Jacob's Cane_A Jewish Family's Journey From the Four Lands of Lithuania to the Ports of London and Baltimore; A M

by Elisa New

  “The river does come up,” Mr. Shergold warned, a bit apologetically. In the supervisor’s office near the off-loading dock he’d urged me to put on the boots before we descended to see how the workers of Carreras cigarettes, some thousands of them, survived World War II.

  They were essential wartime employees, Dick emphasized, confirming what I’d been told before: Cigarettes were an essential wartime industry. I’d heard stories from my family of the three Levy/Baron brothers’ valiant patriotism. The Carreras managers took their turns at fire spotting, the brothers themselves up on the big roof watching over smoking London. And with the tunnel running into its basement from the tube station, Carreras was the biggest shelter in the area. Parents of the young persons working there were happy to send their children to work as many hours as the brothers wanted, on weekends too, for where else but in the underground dormitories of Carreras was there so much safety?

  I’d read all this a few years back in the oral history entries collected in the archives of Camdentown. But before I descended with Dick Shergold to the old hogshead storage and wartime shelter, I’d never actually been inside the factory. Three or four times I’d ascended from the Northern Line to Mornington Crescent, making the trip just to see the Egyptian ornaments on the facade expanding across my view as I rose.

  In 2000 the return of architectural eclecticism had persuaded certain developers to tear off the sober modernist apron that had been draped over the factory’s highly colored King Tut whimsy after our family sold Carreras. By 2003, when I visited, sober modernism was played out. Today full-color brochures hail the original building as one of the great art deco achievements of Europe. With its two huge black cats coming into view as one exits from the Underground, the building camps it up, brazen and retro. It is as fresh and fun and young as ever.

  From the great flat roof, where my uncles had watched for fires, Dick Shergold took me down the trim staircases, narrow as an ocean liner’s, from floor to floor, first through the offices of a giant advertising firm with its open floor plan. Light through the high, well placed windows bathed an antic grid of cubicles and, one floor down, fell on uncluttered desks of the corporate staff of an international travel firm. The women in slim jackets and trousers suits, helmets of hair hugging their heads; the men with longer hair and tieless, wearing the tapered shoes and loose draped jackets of the day—they all tapped at keyboards or cradled phones to their shoulders.

  After seeing the modern renovation of London’s “most hygienic” factory, we were back in Dick Shergold’s world of operations, donning boots, and were descending . . . down . . . down . . . to a world untouched for half a century. Underground in the Carreras factory it was still 1940, the winter of the Blitz. All around bombs fell, but inside Carreras every day was fair weather.

  War is good for cigarettes.

  The Crimean War and the American Civil War had spread the habit among young men throughout the world, and by World War I generals had begun demanding that cigarettes be included with the other rations. Carreras had done its part and grown apace through World War I, packaging small French dictionaries inside packages to the Marne, and using waxed paper and then cellophane to protect a soldier’s smokes from a soaking. Carreras’s wartime advertising featured a comely nurse lighting a soldier’s cigarette. And why not? What better comfort was there to offer a soldier than a smoke?

  World War II was fought on cigarettes, which were the staple of every underground economy. By the fall of 1940, when the Blitz of London began in earnest, Carreras cigarettes had been designated a protected war industry and embarked on its own blitz of rolling, rolling, rolling. Bernhard Baron’s amazing cigarette rolling machine was pushed to its limits and yet demand exceeded supply. Indeed, demand for cigarettes was so high—for the ground troops, the RAF, and the mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters minding the home fires in England—that my great-uncle Edward converted the factory basement, once a tobacco storehouse, to a vast dormitory and bomb shelter, and upstairs the machines ran twenty-four hours a day.

  “Must be the building’s settled some,” Dick Shergold mused, looking rueful as we descended. Tobacco would not have survived such damp as we now felt, and even employees happy to be protected from bombs would not have liked sloshing around as we were. No, the river must not have come up then, for the signs that say “Do not make water in the entries,” still printed on the walls, suggest other kinds of water.

  Some employees, smuggling flasks through the tunnel, may have had a bit too much fun in the bomb shelter. Dick Shergold had heard that the managers would lock the door to the tube station at a certain hour to keep the young folk from excesses of communal spirit. The tube functioned as a makeshift barracks, and Eddie applied himself to the task as wartime innkeeper. His concrete-lined shelter was equipped with showers, toilets, and washbasins, and each worker had his own bunk. Sleeping was difficult as the underground thundered overhead, yet what parents concerned for the safety of their children would not send them to work on Sunday and breathe easily until the following weekend? A parent might worry that socializing at the canteen would lead to socializing in the bunks, but the Baron brothers had supervisory controls in place. A certain “Mr. Campbell” whose official function was warden had his presence advertised on signs at every turn.

  “Might be the building’s settled some,” Dick Shergold mused again. The floor sloped down. The round beam from Dick’s flashlight kept dimming in murkiness.

  After eighty years any building would settle, I tried to tell him. Certainly one so massive, constructed of reinforced concrete, with the largest floor plates in Europe holding up its floors but also compressing the earth, decade by decade.

  Despite my reassurances, Shergold was not at peace. He worried about the river water oozing up past the old pilings; worried at the compromise of the building’s foundations; about settling beams, cracking ceilings, mold, moisture, and nature’s reclamation of the modern marvel of engineering he cared for and supervised. His great humming system of a building, heated and cooled, comfortable, well lit, epitomized the triumph of industrial know-how, but the river with its dark tang threatened it.

  I thought about Shergold a few years later as I watched the longshoremen load their trucks onto the ferry Yael and I had boarded for the overnight trip across the Baltic. His concern for the great building that was his charge came to my mind as, the sun setting, we observed how the longshoremen carefully locked their ten-wheelers onto the deck. When morning came, these strong longshoremen would turn the winches left, hop into the cabs of their trucks, and be on their way, conveying the goods of western Europe to the eastern hinterlands. Each trip they made recapitulated the history of commerce, from the present day back to the heyday of the Hansa.

  Sure enough, the ATM we found tucked in the hallway of the Klaipeda port belonged to Hansa Bank, its logo the medieval vessel that once called at this German port, Memel. The Hansa logo invoked a profitable and orderly commerce that benefited western Europeans. It had given them honey, had supplied them with feathers, tar, leather, and bristles, and kept them alive through plague. This commerce reminded me of the welcome reverse, west to east, flow of enlightenment—of books and ideas and Haskalah and Jugendstihl, of machine technology, rationality, and Wissenschaft.

  But it brought to mind too some of the bloodiest, cruelest invasions ever chronicled. For the route Yael and I had set out to follow belonged not only to commerce but also to conquerors—the route taken by the Teutonic Knights in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and then by Hitler in the twentieth. Clearly it was not only trade that brought the Germans to the Lithuanian plains, but conquest. Hitler reached back to the twelfth century when he chose the name of a Crusader emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, for his invasion of the Soviet Union. His march toward conquest was called Operation Barbarossa.

  A few hours travel into the old lands of the Prusses, the Lats, Livs, and Zemgallians helped Yael and me understand why both traders and conquerors found these
lands irresistible. A couple boarding the ferry with us in Germany had brought with them nothing but bicycles and backpacks, since the lands to which they journeyed were so gently rolling and navigable one might walk across them all the way to the Russian border.

  Thus as I watched the green, unbroken lands pass by, Alexejus and Yael chatting in front, I let myself feel it—the invaders’ itch. Without mountains, the sparkling narrow rivers crossed in a twinkling, the sun dappling the ripening fields, these eastern plains seem literally ripe for conquest. Hitler found them irresistible, these Ostland miles he’d earmarked for growing room, as had the German Crusaders long ago.

  The Lithuanian heartland is today just as verdant, as lovely, as it was, say, for a young Crusader knight marching eastward toward a first sortie. The clashes fought by this knight or his heirs would be deemed so memorable as to merit new genres of literature. In the German language, it was necessary to invent the “chronicle” to capture the valor and terror of the battles waged for Christendom. Whether the Church needed to vindicate losses in the Muslim east or simply raid lands too rich to ignore, the first decades of the thirteenth century saw the Knights of the Cross and then the even more ferocious Teutonic Knights arrive in the Baltic countries. Taking ten hostages at an encampment they called Riga, they quickly subdued the Estonians in the lands that now belong to Latvia, home of the Kurs, and by 1270 even the lands of the fierce Prusses had come under Bremen’s sway. Why then would this region south and east of Riga not submit also?

  The accounts offered in these chronicles and the poems—epic cycles—expand middle Europe’s imagination and concentrate ideals of manhood in the Crusader. One cannot, thinking back on the first knight, but pity him. Pity the young man in a white tunic disembarking from a raft in a strange forest a few hours’ march from the Baltic coast. On the raft, he’d have drifted pleasantly, dozing a little. Would he not have reason to think, as the raft touched the bank and his feet the yellow-pebbled sand, this green and flat land would be the site of triumph?

  Indeed, one cannot blame this knight, marching with his comrades into the wooded hinterlands, for imagining that the conquest would be a short and glorious chapter, a triumphant one. Nothing thus far would have suggested that people of the plains, the Samogitians, would defend their belief in gods of thunder and oak to the death.

  The poets loved this land. What is it—the magnetic darkness, a look of latency and ripening toward evening that makes the central Lithuanian plains so compelling that there are songs, odes, epics written to it in German, Polish, and Lithuanian?

  At dusk, all open ground seems the forest’s vestibule.

  As night drops, fog drifts around the doorjambs, the birds grow quiet.

  Men step out of the fields to stand by the road.

  Even today, driving the roads that press north along the Dubysa from the Neman, one feels the ancient throb.

  The descendants of the Samogitians preserve a look of vigilance. The men have wide cheekbones; their faces are polished, planar, brown over strong necks. Their hair is ashy white, straight but full, growing in tufts. They work late burning grass. In the fall and spring, the whole plain flickers, dotted with small, smoky pyres of the turf from which ash is rendered to fertilize the next year’s crop. Thus a twentieth-century poet, the German Bobroski, gives the history of these bloodsoaked lands, passing and lingering in my family’s towns. “The first night,” he writes, “you stop at Raseinen.” Ambush. Vengeance. “People like no other, of joy! / People / like no other, no other, of death / People / Of smoldering groves / Or burning huts, green corn / Trampled, bloodstained rivers,” he writes.

  Song licks along the edges of the landscape till it catches flame. Thus poet Czeslaw Miloscz chimes in: “Through the meadow fields at night, / through the meadow fields of civilization / we ran shouting, singing, in a tongue not our own but one which terrified others.”

  Would-be conquerors would have to prove their readiness to butcher and be butchered in the quiet woods around the smallest villages—Raseinai, Ariogola, Telshai—of the remotest pagan stronghold. Who knew those villagers had warriors, their horses nimbly pivoting between the birches? The pagans were everywhere—behind stacks of hay, in oak groves, and hidden behind the embankments of high burial mounds.

  What did these waiting in ambush care about the knights with pale hair beating over their temples? They killed them with swords and burning torches. They laced the knights to their horses in their metal breastplates and bucklers and helmets. They lifted knight and horse together into oaks and set them afire. Knights sent to conquer the Samogitians found opponents ready to drink the blood of their horses, to adorn their forts with animal skulls, to kill their own elderly, sick, blind, and lame. Reinforcements from all over Europe were brought in summer after summer to help beat back the most ferocious of Christendom’s opponents, more ready than they to sacrifice all.

  When fresh troops arrived in Vidukle, east of Raseinai, they found the Samogitians had stolen their vengeance. They had burned themselves alive or beheaded each other. But chroniclers identify a spot just outside a town known as Saule, Shaulev, or later, Siauliai, where the knights suffered their greatest defeat.

  This place is now Lithuania’s greatest tourist attraction, the Hill of Crosses. A great, spiky promontory of heaped and piled crucifixes in wood, paper, gold, porcelain, clay, stone, steel, and straw, the Hill of Crosses was, Yael and I agreed, the kind of place where the human faculty for the most bestial terror, and also for the most mindful contemplation, somehow meet. The crosses look like limbs or arrows or tangled barbs; they suggest human will in its most violent, terrible guise. For most contemporary Lithuanians, the site marks resistance to the Soviets. The Hill of Crosses rose, as local legend tells, on the very spot where the Teutonic Knights were first repulsed, “Cut down like women,” as they rode into the marshes, their blood fertilizing Samogitia’s long history of sacred martyrdom.

  Aside from the battle of Tannenberg in 1410, fought in the environs of Koenigsburg, no defeat for the invading Knights of the Cross is remembered in greater detail than the encounter of 1236 in which they were first repulsed. In the woodland coverts around the hill, in the hollows, the knights pressed valiantly and hard. But the Samogitians drove the Christians into the hollows between hills and down into the rushes. As thunder gathered over these green plains, the clouds banking gigantic and forks of lightning hurtling to earth, the battle raged. Recorded in the Livonian Chronicles as a humiliating defeat for the Teutonic Knights, the battle site remains, to this day, a primeval, uncanny place. Some of that uncanniness, from my very first visit, was detectable in the way evening fell in that town so near the Hill of Crosses: Shavli.

  The Hill of Crosses, Siauliai, Lithuania. Photo taken by Yael Levine.

  Or Shavl, or Shawli, or Siauali, or Szawle, Schaule, Schaulens. The many spellings of my ancestral town reflect how many were its conquerors, how blood-soaked its history.

  That morning in 2007, before Yael and I drove out to the Hill of Crosses, my old friend Vilius Puronas, Shavli’s most serious archivist (a little balder than when I last saw him, his beard now wiry with gray) had welcomed me again into his office in the Municipality to share with me more Shavli lore. His book on this subject was now available in the local bookstore (mine, he beamed at me, soon to be there), but yes, there was more to say than he had thought necessary to share with a first-time visitor to Show-lay. He said the town’s name so fondly, and I recalled, listening to Vilius form the syllables, the same fondness my cousin Moshe had expressed when he pronounced his town’s name, a pronunciation different from that of Vilius, and yet warm despite what eventually happened there.

  Moshe’s pronunciation had a sound so poetic and tender I loved the place right then. The simple sound of it, Shavli in Lita, was, I thought, soothing. I heard in it: shah shah, Yiddish for “hush.” And shav, the Hebrew root meaning “return.” And schav, like the French chou: a little cabbage, a homey soup. The li at the end of Shavli, tra
nsposed into Hebrew, means “to me.” For years the very sound of my ancestral town had been a shibboleth of blessing and belonging, a sound vouchsafed only to me.

  But not only blessing. On cold nights, or sometimes when I smelled burning leaves or heard a sudden sound, or picked up the sound of sirens as they rose over cobbled streets, my town’s more barbed and forbidding spellings came to mind. Its very name could scare me, quickening a sense—illogical but deep—that these s’s and c’s and z’s and these keening or moaning vowels were the burnt and black sounds of the the ashy ends of the alphabet. These were the letters reserved for sounds of terror. Schau, Shav, and Auschw, Auschv were aural cousins, and so, when I allowed myself to think these thoughts, was the fate of those snagged on their barbs.

  For in the twentieth century the Jews of Shavli fell under the sword with stunning suddenness. Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, together with the quickened rage of locals caught between enemies, had in a matter of days reduced our family’s number by half. But the identity of their killers, to this day, is not precisely known. It was the Lithuanians, the Samogitians, Leibe Lifshitz had told me before, who butchered the Jews in these parts. Although—and he said this with bitter mockery—they were too drunk, too crazed to do the job right and so the Nazis had to finish the terrible task.

  Doubtless—and Vilius looked sorrowful—some of what Leibe said was right. If we preferred, Vilius was ready to tell us what he believed happened in Shavli in the summer of 1941. What he told me, he trusted, would only fill in what I’d learned from my reading or what the angry, righteous Leibe had told me on my last visit. I was lucky I’d met Leibe. Vilius missed him.

  Leibe Lifshitz was the white-haired man who had shepherded us to the grave pits and then back to the Jewish Community Center, writing out for me in a careful hand the names of my family who, in 1942, were still alive. On my second visit to Shavli, Leibe had invited me to the home he shared with his daughter near the old Jewish graveyard. It was a cinder block box with a small kitchen along one wall and a tiny dining table; the remaining space was scarcely big enough for an old couch, two wooden chairs, and a space heater. All around the walls, stacked from the floor up to his belt buckle, was Leibe’s personal “ar-heev,” his documents on the fate of Shavli’s Jews that, as he’d bitterly remarked, no museum was interested in having. There, for hours, he’d poured into a translator’s ear stories of the ghetto he had survived. His hatred of the Nazis mixed with his rage, his burning sense of betrayal by his neighbors.