days it was the British who used to play at being Henry Kissinger. Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary, negotiated a line that ran fair down the middle of Belorussia and gave the territory to the west to the Poles and what lay to the east to Russia. The fashion of the day was self-determination, but as had ever been the case, no one was interested in self-determination for the Belorussians.
    My mother and her parents lived in no great style in that Warsaw suburb named Praga, across the Vistula by the Warsaw zoo. My father’s family, however, the family of a Minister for Forests in exile, occupied a somewhat better apartment in the heart of the city, close to the Warsaw Central railway station. Both my grandfathers devoted their exile to Belorussian affairs.
    They applied themselves in particular to the besetting problem of Belorussian real estate. Polish landlords had flooded back into Western Belorussia now, claiming ancestral property, being granted it (without the need to pay compensation) just because their grandparents or great-grandparents had once held and exploited that land. (My maternal grandparents, for example, had held large timber and dairy holdings around the oblast of Minsk, and had lost part of them to the Soviets and part of them to a noble Polish family with a long memory. Hence the poor apartment by the zoo, with only the dream of a Belorussian homecoming to add opulence to life.)
    The Poles liked the Belorussians as much as they liked the Jews, and accepted only a minute quota of them into the universities. My father’s education by the Polish Jesuits had been adequate to earn him a rare place in the law faculty at Warsaw. “To be a Hottentot at Oxford,” he would tell me, “was like being a Belorussian at Warsaw, with the chance of imprisonment and physical damage thrown in.”
    After his graduation he provided what would now be called legal aid for Belorussians, traveling as far as Baranovichi and Staroviche to represent his people in property cases, in municipal wrangles over the building of a new church or development, or approval for a shed in which to run Belorussian classes. He wrote widely in the barely tolerated Belorussian newspaper published in Warsaw. It ran under a succession of names, for no sooner had one name been approved than the Polish police would prohibit it. So it was called variously Nation, Independence, People, Freedom, Voice, Belarus, Unity, Survival . At last the Polish police let them publish for some years under the harmless figurative name Dawn . But there was always censorship, and sometimes stories would be blanked out, so that Belorussian readers called it, from its censored patchwork appearance, The Quilt .
    These Belorussian exiles in Warsaw had to suffer the surveillance not only of Pilsudski’s security police but of Soviet agents as well, operatives of Lenin’s Cheka and then of OGPU, both of them the forerunners of the renowned KGB. Cheka agents would follow my mother and grandmother to and from the markets in Freta Street. The Cheka would have been delighted to see them steal something, some special fruit of the kind they had been used to affording in Minsk, or a necklace or a scarf. There would have been an immediate denunciation to the Polish police, who would have brought their ample prejudices to the case. It was worse when in 1925 my father began courting my mother. OGPU agents tracked them as relentlessly as chaperons. Any violation of the bylaws governing the behavior of lovers in Lazienki Park