by Israel Kipen
As an aside: Moshe Kleinbaum reached Palestine before the proclamation of the State in 1948. He became leader of the then-underground Haganah and played a major, if controversial, role in the affairs of state throughout its early existence until his death from cancer in 1972. This Moshe Kleinbaum was none other than Moshe Sneh, one of the Communist deputies in the Israeli Knesset, his new name, in Hebrew meaning “small bush”, being an allusion to the Biblical burning bush. Formerly one of the leaders of the liberal General Zionists, he had undergone a radical ideological transformation. Numerous others, carried away by the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, had become communist too, but many of these in time renounced such allegiance in the wake of the post-war excesses of Stalin’s Soviet Russia towards the Jews in particular. Moshe Sneh at no time reneged upon his acquired allegiance. Though my view is but a private hunch beyond substantiation, I suspect that his transformation was quite possibly linked to that fateful encounter with the Russian ambassador in Kovno in 1940. After that, Moshe Kleinbaum – Moshe Sneh – was never the same man again.
While this issue of emigration to Palestine was, along with others, occupying our attention, political events in Lithuania followed their own course. Vilna, which had been returned to Lithuania with such magnanimity, found itself together with the rest of the Lithuanian state swallowed up by Russia. So, as Jews and as refugees, we found ourselves returned to the status quo ante, a condition familiar to us even if novel for Lithuania.
This new political development opened up some possibilities for making money, however risky the exercise. For suddenly people in Kovno wanted to exchange their currency for Russian roubles which those in Vilna were in a position to supply. I began to travel regularly between Vilna and Kovno, delivering supplies back and forth, as did other refugees. The distance was short and one could make the inter-city journey in an hour. At one time I could not really tell where I was living, for I spent my time almost equally in both places. In Kovno, I would stay in hotel rooms, a silly and reckless thing to do, for to obtain a room in a hotel, one had to procure a police permit, which I usually managed to get. But spot checks by secret police on hotel guests was a common, indeed normal, practice. On one occasion I was woken by a door-knock at two in the morning for just such a check. My papers proved to be in order and I escaped with no more than an inquisitive and obviously hostile look from the policeman. It proved lucky for me that he did not look under my pillow. On another trip, I left myself wide open to what could have led to a most desperate situation. I had arrived in Kovno and was so busy attending to my affairs that I forgot to go to the police station to secure the customary permit. By the time I realised it, the permits office was closed and my only recourse was to obtain the permit from the NKVD. But I had a problem. I carried with me a briefcase filled to capacity with Russian roubles which were not yet legal tender nor safe to have in one’s possession. I had nowhere to leave the briefcase, nor did I dare stow it anywhere, so I walked to the NKVD with the briefcase in hand. The action was reckless; it represented a double madness, for, even if I did not have such damning possession upon me, truth was that no sane person ever walked into the NKVD voluntarily. Perhaps my stupidity attested to innocence; the man at the desk issued the permit without much ado. My thoughtlessness was clearly countered by inordinate luck. Even now, I cannot understand why I stayed in hotels in the first place when in Jewish Kovno I could have easily found a private room paid for on a weekly basis which might indeed have proved cheaper than hotel rooms and certainly safer and less exposed. In my defence, I can only plead that I was then 21 and that, despite my worldly experiences to that time, I had not yet acquired commensurate wisdom.
Between business transactions, I spent much time in the modern cafe in Leiseves Alley, the Konrad. It was a large place with decor and service that placed it on a level with other European high-class coffee houses. There were always refugees there who whiled away their empty days over coffee. In their enforced idleness, rumour was rampant. But at a more practical level, the cafe served as an unofficial bourse where the pulse of the market was gauged, current exchange rates discussed and verified and acquired information exchanged. Information was the life-blood of our existence.
With the fall of France in June 1940 and the events at Dunkirk, a new contingency had arisen. People sharpened their mental processes by evaluating the situation and trying to predict the next German move with its implications for us in our indeterminate day-to-day existence. Though the capitulation of Poland and its dismemberment between Russia and Germany in accord with the German-Russian pact was grim, we could console ourselves with the fact that the West was militarily intact and that the combined political and military weight of Great Britain and France would yet restrain Hitler in his purposes. This had served as a moral crutch for those who sought hope of release from their situation, however elusive that hope was. For many years, Europe had been nurtured on the inviolability of the Maginot line. My own intuition told me, however, that the French were no more a counterweight to the disciplined and modernised German army than Poland had been, even if its army was superior to the Polish one; and though I had no hard facts to support my instinct, I came to believe that the day would come when the French too would crumble before the Germans. I was therefore saddened by the forlornness of those who had to give up such hopes. By that time, as against that of September 1939, the political situation in Europe had greatly changed. With the exception of the Iberian Peninsula, all of Europe was under German-Axis occupation. For so long both historically and geographically landlocked, Germany now acquired the eastern Atlantic as a mare nostrum with resources for new industries at Hitler’s disposal. Also, flushed with the extraordinary success of its military might, Germany now turned its attention towards the east. The Ribbentrop-Molotov pact now came to be seen for what it truly was – as a ploy resorted to by both Germany and Russia, the one seeking to render neutral its rear, before embarking on its European adventure, the other, knowing that war was ultimately unavoidable, buying time to prepare its forces and its people for the coming conflict. With the fall of France, the writing was on the wall.
To us as refugees, this presented not so much a new reality as an accelerated urgency to seek new ways of escape. Those who had made their way to Lithuania were refugees who understood that flight from the firing line was their supreme priority. They needed neither prodding nor clarification of what the fall of France might mean for them. Time was suddenly against us, and in the face of this reality, passivity or prevarication on our part would incur a heavy price. But where did one turn from here in a bid to escape? We seemed to be in a hermetically closed capsule with every route for further flight seemingly sealed off. England was living through its darkest hours, while the Vichy government in France was unfavourably disposed to Jewish refugees. Our mood therefore became increasingly morbid as days, and then weeks, went by. People looked for new ideas, new perspectives; there were many clever individuals among them so some creative solution might have been accepted, but none being immediately forthcoming, the refugees continued to think and continued to fret…
In the meantime, I learned that Mother and my brothers and sister had been deported from Bialystok by the Russians. The information came from the son of the Beloch family that had lived in the apartment above our own in Bialystok, and who had now found his way to Vilna. According to him, at about seven one morning, a military truck had driven up to the house and its soldiers came into the apartment announcing that they had orders to take my family away. They permitted Mother a half hour to pack and then herded her and the children into the open truck. As they approached Bobe to wrench her from the house, she fainted. They thought she was dead and left her on the floor as they drove off. The Russian action was a consequence of Father’s arrest. Questioned by the authorities, he had to reveal his origins, his former occupation, details of his family, and other information. Designated on the strength of his trade as an enemy of the people and an exploiter, his family was
also doomed. Hence Mother and the children were rounded up and deported to southern Siberia. Bobe, after reviving, went to live with her older son and shared the gas chambers with his family.
Father, then, was in a Russian prison, somewhere, I had no inkling where; Mother and my brothers and sister ranging in age from eleven to eighteen were in Siberia. I was in despair, having to force myself to concentrate on my own future even as I felt myself tossed on waves of events beyond my control. If my instinct had early on induced me to run, the new circumstances that had so engulfed my family compelled me all the more determinedly to seek ways of escape and of survival. There was little doubt in my mind that in letting me leave Bialystok, my parents were taking a gamble on me, opening out to me prospects different and possibly better than their own. My resolve to escape and survive mounted as despair at events in Europe escalated with each passing week. Time dragged on. Summer came but brought no new glimmer of hope.
I continued to commute between Vilna and Kovno. On the eve of Yom Kippur in 1940, I found myself in Kovno. I had had no particular reason to return to Vilna as I was equally homeless in both cities. As the sun set, I made my way to the central synagogue only to be stopped at the door and told that entry was by card only. Having none, but determined nonetheless to attend the Kol Nidrei service, I went to the suburb of Slobodka renowned for its yeshiva and attended service at a prayer-house there. It was the sort of service to which I had been accustomed at home and, standing there in prayer, I could not but reflect on what had happened to the world in a single year since the preceding Yom Kippur. Nor could I desist from thinking of Father in some prison cell and of Mother somewhere in Siberia that night. The following morning I sought entry again into the central synagogue and had no problem this time. The synagogue was packed. I stood among the worshippers towards the rear without a prayer-book, reciting the prayers by heart, catching from time to time the glances of others about me. I spent the entire morning in the synagogue, then left, not returning for the remainder of the service. My emotions had so welled up in the incessant contemplation of my family’s fate that I could take no more. I preferred to roam the empty streets in the afternoon.
Soon after Yom Kippur I received a card from my uncle Avrom Ber from Bialystok containing Mother’s address in Kazakhstan. It later transpired that Father had also managed from prison to communicate with his brother and learn of Mother’s whereabouts.
Copy of visa to Curacao.
One day, a rumour swept the refugee circles in Kovno that a Dutch yeshiva student caught by the outbreak of war in Poland had travelled to Vilna with the MIR Yeshiva. The student managed to obtain from the Dutch Consulate in Kovno a visa to Curacao, which was under Dutch rule. On the strength of this visa, the Japanese Consulate in turn gave him a transit pass. The news fired the imagination of the entire refugee community and shortly afterwards, on one early autumn morning, the Japanese Consul in Kovno was woken by a commotion in the street. According to his own testimony, when he got out of bed and looked out through his window, he saw a multitude of Jews standing outside the Consulate doors. The MIR Yeshiva students were waiting for him, seeking the same transit visas through Japan that he had granted the Dutch yeshiva student a short time before. It was one thing, however, to grant an individual transit visa in a genuine case, but something quite different to let hundreds of people into Japan on the strength of Dutch visas to Curacao which everyone knew were fictitious, there being in fact no immigration into Curacao at all. When the fact is recalled that Japan was by then a member of the tripartite Axis alliance together with Germany and Italy, the spectacle outside the Japanese Consulate must have been truly bizarre. However, as matters turned out, the Consul contacted Japan for directives and after two days, with the crowd of yeshiva folk still at his door, he acted on his own initiative and granted them all transit visas for a period of ten days.
The news spread like wildfire and people then had to determine whether they were prepared to consider such an uncharted, unpredictable route, even if it might not materialise. For a major question still remained: how was one to reach Japan? This new glimmer of an opportunity caught everybody unawares and unprepared and appeared also too farfetched and unrealistic to pin too much trust on it. To most, the whole idea was an exotic one, a hare-brained fantasy unworthy of rational consideration, and best shelved until its results could be more clearly seen. I did not belong to this majority. No sooner did I hear about the scheme than I decided to chance it. I had nothing to lose; I had every reason to seek a way out. Accordingly, I obtained a Curacao “visa” and then a Japanese transit visa in a procedure which was by then well established. I proceeded to persuade others to do likewise, the first among them being my roommate Mietek Elbaum. He proved sceptical and resisted the whole idea however hard I pressed. He was not mentally attuned for such an adventure and would not be persuaded.
In the meantime, I became one of the “Dutch Consuls” to supply those Curacao visas on request. As Polish citizens, we laboured under a particular difficulty in that we were under the suzerainty of Lithuania which was still officially at war with Poland as a consequence of Poland’s occupation of Vilna after World War I. We were, therefore, as Poles, enemy subjects. A legal solution was eventually found to circumvent the problem. We were issued with Lithuanian Nansen passports which, having been approved by the League of Nations in such situations, carried international validity.
With these visas and transit passes in our possession, the next problem was that of getting to Japan. No-one had yet given thought about what we might do when we got there. What concerned us first and foremost was reaching the place. A study of a map indicated that there was only one feasible route and that was to traverse the vast Russian continent to its easternmost point and from there to cross the narrow strait that separated Japan from the Asian mainland. But how was one to obtain permission for transit through Russia? Did one dare even risk applying for such a transit visa? Such information as was available to us was very disheartening. We had heard of an incident that had taken place in the city of Lublin in Poland shortly after Russian occupation there. The Orbis travel bureau had placed a notice in its window requesting all holders of overseas visas and people with plans to travel to register within a given period. People queued there for days. Advised that the Russian authorities would facilitate their departure from Lublin, they were subsequently gathered together and, having clearly shown that they were not willing to remain in their city, were all deported to Siberia.
In the light of this precedent, it took much courage to come to a decision leading to action. In Vilna, the only agency that could issue such visas was the NKVD, the very mention of which sent shivers down the spine. The likelihood of obtaining transit visas was not rated high in the first place, while to apply for favours from the NKVD at all was literally to take one’s life into one’s hands and gamble with it. Nonetheless, I applied, being among the early ones. Having done so, we had to make ready for travel. As we realised that we might as easily finish up in Siberia as in Japan, we prepared ourselves accordingly. Time then began to weigh very heavily. Administrative wheels at the best of times never moved particularly fast. In this instance, considering the extraordinary nature of the request and the known attitudes of the Russian authorities, we settled for a long agonising wait. Meanwhile, I renewed the pressure on Mietek Elbaum. When I felt that his resistance was weakening, I took him to Kovno and made him go to the Japanese Consulate to obtain visas for himself and his brother who also lived in Vilna. Back home once more, he proved reluctant to apply for a Russian transit visa and again I had to persuade and pester and push him until finally, unable to take any more from me, he relented and secured the pass.
By that time, a new vigil had started. This time it was not outside the Japanese Consulate but in the dingy corridor of the NKVD. We went there daily to enquire about the progress being made with our applications. The waiting was nerve-racking. One day it was announced that formal notification would be made on th
e following Tuesday. Whether my name appeared on the first notice that appeared on the promised day or on a second list issued soon after is now unclear in my memory. But what does remain very vivid are the small plain sheets of paper pinned to the wall, the crush of people seeking out their names, my heart racing as though I were standing in a dock awaiting sentence, and almost unbelievingly, seeing my own name bright and clear in the list, both on first inspection and on a second confirmatory one. As I retreated to allow others access, I had a distinct sensation of having won a ticket to life, but very quickly reminded myself to take hold of the situation, the wider general one and my own, remained so volatile and unpredictable that anything could still happen to throw all hopes and plans askew.
Soon after, an Intourist office opened in Kovno to process travel arrangements. The granting of the first Russian transit visas had a major impact upon the refugees. Those who had previously been sceptical or reluctant or cautious now decided that the scheme might be feasible after all. Consequently, a new rush for visas was set in train, with the earlier trickle swelling into a flood. This acute increased demand for visas, however, in the end proved counter-productive. As long as the numbers of applications were modest and steady, the procedure had progressed without attracting the attention of the higher echelons in the decision-making process. The increase in the volume of applications had apparently created an administrative problem which in turn became a political one, and one day it was announced that no more transit visas would be issued. The tap was turned off and the last escape route sealed.
