I’ve written before about the pleasure of making friends with those with whom you work-and, on our counterparts’ side, those people whom you might otherwise not even meet.
Just one such group are the three Lyudmilas-the conveniently named lab staff of the Minsk Central Water laboratory. I had arranged to meet them for supper on the middle night of my stay in Minsk. As it happens the formidable boss Lyudmila couldn’t make it, but that left me with Lyudmila S and Lyudmila N, both real experts at their job and both having visited us at Ombersley as part of professional visits to the UK. Lyudmila S is completely self-taught in English, yet now I notice that she is very confident and almost perfect when she speaks, in her heavy Russian accent, just like James Bond’s Russian girlfriends do.
We met on what, I was told, was the first warm evening of the year, when we could sit outside and eat. We talked that mixture of the professional and the personal that old colleagues tend to – how much more equipment had they got, how many new grandchildren had I got (one more, as it happens) and, of all things, we talked about the credit crunch; it is affecting Belarus as greatly as at home, even though their economy is much more controlled than ours. The answer, of course, is that they make things which they export to us-and we’re not buying.
But after the customary shashlik and salad supper it was time to go. I wasn’t ready to finish the evening so on the way back I called in once more at one of the most poignant memorials I have seen. Most Belarussian memorials are very large and stuck on the top of mounds, but not this one. Now almost hidden at a road junction and surrounded by young trees and, more bizarrely, by modern apartment blocks, there is a small depression in the ground, abou
t 50 metres in diameter. It was here, on 2nd March 1942 that thousands of Minsk’s Jews were marched and shot. The same thing happened on that day all over Belarus, as you will know if you saw Natasha Kaplinski’s Who do you think you are.
On the steps down to the bottom there is a heart-rending bronze sculpture depicting adults and children walking down to their deaths, accompanied by a fiddler at the rear. At the far end is a small memorial and an inscription in Russian and Hewbrew. So, a few minutes of contemplation gave a sobering end to a very pleasant evening, remembering that not that long ago such terrible things were happening all over Europe.
Just one such group are the three Lyudmilas-the conveniently named lab staff of the Minsk Central Water laboratory. I had arranged to meet them for supper on the middle night of my stay in Minsk. As it happens the formidable boss Lyudmila couldn’t make it, but that left me with Lyudmila S and Lyudmila N, both real experts at their job and both having visited us at Ombersley as part of professional visits to the UK. Lyudmila S is completely self-taught in English, yet now I notice that she is very confident and almost perfect when she speaks, in her heavy Russian accent, just like James Bond’s Russian girlfriends do.
We met on what, I was told, was the first warm evening of the year, when we could sit outside and eat. We talked that mixture of the professional and the personal that old colleagues tend to – how much more equipment had they got, how many new grandchildren had I got (one more, as it happens) and, of all things, we talked about the credit crunch; it is affecting Belarus as greatly as at home, even though their economy is much more controlled than ours. The answer, of course, is that they make things which they export to us-and we’re not buying.
But after the customary shashlik and salad supper it was time to go. I wasn’t ready to finish the evening so on the way back I called in once more at one of the most poignant memorials I have seen. Most Belarussian memorials are very large and stuck on the top of mounds, but not this one. Now almost hidden at a road junction and surrounded by young trees and, more bizarrely, by modern apartment blocks, there is a small depression in the ground, abou
t 50 metres in diameter. It was here, on 2nd March 1942 that thousands of Minsk’s Jews were marched and shot. The same thing happened on that day all over Belarus, as you will know if you saw Natasha Kaplinski’s Who do you think you are.On the steps down to the bottom there is a heart-rending bronze sculpture depicting adults and children walking down to their deaths, accompanied by a fiddler at the rear. At the far end is a small memorial and an inscription in Russian and Hewbrew. So, a few minutes of contemplation gave a sobering end to a very pleasant evening, remembering that not that long ago such terrible things were happening all over Europe.
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