Do you remember Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Tinderbox”? A soldier, walking home from the wars and swinging a fine sword, comes upon a witch loitering by the lane who offers him a magic metal box that she has hidden inside the trunk of a hollowed-out tree? The soldier accepts this strange gift, and when he opens it, the tinderbox unleashes three magical dogs — one with eyes the size of teacups, the next with eyes the size of supper plates, the last with eyes big as windmills — that do his terrible and mystical bidding and, in the end, save him from an anonymous death.
When I was a kid, this story of the fairy-tale tinderbox was mingled and confused in my mind with a metal box that was kept hidden inside our family storeroom — up the stairs and down a long hallway, on a high shelf in an airless chamber crammed with old wedding clothes, Kodachrome slides, souvenirs of whaling and war — that had been brought home from Moscow by my grandfather Arnold in the 1920s. The box was rusted, about the size of a breadmaker, and contained terrible things.
I had been aware of this metal box’s presence in our storeroom since I was 7 or 8 years old. It sat there in the mothball-smelling dark for decades, emitting a sinister vibration. My brothers and I were forbidden to open it, but naturally we did snoop. The storeroom’s dry air had over the years curled the prints into tight tubes, like stale cigarillos, and we had difficulty prying them open to steal a peek. We only managed a few glimpses before stuffing the photographs back into the box, hearts thumping, afraid of being caught. The most indelible image, which still flashes before my mind’s eye as I type this, was of three stone-faced women with shawls on their heads and bloodied human limbs — legs and arms — on their laps and piled at their feet.
The photographs were taken by members of the American Relief Administration during a great famine in the early Soviet Union, in Ukraine and in the regions of the Volga and the Ural Rivers. Millions of people died of hunger and disease in 1921 and 1922. They blamed it on the chaos of war — the world war, the Russian civil war — as well as government requisitioning of grain and the logistical inadequacies of the Russian railway system. You may have heard of another famine in Ukraine, a more famous famine called the Holodomor, or, sometimes, “Stalin’s famine,” but that one was a decade later. The famine of 1921–22 is mostly forgotten, although “The American Experience” produced a PBS documentary about it in 2011 that will air again on PBS’s World Channel on Saturday night at 8.
The box had been in the storeroom for some 80 years when, in October of 2014 — a week in autumn when the pumpkins were piled in pyramids outside the supermarkets and my son, Teddy, was turning 5 — I decided to fly home from my marital abode in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to open it and restore the photographs, to see just exactly what my grandfather had brought back from Russia and kept, concealed, with such care.
Arnold Rattray had been one of “Hoover’s boys,” among the 300 Americans under the leadership of future president Herbert Hoover who were allowed into the Soviet Union at the invitation of the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov. Like many of the young men who went on this relief “expedition,” he was a veteran of the First World War, a first sergeant in the medical corps who had stayed in Paris after the Armistice to work for the Graves Registration Service, moving American soldiers’ remains from the battlefields to war cemeteries at St. Mihiel and Aisne-Marne. In Russia, still only 25 years old, he was the assistant to the head of the A.R.A. medical department and, according to family lore, was sent out as a scout to survey the progress and assess the needs of the A.R.A. clinics in cities from Samara to Odessa.
The A.R.A. was granted extraordinary power and freedom: It could commandeer railroads and ships; it employed some 120,000 Russians, and in 1922 fed nearly 11 million people a day on grits, white bread, cocoa, and condensed milk.
I found instructions online for the restoration and re-humidification of the 66 yellowed and brittle photos in my grandfather’s tinderbox. I had been camping out in our guest room on Edwards Lane during this visit home in 2014, and that was where I put together my makeshift laboratory, placing two large, lidded Rubbermaid bins on top of my late Aunt Mary’s China-red vanity table and an old hope chest. Late one evening, feeling rather jittery, I poured a few inches of distilled water inside the bins, placed coated-wire baking racks inside, and set the photos on them one by one. Then I snapped off the lamp, leaving the famine victims alone in the dark again, and — deciding I might have nightmares if I stayed in the room — went to sleep in my childhood bedroom at the other end of the hallway.
In retrospect, I don’t know why I didn’t anticipate how disturbed and indeed frightened I would be by the famine photographs. It took three nights to unfurl all 66. A hundred years had passed since they were taken, but as they uncurled they emitted darkroom smells. They did — the sour-sulfurous darkroom gases so familiar to me from having grown up in a newspapering family. They bloomed inside the bin, les fleurs du mal, night blooms, and when I lifted the lids off each morning I was confronted with fresh horrors. One photograph showed a naked, skeletal girl standing in front of two nurses, who supported her. Another, a group of children eating on a train, one small boy holding something to his mouth and directing his piercing gaze directly into the camera. The dead packed like bundles of firewood inside a metal container that looked like a garbage box.
Half of the photographs in my grandfather’s case were from Ukraine; eight or nine were from the city of Mariupol. A wraith, barefoot, hair matted, his body barely covered by rags and a wild look in his pale eyes (the penciled caption, “A child, crazed by hunger, at the hospital at Mariupol”). Exactly a century ago. Three members of the American Relief Administration standing close shoulder to shoulder at several yards’ remove from a head-high heap of corpses in a graveyard in Mariupol. May 1922. A warm-weather party of merry uniformed men in a garden, mouths open in song. The caption on the verso said, “Drunken Bolshevist officials at Mariupol. They are singing ‘Stenka Razin,’ a very Red hymn.”
My hands shook when I handled them. I took the photographs out of the bins as gently as I could, laid them on blotting paper, and covered them with pH-balanced velum, like pulling a sheet over the departed. Then, to press them flat as you do flowers, I delicately placed a hardcover book over each one, pulling off the bookshelf whatever came to hand: “The Battle of Okinawa” and “Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing.”
Maxim Gorky, writing on behalf of the Soviet government, paid tribute to the A.R.A. in 1922: “Your help will enter history as a unique, gigantic achievement, worthy of the greatest glory, which will long remain in the memory of millions of Russians whom you have saved from death.”
Well, that didn’t happen. History has forgotten.
My brain has been tripping on the wire of Mariupol — Mariupol, Mariupol, and why Mariupol? Why the children of Mariupol? — for weeks now. Usually I end this column with an artful insight or clever twist, but there is none.