by Elisa New
Likewise it must have been Bertha who managed his brothers’ marriages to show the family to best advantage: Theo, introduced by Bertha to a niece of Sir Hugo Hirst; their presentations at court reported in the press. And happy-go-lucky Paul: Bertha found for him the languid beauty Elizabeth Defries and then, Defries making him miserable, another. These excellent matches paled, of course, beside the one she managed for her own daughter Millicent to the handsome son of the RAF air marshal, Sir Arthur Murray Longmore.
In photos Bertha, always by Eddie’s side, seemed to preserve the look of a bride on a wedding cake. Here she was in a smart suit, an orchid corsage tucked under her pointed chin. Here as avatar of evening, her gown a dazzling waterfall of sheen and float. Bertha went to pains to be captured always epitomizing luxury comme il faut, and with the photographer arranged for in advance, she was not to be caught discomposed. But neither was she caught neglecting her social duty.
From the flat in Belgrave Square and even from the country house at Fulmer Chase, Bertha’s chauffeur brought her several times a month to the Bernhard Baron settlement, from which vantage point she engineered a knighthood for her husband, Edward S. Baron.
Thus it happened that in the spring of 1942, my aunts Fanny, Myrtle, and Jean each received a letter, clippings enclosed, from Eddie.
Bertha Continues her Work at the YMCA Canteen at Victoria and the running of an Officer’s Club, which she does well and enjoys.
Betty, as you no doubt know, has just received her commission as an Officer in the Woman’s Auxiliary Air Force. She is very much interested in her work, and after roughing it for a year, she well deserved to be commissioned.
Dick, at the moment, is abroad and a little while ago had the pleasure of sinking a U boat.
Jerry is still in the Middle East and was made a Major, which is most pleasing.
Earle, still in this country and is a Captain.
It is, however, to the two clippings enclosed that Eddie directs his sisters’ special attention. For they will notice that he writes not from the square but from the “cottage” at Fulmer Chase. He and Bertha have donated the house itself as a lying-in hospital for officers’ wives.
Some, of course, will see this donation, this loan, of Fulmer Chase as just the quid pro quo—a country home for a title—that clinched the deal. Some will shake their heads, not without admiring, at Bertha’s determination, at her managing to get Clemmy herself, the very wife of Churchill, to choose Fulmer Chase for her own pet project.
My aunts Fanny, Myrtle, and Jean did not, needless to say, have these reactions.
A knighthood! For someone in our family!
They put not only the cuttings but Eddie’s charming and modest letter into their albums and kept them preserved there next to the picture of the family in Raseinai in 1928.
“I am enclosing herewith,” Eddie wrote, “some newspaper cuttings which will convey to you some of the reasons which occupied my time for a while.”
A former American, who went to England 32 years ago, was among those made a Baronet yesterday by King George of England. He is Edward S. Baron, now Sir Edward Baron, who was born in Baltimore 50 years ago. Three sisters are living there, Mrs. Edward I. Goldman, 1721 Georges Lane, Mrs. Harry Rosenstein, 1733 Georges Lane, and Mrs. Charles Jaffe of Melrose Court. Sir Edward went abroad to continue a musical education, but stopped in England and became so interested in a cigarette factory owned by an uncle that he stayed there. He turned his estate over to the British government for use as a maternity hospital for the wives of men in the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy.
FOURTEEN
Yellow Star, Gold Star
In the late summer of 2007, when Yael and I were on our way out of Berlin to catch the ferry at Sassnitz, our taxi driver made a wrong turn.
As the car sat stalled in the left lane, Yael and I glanced to the right and saw, across the idling traffic on the handsome avenue, a field of brokenness: Berlin’s Holocaust memorial.
A plain of uneven stumps, the memorial forces a stumble of eye, of foot. To walk through it, even to look from the window, is to feel both balked and overtaken. These halted risers of granite gather anonymous history into Berlin’s center—towns, lives, stories, nations—all mustered into one sorrowful admission. The field of stumps proffers no explanation. Civilization’s cogency, its confidence, restored? Enlightenment? The monument yields none of this.
As we made our turn and drove away, I took Yael’s hand, pale with its lovely small bones and trace of veins, not sure what I was doing, what story, what sequence would ever contain even my own family’s lost ones or its survivors, who’d never known enough to grieve for any but their own children.
Not from us your peace of closure, say the stumps.
And not from us your tale of continuity.
By 1941, with both Jacob and his brother Paul Levy recently dead, the places on Jacob’s cane and the people still living in these places had been mostly forgotten. And so from the time I first saw the cane, and read on it an obligation to learn and then to tell its story, I’d begun to collect, to keep, and to hold sacred more or less everything.
My files, if you could call them files, were unruly and eclectic, the pages a thicket of places and languages, and the folders full of odd, knobby, bulky, crumbling things—a strip of pale birch bark from the glade at Shavli, a small diamond-shaped piece of purple carbon from the YIVO archive that had once passed through Max Levy’s typewriter. I’d taken myself to every one of Jacob’s addresses and to factories and machine shops, and I was saving, in little plastic baggies, small bits of masonry, architectural drawings, scrawled notes on envelopes. I kept in my office a box top full of tobacco, now crisp as December underfoot, but yellow still. And, also, a pack of stale cigarettes with Carreras Rothmans stamped on it. And countless gray Xeroxed clippings and smudged carbons, my materials for a book, now become a mad Geniza like the cellar of sacred books found in Cairo.
It had been a problem for me from the start: how to pay honor and to whom. Years ago, with Yael, I’d stumbled trying to recite the Kaddish over the mass grave at Shavli, embarrassed at the contrivance of the act, so embarrassed before my daughter and Leibe and Chaim that I did not know all the words.
I felt unsure, looking up at a carved figure, a sort of pieta it seemed, that Christians had erected over the gravesite, whether the very place was not somehow desecrated by Christian guilt. I’d had that experience before. Research over the years had gotten me used to a method comprehensive if not entirely comprehensible, even to me.
My research had made clear that nothing, no one, ever dies out of this world alone, that every event is kin to every other. In Berlin the field marking cities burned and graves defaced makes no separation between sacred and profane, monument and macadam, so that in effect around this plot all Europe spreads in one unbroken field of brokenness. One never reaches the end. How then could I?
For instance. Just the night before, strolling the Friedrichstrasse, the rain shower of the afternoon making the lights of the boulevard soft and lambent, Yael and I had walked west to east. Past Checkpoint Charlie and along the muraled time line of the twentieth century, we’d found Berlin’s Opera House, its doors open to the generous cobbled plaza, and past it, the pillared Humboldt Institute, and then hailed a cab for Oranienburg. My map showed that here Jewish civilization had its last, and some thought greatest, flowering.
The soaring Neu Synagogue, of which the Moorish synagogues of Baltimore’s Eutaw Place were copies, stood at the junction, and a few doors down was the salon where the Jewish Enlightenment’s great sage, Moses Mendelssohn, held court. In his parlor conversations, free thought exposed Jewish boys to newer ways. Few took long to exchange their rustic clothes for frock coats, for why else had they come—running west from their fathers, fleeing eastern mud to soak up Enlightenment’s spirit, to learn Emancipation’s German accent. It was from here, here in Berlin, that the books flooding the ports of Klaipeda were dispatched, and from here th
at the newly trained architects, ripened on Jugendstihl, retraced their steps east to Riga, to rebuild it in a German image. It was from here that giddy tidings came of emancipation, modernization; from here the spreading railroad networks connecting west to east. And from here all the ideas that taught Jacob’s brother Max to believe in the law as an instrument of emancipation, his brothers Paul and Isaac to believe in scientific agriculture, and Jacob himself to carry to Baltimore his faith in industrial progress as the engine of civilization.
And from here too, German Jews were transported eastward and deposited in Riga. To make room for the new arrivals from Berlin, Jews already in Riga, too much including my relatives, were ushered to the grave pits first.
Where better, as plans evolved in late 1941 for the disposal of Germany’s own, than Riga, so long hospitable, so long convenient, reasoned Hitler’s planners. Where better to send them than to the Ostland, the Baltic states that had long given Germany an easy field for conquest, plus scope for commerce. And now Germany wanted “living space,” Lebensraum, as soon as the Ostland could be “cleared.”
There, far from the prying international press or protestations from the tenderhearted, Berlin’s Jews might be unloaded without fuss. If the human contents of trains did not arrive “intact” and “fit to work,” they did at least arrive where “operations” had reached improved efficiency. Operation Barbarossa had been ragged at first, operation scattershot. Just months before, in the summer and fall of 1941, what with resistance and the unpredictability of local militias, the killing squads sometimes passed two or three times through the same little hamlets, each time doing reconnaissance for a suitable site to execute the identical mission, killing the Jews.
Far better, urged the commander of the Ostland, to commandeer whole districts, enclose them, and use them as mustering grounds and staging places, dispatching unnecessary laborers and those no longer fit for labor. In this way those in charge had already achieved the desired results. Commanders in the Ostland were proud of the systems they were devising, eager to test them on larger populations.
Impatient to dispose of Berlin’s Jews and also Frankfurt’s, in late 1941 Hitler had them shipped from Charlottenburg and Oraienburg to Riga, as if that city’s environing forests were nothing but the leafy outskirts of Berlin’s suburbs. Jews loaded on trains at Berlin disembarked directly to a place where techniques and a certain infrastructure were ready to receive them.
The area selected for the ghetto was no more than half an hour’s walk from the Riga railroad train station. For Jews who had journeyed many days without food or water—and were still capable of walking—the walk to the ghetto took about an hour. Those who could not walk, those so famished, frozen, and disoriented from standing in the unheated cars for several days with nothing in their mouths but snow chipped off the cars, were taken directly to the forest in lorries.
Ironically, there was work, plenty of it, as factory supervisors clamored for workers in the beet processing factories and in bricks and peat. Those among the German Jews who were reasonably healthy were kept in the so-called Large Ghetto recently cleared of Riga’s resident Jews.
German Jews who could not work would follow Riga’s Jews to the grave pits at Rumbula.
In Riga, when I first stopped there, I went as far as the graveyard fence and then halted, deciding not to walk into the forest where the condemned from the train were sent. It was my second trip to the Baltics, this time without Yael.
The day before I’d gone to the city archive and had gotten my shy translator, Valtis, to help negotiate permission to rummage in the stacks. There we had found the addresses, first 28 Kalnu Iela in the city center, where Isaac’s daughter Sarah, listed as Zarah, had kept house through the 1920s. According to the city directory, Zarah was still at this address in July 1941. Leaving the archive, I’d made my way to 28 Kalnu Iela, glad to find Sarah’s flat so central, on so distinguished a street, proud of this handsome address—the curved elegant building, its shallow, dove gray steps rising out of the softly lit vestibule. To this flat, I was pleased to realize, my great-grandfather Jacob had taken himself on foot, during his visit in June 1928, from his hotel, the Petersburg, near the president’s house. Sarah’s brother Avram, a jurist living on Lachplesa, and her sister Betti, living on Stabu, were also listed in the 1941 Riga directory and would likely have been there in the fall as the storm troops perfected their methods and readied the town to receive Berlin’s Jews.
These family members, I surmised, would not have died in the first roundup. They may even have preserved a measure of calm, confident as Riga’s Jews tended to be, that the luck and prosperity they’d long enjoyed, courtesy of German trade, would make them different.
Many years later, in 2000, Riga’s remaining Jews, an audience of whom I’d spoken to a few days before, were not shy in reminding me of how distinguished, how special, their Jewish community had been. They had agreed with my hunch that as longtime residents of the city, Sarah, Avram, and Betti and Minna—although Lithuanian born—would have not been among the Lithuanian Jews who sought sanctuary in the Gogola Street synagogue only to be trapped inside when the great wooden reading desks were covered with benzine and the whole building burst into flames. Most of the dead were Lithuanian Jews fleeing from Zagare and other border towns, not longtime residents of the city like my distinguished relatives.
No, Zarah would have remained unmolested until the whole plan was in place. Kalnu Iela was not even a predominantly Jewish district that in a day or week could be emptied of its inhabitants wholesale. Noisy shouting and gunfire, the inevitable concomitants of a massacre, were to be avoided in this neighborhood. Near the city center, steps from the elegant hotels and the foot traffic, it was fitting that a certain quiet discretion prevail, at least until the processions had passed the railroad station. There were plenty of fugitives and poor Jews to round up before notifications, edicts, and other appeals calculated to quell an uproar would result in Riga’s more prosperous Jews gathering in the courtyards wearing yellow stars, one stitched on the breast and one on the back. Then there was the headache of transporting Riga’s Jewish elite, the most educated and prosperous in the Baltics, to the derelict part of the city between the old graveyard and the railroad tracks, which in any event had space for only 13,000.
Some days movements of Riga’s Jews were complicated by the arrival of trainloads from Berlin. Overcrowding in the fall of 1941 meant more and more of Riga’s Jews were marched to labor camps to clear mines or dig peat. Thus room was made for newly arriving German Jews. Despite the outflow to labor camps, it was obvious by late November that clearing much more space, rapidly, would be necessary.
Communiqués to Berlin had a boastful note. In the days between November 29 and December 8, 1941, Einsatzgruppen units, aided by Latvian volunteers, marched 25,000 of Riga’s Jews into the Rumbula forest and shot them in mass pits. By the opening months of 1942 only five thousand Jews survived in the Riga ghetto. Childless and thus unencumbered, a woman in her forties, Zarah Levy would have been unlikely to survive the last weeks of 1941. Competition between the two ghettos for the choicest labor assignments, pitting German Jews and their Baltic cousins against each other, kept factory quotas filled, but it was hard on those who were not young and strong. And thus despite a high demand for slave labor—a paradox that there was work for as many as the Nazis managed to keep alive—Zarah was not, I think, one of those spared past the first weeks of 1942.
That day in 2000, I paced a dusty track through the Large Ghetto, the German one, and the Small Ghetto, reserved for surviving Riga Jews. Zarah Levy and her brother Avram and sisters Betti and Minna—whom I’d followed as far as the ghetto—I left there. But I have their photo. These Riga cousins of mine, Isaac’s children, looked like my great-grandfather Jacob’s children—Avram with the prominent Levy ears; Minna with my Aunt Fanny’s look of kindly, second-string brains plus beauty; Sarah, or Zarah, sporting a decorous string of pearls and a smart little jacket.
So much work needed doing at the Frankel Leatherworks that, while other towns had been purged of their Jews outright, it appeared possible that modern industry would once again revive the fortunes of the Jews of Shavli. Frankel’s Leatherworks, the largest in eastern Europe, and Nurok’s shoe factory too, were considered industries of the first importance. Capable of supplying boots and packs and other leather goods to Wehrmacht forces on the eastern front, the factory was a great boon to Shavli’s Jews as well as to the Germans. Its efficient maintenance and unimpeded production schedule even merited keeping necessary Jews alive.
The fierce, uncompromising Leibe told me that his father had been an accountant to Frankel, and his family was among those exempted from deportation to Zagare and the various Aktionen. Sitting on the sunken couch in his cold, small house, with its corrugated iron roof and chipped walls, a few days after I stopped at the edge of Riga’s Jewish ghetto, I talked for the last time with Leibe.
For hours he turned the pages of his ghetto notebooks, guiding me through the edicts: Jews may not walk on sidewalks. Jews may not wear fur. No shoelaces for Jews. No milk. Yes, he’d nodded his head, he’d been there from the beginning, from 1941 when the ghetto was formed until the few hundred survivors, including apparently one Solomon Levy, were taken to Stuthoff and then Dachau. As Leibe had told me before, it was because Solomon could register as a “specialist in metals” that he’d been preserved in one of the ghettos. On Smallprison Street, now a derelict neighborhood of workshops, was the house in which my great-grandfather Jacob had been born. It was still standing and, as late as 1941, still owned by the Levys. Solomon had paid the taxes on the house, but I surmise that in 1942 it was someone else’s home and castle.
