Nearly a century after these events, Chimen, by then a very old man, remembered the suspicion with which Yehezkel viewed secular education: ‘For him, science was more or less permissible. What was not permissible was the humanities, because with the humanities you became less religious.’ When my father, Jack, got into Trinity College, Cambridge, to study physics, Yehezkel would quiz him on the theory of relativity. But when Chimen himself had travelled to Jerusalem in 1935 to study philosophy and history, Yehezkel had been underwhelmed. ‘I went as a rebel against his wishes,’ Chimen remembered. ‘I went to a university. He was not very happy about that. He wanted people to go to Yeshiva. He and I disagreed.’
In the yeshivas of his youth, Yehezkel had felt protected from the often-savage realities of life outside of their walls. Many secular Jews, however, who witnessed the pogroms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were pushed into political activity. History was, quite simply, a politicising agent, one that made it ever harder for the Jews of Russia to sit it out on the sidelines. ‘We demand civil equality and equal submission to general laws as men who, despite everything, are conscious of their human dignity, and as conscientious citizens of a modern state’, wrote the authors of the 1905 ‘Declaration of Jewish Citizens’, which was signed by six thousand politically active Russian Jews, men and women who had joined a variety of political clubs, parties and clandestine organisations in the previous few years.
In many ways, those Jews who combined a vigorous intellectualism with revolutionary political beliefs were matmidim by another name. Chimen, born in the autumn of 1916, in the dying months of Tsarist rule, was just such a figure. His and Mimi’s house, by the 1950s, was a sort of secular yeshiva, a place where students came to study great texts; to hear great masters exploring their ideas; but, above all, a place where people would be expected to think about difficult moral and political topics for many hours at a time. Chimen might have been a dyed-in-the-wool Communist at this point in his life – but even then he was an intellectual snob. He valued not status per se but intelligence. And he could be more brutal in his verbal responses to a Communist he considered stupid than he would be to a clever person who happened to be a member of the hated bourgeoisie. For my father’s lifelong friend Krishan Kumar, who went on to become a sociologist and an expert on utopias, Hillway, which he started visiting at the age of eleven, with its endless political discussions and its spiralling columns of books, was the greatest university he could have ever attended: ‘I remember being very struck by the books in the downstairs room. Great fat tomes in the front room where you sat. From the moment you opened the door, it was a house of books. The front room was a room of learning and talk. You’d sit there and everybody was so close to each other. Everybody talked. It was a galaxy of talent’.
***
Opposite the door of the front room coming in from the hallway, on the wall of shelves to the left of the fireplace at about eye level, was a row of books on the Holocaust. Among these was a large volume, by a historian named Lucy Dawidowicz, titled The War Against The Jews 1933–1945. When I was about ten, I began asking Chimen questions about the Holocaust. It was, after all, one of the great elephants in the room at Hillway, an omnipresent reality that would be hinted at in ghastly, sometimes coded, references around the dinner table. Periodically, survivors would come to the house for dinner. Frequently, friends who had escaped from continental Europe prior to the Second World War would tell their stories. Fred Barber, the bald, genteel doctor who lived around the corner from Hillway, would drop remarks about life in pre-war Czechoslovakia; the cousins from France – Irene and her daughters, Jeanette and Michel and their children – many of whose family members had been corralled off to the death camps, would come to visit.
Rather than fob me off with half-truths, modified to dull the scale of the atrocity for my young ears, instead of trying to comfort me with explanations that hid more than they revealed, Chimen, always the historian took this book – its jacket cover white at the top, with jagged, burnt edges blending into a red bottom, an abstract image redolent of blood and fire and carnage, of ghettos burned and corpses cast into furnaces – off of the shelf, gave it to me and told me to read it. I still remember my horror as Auschwitz was described; and, in case I ever need reminding, I still possess the book. On my own bookshelves, it sits next to Art Spiegelman’s Maus and just a few tomes along from William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Its cover, suggestive of burned, ragged paper, looks similar to the sheets of burning paper that fluttered down over Brooklyn, where I was living at the time, from the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, sheets that I gathered up that horrifying day and put into a beige folder as reminders, however inadequate, of the capacity for evil to rain down suddenly out of a clear blue sky.
Chimen had gone through the book meticulously, underlining passages in pencil that he found particularly powerful. Hitler’s Final Solution programme, Dawidowicz wrote, ‘was part of a salvational ideology that envisaged the attainment of Heaven by bringing Hell on earth. “The Devil is loose”, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen noted in his diary on 30 October 1942. The most important event of our time, André Malraux said, was “le retour de Satan”, citing the German system of terror’. Chimen had underlined both the English and French references to the devil. It was, as far as I could tell, the only time he highlighted such allegorical imagery to describe a historical event. And it spoke, I think, to the paucity of words that he felt were available to explain such an epic atrocity. My grandfather, never otherwise at a loss for words, was frequently tongue-tied when it came to discussing the Holocaust. All the tools of the historian’s trade, the understanding of Marxist dialectic, the belief that history moved in a generally progressive arc, all fell mute before such organised psychopathy. When Chimen watched documentaries on, say, the Warsaw Ghetto, I would turn to him and see him silently sobbing.
Chimen’s erstwhile friend Itzik Manger wrote, in the opening stanza of his poem ‘Ballad of the Times’:
There’s a dead child lying in the road,
A little girl with blond hair.
Five or six weeks more maybe
She’d have reached her seventh year.
Marshal Goering is playing with his child.
It is such a simple image, yet so utterly horrifying – the orchestrators of mass murder sitting back and enjoying their domestic bliss as all around them was drowned in blood.
In his University College office, Chimen kept a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. As carefully as with Dawidowicz’s text, so with Mein Kampf he had underlined key passages in red ink, and had scribbled precise little notes in the margins. ‘He [the Jew] lacks completely the most essential requirement for a cultured people, the idealistic attitude’, Hitler had written; they were stateless wanderers who corrupted whatever cultures they inhabited. Chimen wrote on this page that the Nazi leader’s idea was that ‘the Jews had never had a territorial limit and were worse than nomads’. Forcing himself to carefully read the bile-filled screed, the historian had underlined Hitler’s description of the Jews as parasites and bacilli, of Marxism as being a Jewish idea, of Germany’s defeat in the First World War as being caused by Jews. In a letter that he wrote to Dr John P. Fox, in 1978, as Fox prepared a BBC lecture on the Jewish Councils in occupied Europe, Chimen made reference to that passage: ‘Hitler, in his Mein Kampf, portrays the Jews as a dangerous bacillus – a parasite in the body politic of Germany, which must be destroyed to save the German nation. Whether this finally led to the Final Solution is a separate question, but there is little doubt that the germ of the extermination of the Jews is contained already in Mein Kampf’.
Over coffee once, when I visited the house from university, Chimen mentioned that after the war his family had found out that his own grandmother – Raizl’s mother Leah, daughter of Rabbi David Willowski – who was very elderly by then, had been shot dead during the Einsatzgruppen actions in Byelorussia, either in one of the ghettos or in the
killing fields in the forests outside of town; or, perhaps gassed in one of the early mobile gas units which were so lethally experimented with in Byelorussia. Chimen, from a distance of sixty years, could not tell me how my great-great-grandmother had died; but he knew that she had been murdered by the Nazis. It was the only time I ever heard him discuss the personal losses he had endured during the Holocaust; and he mentioned it quickly, reluctantly, with a minimum of additional details. It was as if the event, for Chimen, was too vast – and the people lost within it were too small to be mourned individually, their deaths too easily swamped by other, bigger, horrors: by destructions of entire populations, by industrial, methodical killings that numbered in the millions, by the complete loss of communities that had survived in Eastern Europe for centuries. Never a social historian – unlike his nephew Raph Samuel, who specialised in telling the stories of individuals and bringing their lives out of anonymity – Chimen was always more comfortable in exploring the impact of historical events on countries and economic systems than he was in detailing the lives of individuals trapped within that historical web.
And yet, those individual stories did, at some deeply personal level affect him enormously. Not until after he died did I find out that Chimen had been instrumental in bringing to London more than fifteen hundred Torah scrolls from the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. They had been collected both by Jews, hoping to salvage at least some artefacts from their world before it was consumed by the genocide, and also, bizarrely, by Nazi ethnographers, eager to add loot to the macabre museum they hoped to create in Prague as an epilogue to the story of an extinct race. During the war, the scrolls and thousands of other fragments from vanished Jewish homes and communities were put on display in Prague’s Jewish museum and a handful of local synagogues, the exhibits curated by Jewish librarians and scholars, catalogued and tagged by Nazi clerks, and viewable only by a select few SS officers. During those years, the Jewish populations of Bohemia and Moravia were systematically destroyed, most of their members shipped first to the ‘model’ camp of Terezin (known in German as Theresienstadt), and then onwards to Auschwitz and the other extermination centres. A population of nearly one hundred thousand was reduced to barely seven thousand. After the war, the scrolls lay unused and forgotten, stored in a tiny synagogue out in the suburbs of Prague, wrapped in polythene, many of them covered with a fine veneer of mould.
There they stayed for more than eighteen years, until 1963, when a London art gallery owner named Eric Estorick who specialised in Eastern European art, heard about them from a Czech government official and arranged for Chimen to journey to Prague to evaluate them. Chimen’s initial task was to determine which were kosher – undamaged, and thus fit for use in a synagogue; which were pasul – desecrated or torn, mouldy or water-damaged, and thus unfit for religious usage; and which fell somewhere in between – damaged yet, in the hands of skilled scribes and scholars, salvageable. Chimen, normally so meticulous about writing down even the most mundane of appointments in the tiny cloth-covered diaries that he carried around with him in his jacket pocket, left no record of this trip; no aeroplane number jotted down in his little maroon-coloured year planner, no note saying something to the effect of ‘leaving for Prague’. He was, by then, fearful to the point of paranoia of any written connections to the Eastern bloc. The trip must, however, have taken place in late October, as there is a little more than a week of empty space in his diary for that period.
He spent that time in a dreary Prague, being followed by KGB agents, he told those connected with the venture subsequently, continually terrified that he would be arrested and shipped back to Moscow. There was nothing to do but work; the shops were so empty that he could not even find a present to bring back to London for Mimi. He returned, shattered by his discovery of the massive Torah collection, with tales of how some of the scrolls had had SOS messages tucked into their folds, with notes such as ‘Please God help us in these troubled times’. He then proceeded to help Estorick, along with a wealthy businessman named Ralph Yablon and the liberal rabbi Harold Reinhart, founder of the Westminster Synagogue, to negotiate the purchase of the entire collection. In late 1963, a few cryptic notes appear to that effect in his diary: ‘5pm Rabbi Reinhart’, says one such notation, on 10 December, the first evening of Hanukkah. Nothing else. No details. No mention of the project at hand.
What he had found haunted him. ‘The agony of the work remains with Chimen Abramsky to this day’, wrote Philippa Bernard in 2005, in her book Out of the Midst of the Fire. ‘Some of the Torahs were burned when the synagogues were torched, and he recalled the Rabbinical tradition that if a Torah is burned the words are sent up to Heaven. Some were blood-stained, many lacking binders to hold the two rolls together, were tied with tallisim [prayer shawls], or even in one case with a child’s mackintosh belt. Two were held together with pieces of a woman’s corset. The human misery embodied in that tragic collection was a palpable reminder of what had befallen the Jewish race’. By February 1964, when the scrolls arrived in a chilly central London, delivered by a fleet of lorries, Chimen had been a fervent anti-Communist for six years. He stood in the crowd and wept: for the horrors of the Holocaust and for the sheer callous neglect that the scrolls, these extraordinary memento mori, had experienced under Communist rule in the decades afterwards.
As I root around my childhood memories of the books in that front room, it seems to me that the texts on the Holocaust also provide hints as to why Chimen remained so ferociously pro-Soviet during the war years and their immediate aftermath. For, despite their many other crimes, before and during the Second World War the Soviets were not actively anti-Semitic: their imprisonment of religious proselytisers such as Yehezkel in the 1920s and 1930s had been anti-religious, not anti-Semitic per se. They did not tar all Jews as enemies, nor declare, as had the Nazis, that the Jewish race as a whole was inherently foreign, inherently apart from the broader society. Wholesale, across the board hostility to Jews was not part of Stalin’s calculus until the post-war period, when opposition to the State of Israel (which had been welcomed initially by the Soviets, who were eager to take pot-shots at the crumbling British empire) morphed into a more explicit anti-Jewish rhetoric and then a series of lethal actions against the Jewish intelligentsia in the Soviet Union.
During the war itself, the British Communist Party, with Chimen’s Jewish Affairs Committee playing a vital role, compiled a huge dossier of evidence on the unfolding Holocaust, with testimony from those few who had managed to escape the death camps and join up with partisans in the surrounding forests, and providing information on the mass shootings and then on the gas chambers. As early as June 1942, they had gathered a body of material, provided to them by the Polish National Council, on the makeshift extermination campaign that had begun in the land still known as Eastern Galicia in the summer of 1941, on the use of mobile gas chamber trucks in Chelmno, on the shootings carried out by the SS Einsatzgruppen death squads, as well as the systematic slaughter inside the death camps. The British Communists helped to organise some of the earliest public events to discuss and denounce the unprecedented massacres. And it was at least in part as a result of their actions that, years before the defeat of Nazism, British parliamentarians, including the foreign secretary Anthony Eden, began to talk about war crimes trials for the architects of the Holocaust. By the summer of 1942, the British Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress had passed resolutions condemning these unprecedented atrocities. The Communist Party was publishing pamphlets documenting the destruction of Eastern European Jewry. And at a huge meeting convened at London’s Caxton Hall on 2 September of that year, representatives of governments-in-exile from the countries of occupied Europe, as well as members of socialist groups from around the world, met to speak out against the killings and to urge the allied governments to hold Germany’s leaders accountable for their crimes after the war ended. The dossier on the unfolding genocide, put together by Chimen and others in the Communist Party, sits n
ow, long forgotten, in a filing cabinet in the People’s History Museum in Manchester.
After Hitler unleashed his vast armies against the Soviet Union in 1941, the fight to defeat Hitler became intertwined with the fight to protect Stalin’s Soviet Union. If the Soviet Union could withstand the German onslaught, in the long run Hitler’s empire was doomed. In 1941, the year Chimen officially joined the organisation, membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain nearly tripled, reaching a peak of just short of 60,000 members. In some so-called ‘little Moscow’ enclaves – in the mining communities of Fife in Scotland and in South Wales, in Chimen and Mimi’s East London neighbourhood of Stepney – the Party came temporarily to dominate the local political scene. Chimen was a close friend of the Scottish Communist MP William Gallacher, even going so far as to help Gallagher write his autobiography. Raph Samuel, who was reputedly quite capable of holding his own in a theoretical conversation about Marxism from around the age of seven onwards, a Communist child prodigy, an illui of revolutionary theory, wrote that Party members obsessively followed news about fighting on the Russian front, and busily worked on putting up stickers on lamp posts: ‘Second Front NOW!’ They went to see Soviet films in unbombed cinemas, and busied themselves every May Day by going on demonstrations on behalf of the workers of the world. ‘The Lenin Album was my bible at this time’, Raph continued. ‘A sumptuously produced volume of facsimile reproductions, photographs and pictures. There were only five copies in the country, I was told, and my uncle was the proud possessor of one of them. It introduced me to the idea of clandestinity and persecution, revolution and counter-revolution, barricades and strikes’.
The House of Twenty Thousand Books Page 18
