Slonim, Belarus

FROM LITHUANIA TO BELARUS: A JOURNEY TO THE PAST

By Benny Kaplinski

It is difficult to describe one’s feelings when standing on top of the burial pit containing the remains of one’s own grandparents and thousands of other innocent Jewish men, women, and children so ruthlessly murdered during the Holocaust.

This was the scene which confronted me recently while on a ten day trip to Lithuania and Belarus for the filming of a BBC television documentary on the family history of my cousin, Natasha Kaplinsky, who is a prominent BBC television news presenter in London.

My visit started in Vilnius which was the birthplace of my late mother, Sima, and her parents who were both talented and well known musicians, my grandmother, Feign Krewer, a professor of piano at the Vilna Jewish Academy, my grandfather, Salomon Rothenstern, a notable violinist in the local symphony orchestra.

Walking through the streets where they lived and worked was almost a surreal experience. I could almost hear feint strains of Chopin coming from the apartment block in which they once lived, such a closely knit, happy, talented family.

There is so little left in Vilnius of what was once such a rich and flourishing Jewish culture in the tradition of the great Rabbi Vilna Gaon, of whom some would say was the greatest Jewish thinker of all time. Gone are the great yeshivot, the myriad of Jewish theatres, schools and synagogues (only on survives) and the strong Jewish intelligentsia of writers, poets, actors, painters and musicians. It is little wonder that Vilna in its heyday before the Holocaust was referred to as the “Jerusalem of Lithuania.” It is heartbreaking when one sees faded signs in Yiddish of what was once a confectionery shop here or a tailor there, which today’s visitor would easily miss were it not for the trained eye of one’s guide.

Not far from Stepano Street where my grandparents lived, are the entrance and buildings of the Vilna Ghetto which today look bizarrely quaint, not unlike some of the houses and buildings of Paddington or The Rocks. Who could believe today, passing through these neat looking buildings, that this was once the scene where less than seventy years ago these same buildings were part of prison neighbourhoods housing their emaciated, systematically decimated residents? Signs in Yiddish atop some of the buildings remind one of the numbers of Jewish men, women, and children who were once incarcerated here under horrific conditions of starvation and terrible suffering before being callously exterminated.

A lonely fifteen minute train journey from the central train station of Vilnius takes one to the entrance of the Paneria Forests, the grim scene to where some 70,000 or more men, women, and children, including my beloved grandparents, were forced to make their final journey. I could not help thinking while on that train of those who made the same journey in 1942.

What thoughts would have been running through the heads of these unfortunate victims, many so very young, before being forced to undress and stand in front of deep, circular pits, then mercilessly cut down by machine gun fire? Many of the children were simply bashed to death here in order to save on bullets.

As I stood on top of one of these pits, I could not help thinking of the grandparents I had never met and the envy I felt as a child for all my friends who seemed to be so spoilt by their Bobbes and Zeides while I never had any to boast of. Indeed, my late mother was not even able to salvage a single photo of her father, so I was even robbed of the opportunity to see what he looked like and whether I resemble him in any way. Life can be so terribly cruel and unfair.

What was so baffling to understand about this scene was the seemingly peaceful atmosphere with its chirping birds and serene beauty of the trees with its fresh scents, so hauntingly deceptive when one thinks of the horror that happened in such a tranquil setting.

The next leg of my journey took me to Minsk, Belarus, and the long awaited meeting with my cousin, Natasha, whose grandfather and my father were brothers. I had last seen Natasha as a child in Cape Town some three decades ago. Together, we were about to embark on a traumatic journey of self- discovery through the shtetls of Belarus where our ancestors lived, most of whom were so ruthlessly murdered. We would discover previously unknown aspects of our past which were kept secret by our families in order to protect us from the terrible trauma of the graphic details we uncovered, which moved us both to tears and, which in some instances, left us with more questions than answers.

Starting in Slonim, the village where our paternal ancestors lived, we followed in the footsteps of my grandparents who owned a prosperous rope and fishing net factory in the town which was situated in a warehouse above which was the apartment in which they lived together with their eight children including my father Izak.

My father, being the youngest in the family, was chosen to study medicine at the Sorbonne University in Paris in the late 1920`s returning to Slonim in 1936. Of the entire family, he was the only Holocaust survivor, four of his siblings wisely choosing to immigrate to South Africa (including Natasha’s grandfather) and South America before the war. His parents and other three siblings, we discovered from local researchers for the BBC programme, suffered the most horrific of fates. In a series of three pogroms carried out by the Nazis together with local collaborators, hordes of attackers stormed into Jewish homes, dragging residents from their rooms into the streets below where they were variously bashed, clubbed, shot or stabbed to death. Those who attempted to escape this initial onslaught by running down to the nearby river, were mercilessly pursued, cornered as if part of some perverse sport, before being murdered and thrown into the river until the water ran red with their blood. My grandparents and two of their children were, according to our researchers, forced into one of the wooden synagogues which was barricaded from the outside and then set alight. My father at this stage had been working as a doctor near the town of Baranowich, some 60 kilometres away miraculously escaping this most terrible of fates.

We discovered in the local archive that my Uncle Abraham, after whom I was named, an optician also working in Baranowich, had been taken to the nearby ghetto together with his wife and two infant children from whom he was later separated. Upon hearing that his wife and children were later transported to Auschwitz, he then committed suicide at the age of 36.

A family photograph discovered in the local archive, which we had never before seen, showing him, his wife and elder child in happier days, brought us all to tears.

While in Slonim, we visited its last remaining synagogue, once a great and beautifully ornate building with now very faded exquisite Chagall like painted murals very Kabalistic in nature, now virtually derelict strewn with garbage and anti- Semitic graffiti on its outside walls. We had to wear hard hats to gain entry to the very fragile bimah area in the centre situated between four magnificent Corinthian looking columns. What a spectacle this must have once been when the Slonim community was at its peak. As I stood in this area and intoned the Hazkara and Kaddish, I realized that this was the first time since the Holocaust that there has been a cantorial rendition here.

The next day was to be the most harrowing as we journeyed to the town of Iwje. In this seemingly quiet and sleepy village with its old thatched roof houses and a rather Gothic looking church, we made our way to the town square, a very long but narrow grassed area nestling beneath rows of beautiful trees. It is so hard to imagine that this was the scene some 64 years ago where the 3,000 Jews of the Iwje Ghetto, men, women and children, were forced to assemble in their best clothes but with no bags. Told that they were to be “resettled”, the women came wearing layers of their best dresses, the men in hats, suits and ties, the children in sparkling clean clothes. Included in this group were my beloved parents, Izak and Sima. Surrounded by machine guns, they were first told to hand over any jewellery or other valuables. Some were shot on the spot. The others were told to start walking in groups to the first street intersection a short distance away.

We followed the road to the first fork where many of the women, children and the elderly were told to turn right, the rest to turn left. My parents by an oversight were initially told to take the right turn which led to an entrance into the forest area about half a kilometer up the road. At virtually the last moment following frantic screaming by my mother, for which she was mercilessly whipped, that my father was a doctor, doctors being spared by the Nazis to treat their own soldiers, that the commanding officers realized their mistake confirmed by the Nazi collaborator mayor of the town who recognized my father as having worked in nearby Baranowich as a doctor. Told to turn back and to take the left fork in the road instead of the right, they were spared the horrific fate of undressing, packing their clothes into neat bundles, then being forced to stand in front of two long and very deep parallel pits where they were subsequently shot. Those approaching this area from the road knew of their impending fate hearing the continuous bursts of machine gun fire, then seeing the bloodstained clothes which were later sold to the locals or traded for bottles of vodka.

Our guide related the story of a young boy, no more than 8 or 9 years old, who upon becoming totally hysterical on his way to the pits, jumped onto a Nazi officer biting him on the neck before the boy was able to be restrained, then shot like a mad dog.

The eerie silence of this area now belies what must have been such indescribable chaos and horror those few short decades ago. In front of the pits now stands a solitary memorial with an inscription in Hebrew and Yiddish reading, “Here lie Iwje`s finest Jews amongst whom were rabbis, cantors, small children ... and the world remained silent.”

Many of the painful details of what happened here came from testimony given by my late father who was called as a witness in 1965 to give evidence in Mainz, Germany, at the trial of the two commanding officers responsible for this terrible massacre. This document of evidence, never before seen by me, was uncovered in German archives by BBC researchers. It was impossible to maintain my composure as the details were read out in front of the cameras in the town square where that life and death selection was made.

Yet, in the midst of such pain and anguish, came the final moment in our journey that left us feeling inspired and uplifted as we then tracked the trail in the nearby forests to where my parents managed to escape a certain death in the ghetto when they scaled the walls and eventually joined up with the Bielski Brothers Partisans Resistance Unit, a legendary detachment which hid out in what must have been an oasis in the forests from the destruction of their families in the shtetls of Belarus. With great determination and personal courage in the face of great adversity, these partisans lived in the open for almost three years creating battle and sabotage groups and surviving precariously with danger at all times of being caught in addition to braving freezing winters and hunger.

As we entered the small, cleverly camouflaged wooden dug-outs in the forest, which are miraculously still standing intact and which was home for these people on the run, we could not help being amazed at the ingenuity of the partisans against such hopeless odds. These extremely well organized groups functioned like small villages in the forest with local commanders, and little “ factories” producing essential goods such as soap, clothes, shoes and food cleverly processed from forest berries and mushrooms. There were even hospitals in which doctors like my father were utilized, schools and bath-houses. Workshops produced armour such as handmade mortars used to strike at essential enemy infra structure such as rail lines and bridges.

I was struck by the serenity and beauty of this area and could not help trying to imagine this scene as it once was where each partisan member had lost someone from their families, some indeed losing all their loved ones as was the case of my mother’s family.

This experience in the forests made me realize what heroes my parents and the other partisans really were to live life like this on the edge for so long. My only regret was that my parents hardly told me anything of this in the belief that concealing this information would protect us from the trauma that they lived through. When I think about it now, their story contains the essence of great legends, particularly their experiences in the forest which would have made such wonderful bedtime stories when my brother and I were small children. I almost feel as if I was robbed as a small child of hearing such wonderfully courageous stories about my own father and mother.

Both Natasha and I emerged from this emotional rollercoaster journey as different people from what was a totally life-changing experience. We felt shaken and traumatised by the details we uncovered. Yet, something happened as we stood with our dead in Lithuania and Belarus. The intimate details of death and destruction that we discovered made us want to cry endless tears as well as boil with anger. We returned, however, feeling committed to life in the realization that even though so many members of our family died so needlessly, they were not really completely destroyed as the Nazis would have preferred. The reality is that they survive through us and our children.

For me, the Holocaust with its terrible suffering still remains incomprehensible. In some ways, though, by walking in the path of my ancestors, this journey was able to unlock previously repressed emotions which have been swept aside for so many years. My journey, in many ways, enabled these feelings to rise to the surface allowing me to mourn and come to terms with the deaths of my beloved grandparents together with the uncles, aunts, nephews and nieces whom I never had the privilege of knowing as well as with the untimely deaths of my own parents who both passed away twenty years ago this year within six months of one another.

In some ways, this journey provided me with a certain sense of healing and closure as well as giving me a better understanding of my life as a child growing up in the home of Holocaust survivors in which their experiences were seldom talked about and the consequent reasons for their frequent bouts of paranoid anxiety, panic and depression.

Finally, as a child of survivors, my journey also made me realize that even though I too am understandably emotionally scarred as a result, and in spite of all their suffering and death,

I am so very grateful that my ancestors gave me the greatest gift of all – the gift of life.

SA-SIG Newsletter, Vol. 11, Issue 2, April 2011