by Boris Senior
In recent years when I began a quest to find my roots, I searched for a map of Lithuania. Someone brought me a large map more than a meter and a half in length. When I spread it out, I was astonished to see that of the 300 villages in which the Jews lived, the map was of my Dad’s village. It was drawn by hand from memory by one of the few survivors of Naumiestis, a man who had immigrated to Chicago. Below the detailed drawing of Naumiestis that showed most of the owners’ names and the location of the village houses on the eve of the Holocaust was a detailed report of the events of 1–2 July 1941, the dates all the Jews of Naumiestis were killed. The map, which I took with me on the visit to the village, also describes how in July 1941 all the Jewish women and children of the village were taken to the nearby forest in horse-drawn wagons after being told that they were on a journey to their husbands who were “working in Germany.” They were killed in front of hurriedly dug pits, which became their mass graves. I have heard that the ground moved for days after the burial, for many were thrown into the pits and buried while wounded and still alive after the butchery. I was unable to find the mass grave of the women and children in the forest. Thus, 300 years of Jewish life and culture vanished forever without trace. Nothing remains of it today except our memories. Included was this note from the writer, now long dead:
“My yizkor saying”
My intention in making this map is that perhaps in the future generations a grandchild or a great-grandchild will out of curiosity unfold this map. He may accidentally recognize a familiar name that he heard years ago in his parent’s or grandparents’ home. He will also read how and when the terrible Holocaust happened. It is my hope that this will remind him not to forget and not to forgive. [The Yizkor is a memorial service for family and friends to remember those who have died. It has taken on a modern meaning as an annual remembrance of victims of the Holocaust.—ed.]
Deeply affected by the story of the Holocaust in Dad’s village, I prepared to visit Lithuania on a pilgrimage to my roots. The recounting of the aforementioned legend written by the long-dead stranger pays homage to the murdered families of Naumiestis, and I have decided to make sure that the Jews of Naumiestis will never be forgotten.
During the visit to Naumiestis in 1993, I found that not a vestige of Jewish life remains there despite three centuries of settlement. Almost without exception, the Jews in the village were murdered by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators. I couldn’t locate the various homes that appear in the map, and all that remains today of centuries of Jewish life in the village is a small marble plaque at the site of the former Jewish cemetery. The plaque stands over the mass grave of the entire male Jewish population—all those over the age of fourteen—and reads, “Here one thousand Soviet citizens were killed by the Nazis and the Lithuanian Fascists.” Not a word mentions that the murdered citizens were all Jews. Moreover, I was unable to find a single tombstone among the weeds in the neglected patch of ground.
Ever since I was at the village I have found it impossible to reconcile the history of the mass murders with the appearance of the peaceful farming village and its inhabitants going about their daily tasks.
After leaving Lithuania at the end of the nineteenth century, my father never saw his parents again.
THE WHITE KAFFIR
In his early days in South Africa, Dad worked for a number of small country store owners and saved every penny he earned until he had a small amount of capital. After moving to Johannesburg and working for a movie distributor, he bought a nearby cinema that was for sale. It was in the time of the silent movies, and Dad employed a Mr. Cohen to sit below the screen and while watching the film play his violin: sad music for sad scenes and lively tunes for happy scenes. Mr. Cohen eventually scraped together enough money to buy a share in a small general store, the “OK Bazaars,” which had been so named and started by my father. After some time it became a countrywide chain of large stores, and Mr. Cohen became a multimillionaire. Dad left the company shortly after it was formed. When he met Mr. Cohen at a cocktail party some thirty years later, Dad said to him, “You were not much of a violinist when you played for me!” His former employee replied, “It was my luck that I was a bad violinist, otherwise, I would probably still be playing for you in your cinema.”
Dad sold his share in the OK Bazaars, made a good living from the cinema, and after some years bought a share in a firm dealing with expedition and shipping, eventually buying control of the firm, which became the largest one of its kind. He continued to live modestly, working hard and became wealthy over the years by carefully saving his money. When my sister Selma asked him, “How did you make all that money?” his reply was typically short and simple. “I earned ten shillings a month and saved eight.”
Years of self-denial did, indeed, contribute to his eventual wealth, and he continued throughout his life to spend a minimum on himself while at the same time donating large sums to charity and to people who were in trouble. He never spoke of these gifts, and we in the family only discovered them by chance if at all.
As the youngest of my brother and sisters, I spent much of my time alone, but there was one person to whom I was especially close, Jack Mahusho. Jack was of the Tswana tribe. He was in his thirties and good-natured. He had been employed by the family from long before I was born and was loved by all of us. There was, however, an apartheid barrier between him and our white family, which I never dared cross despite my love for him. The apartheid system operated at all levels and prevented contact and the growth of relations between the different races. Though there was a constant awareness of the gap between the whites and the blacks on a formal level, on the personal level close bonds often existed.
My mother was born in Yorkshire, England, and came to South Africa with her family at the age of six. Her whole background was English upper class, and she was a cultured woman with inborn ladylike manners. Unusual for a person with such an English background, she had a deep love for everything Jewish and especially for the nascent Yishuv (Jewish settlement) in Palestine. Her English education fused with her Jewish background and culture and made it possible for her to guide us constantly in our approach to life. Moreover her excellent command of English enabled her to assist us constantly with our formal studies. Not being a socialite, she was always on hand in the home to care for her children, and her interest in all our doings was fundamental to our upbringing. She disliked intensely any hint of ostentation and was unusually modest in her daily life. The functions she held in our home—musical recitals and talks given by the leaders of the Yishuv all occurred in an atmosphere of gentility and culture.
Besides my mother, Jack Mahusho was the one who attended to most of my needs. I was so close to him that often I refused to let him eat his meals alone in his room and insisted on sitting near him and eating mouthfuls of his skaaf (food) from his plate, usually a stew of sinewy meat in a tasty gravy of curry and cornmeal. On his weekend day off, I sometimes went into a tantrum if I were not allowed to accompany him to his home in the black township in Newlands. When I was thirteen, he was killed in a traffic accident. That was the first time I recall having broken down in uncontrollable weeping at the loss of a dear one.
St. Katherine’s kindergarten in Johannesburg “for young ladies and young gentlemen” was my first school. The principal of the kindergarten was an elderly Englishwoman with a dried countenance. On one occasion when I was unruly and caused a girl to fall off the swing in the garden, she raged at me using what was in her eyes the worst possible epithet and one which gives a succinct view of the prevailing attitude toward our black compatriots at that time: “You are just a white Kaffir.” The Kaffirs were a South African tribe.
My father was shorter than medium height with dark hair and fair skin, his hair always cropped very short in the Russian fashion. I recall as a child once having been taken to the barber by him and returning with an almost shaven head, which made me too ashamed to remove my hat for weeks except before going to bed. From then on I use
d every stratagem to avoid a visit to the barber with him for fear of another “Russian haircut.”
The annual visits to the huge domed Wolmarans Street synagogue for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur were my first exposure to Judaism. There were also Friday nights with the starched white tablecloth, the two candles, the Sabbath meal of gefilte fish and my brother Leon saying Kiddush. Each year we held the Passover Seder and read the ancient story of the Exodus in the Hagadah, the book that describes the Seder sequence, from beginning to end despite the fidgeting of the children impatiently awaiting the Pesach meal. I was invariably spellbound when my father counted out the ten plagues, accompanying each one by dipping a spoon into a glass of wine and depositing a drop on a large plate.
The break in the ceremony when the door to the outside was opened for the prophet Elijah to come in also fascinated us. The long table with the gleaming candlesticks added to the festive atmosphere. Both my parents, though intense in their belief in the ancient Jewish country Eretz Israel, and in their desire for a national homeland, were not religious although they zealously kept alive the Jewish traditions in their home. In other words, both were Zionists but secular in their beliefs. These, too, have been my own views since childhood.
Throughout my youth I remember we had visitors from Palestine, many of them well-known figures of Zionism and some of the stars of Hebrew theater and world-famous concert pianists and violinists. The great day for me was when Chaim Weizmann paid a visit to South Africa and came to our house to meet the notables of the community. A tall, distinguished man with a shining pate and small, cropped beard, he looked very much like Lenin. For me Weizmann was the “King of the Jews.” I was seven years old and I begged to be allowed to sit next to him at dinner; my mother agreed and I sat next to him at the long table. Toward the end of the dinner, fruit was served. I remember that after I ate a large portion of grapes my mother told me that I had eaten enough. Downcast, I sat in silence at the long table. Chaim Weizmann quietly began to help himself to grapes and surreptitiously to hand them to me one by one under the table without my mother or the other guests knowing what was going on. I have to this day a sheet of paper with his signature and written above it “To Boris Senior with best love, Chaim Weizmann.”
There is no doubt that Weizmann’s role in modern political Zionism was seminal. I remember being brought up on the well-known story of his important breakthrough in the method of manufacturing acetone in World War I. I was told a very dramatized version of how his discovery helped win the war for Great Britain, and that as a mark of gratitude, King George V asked him what he could do for him. His somewhat impertinent answer, “Your Majesty, please help my people get back their national homeland.” A surely dramatized story that made an indelible impression on me. In Israel today, it is unusual to find even a small town that does not have a street named after Chaim Weizmann. He was a giant of the Zionist movement and was regarded with respect by the leaders of the world community in the first half of the twentieth century. Though born in what is today Belarus, he was an Anglophile, and the only criticism of him could be that he was too trusting of the British whom he so much admired. It is not surprising that Chaim Weizmann was elected the first president of the new State of Israel in 1948.
At that time, my parents began traveling to Europe and to Palestine regularly, at first by boat. In those days foreign travel was leisurely and carefully planned. I remember going with my mother to Thomas Cook’s to arrange their journeys and being ushered into a large, gloomy office for a session to hear the plans, who would meet them at the boat train, where they would stay, and what vehicle would be there to take them to the various places. I would look with interest at my mother’s steamer trunk in her bedroom and at the clothing on wooden hangers in both sides of the trunk, which would stand on end open like a book with corners reinforced with sturdy brass fittings. The trunk probably weighed some hundreds of kilos.
In the early 1930s, my parents began traveling by air, and we used to go early in the morning to Germiston Airport to bid them farewell. The first leg of the journey was in an Imperial Airways de Havilland Rapide twin-engine biplane with seven passengers and two pilots. My father, dressed in khaki shorts and shirt and a pith helmet, looked like an African explorer. As each passenger boarded the aircraft it tilted a little to one side. We stood close by on the grass as the pilot ran up the engines, and the airplane and its passengers inside shook and shivered. When the pilot taxied to the beginning of the grass field and took off over our heads, we tearfully waved good-bye.
The various legs of the flights of Imperial Airways were about three hours long and after each they landed for refueling. At the end of the day, they would retire to a nice hotel at their destination for a rest and a quiet evening. If the pilot saw some interesting wild game on the way, he would draw the attention of the passengers and circle the herd of elephants or giraffe or whatever. A few years later they would, after two days’ flying, be transferred to a large four-engine Sunderland flying boat at Port Mozambique, with twelve passengers and a crew of five. The flying boat eventually landed in Palestine either on Lake Tiberias or on the Dead Sea. The flight took the better part of two weeks, and no one seemed to be in too much of a hurry. I have a clipping from a South African weekly that gives an idea of air travel in that period, with a heading on one page about my parents paying “a lightning visit to Palestine, there and back in one month.” Now who had it better, the early travelers or us nowadays in the sleek jets?
THE LONELY TREE
The Sterkfontein caves, renowned for the traces of early prehistoric civilization they contain, are forty kilometers north of Johannesburg. Though we lived in Johannesburg, much of my youth was spent at Doornbosfontein, a farm we owned near the Sterkfontein. It is a large farm, and its name comes from a big Doornbos thornbush tree that stands in splendid isolation in a broad treeless landscape. From my early childhood, we called it “the lonely tree.”
After establishing himself in South Africa, my father bought the farm for his sister and two brothers and their families as a home to live in when he brought them from Lithuania. It is huge—7,000 acres. The three immigrant families hailed from the small village in the distant Baltic country having had no experience in agriculture. They took to their new environment and occupation without difficulty, as has been the wont of Jews who so often have had to migrate from country to country. The district was populated by Afrikaans farmers, who looked on incredulously as the inexperienced Lithuanian immigrants, in their outlandish Russian dress with pale complexions, began to plant corn and reap crops with surprisingly good yields.
Despite knowing little English and not a word of Afrikaans, they were welcomed and were well treated by the God-fearing Afrikaner farmers who considered the Jews to be “the people of the Book.” Probably the sympathetic attitude of the Afrikaans farmers to the Jews had its roots in the history of their Huguenot ancestors’ flight from religious persecution in Europe in the seventeenth century.
The farmers had been accustomed to visits from time to time by a kind of Jewish immigrant called “smouses” in Afrikaans. They were traveling merchants who went from one isolated farm to another with a bag or two of articles for sale. The farmers were isolated from contact with their farmer compatriots because of the lack of facilities for communicating. They tended to rely on the traveling smouses to bring them news from other farmers. The peddlers were often put up for the night by the kind Afrikaners, but they had not expected to see them working beside them as farmers. My father always spoke well of them and of the Afrikaners and their welcoming attitude to newcomers.
Most of the road from Johannesburg to Doornbosfontein is tarred, but the last ten kilometers consists of dirt roads winding through low hills covered in dry brown grass and fields of corn, the staple food of most black South Africans. As these roads pass through farms, there are gates every few kilometers, and if one throws a coin to the Picannins who are nearby, they open and close the gate with a winning smile. Aft
er leaving the tarred road, four farms are passed in this way, the last belonging to the family of Dolf de la Rey, descendant of the famed Afrikaner general of the Boer War.
Our homestead at Doornbosfontein was near the farm entrance and consisted of one large ancient farmhouse and another smaller building composed of what is known as rondavels. These are unique to South Africa and are circular structures with roofs made of thatch, the interior construction exposed and consisting of long poles of poplar wood, which support the thatch. The poles end in a conical top, the whole making a pleasant appearance with the bundles of thatch forming attractive ceilings especially in the soft light of paraffin lamps. The thick walls are made of bricks and plaster painted white inside and out, and inside there is always the peculiar but pleasant smell of thatch. Apart from some danger of fire, there can be no better form of roof, cool in summer and warm in winter.
The atmosphere of the veld pervades everything. At Doornbosfontein, we always felt close to nature. It is usually bone dry, but in the summer after a rain shower, the air is suffused with the wonderful pungent odor of dry earth wet by rain. The rain comes in the early afternoon, preceded by vast buildups of towering cumulus storm clouds, which invariably give birth to wild storms. When we sought shelter in our rondavels, the rain could not even be heard through the thick thatch, and we felt cozy and safe. Outside, the veld stretched as far as the eye could see, the parched earth drinking in the life-giving fluid from the heavens, the dry cracks in the earth healing as the rain smoothed the ravages of the burning sun.
A dam at the end of a stream supplied water of good quality. There was no telephone or electricity at Doornbosfontein, and the nearest telephone and post office were at Orient rail station, seven kilometers away. Part of the farm is in a mountain range. It was a magnet for us children because of its streams, steep valleys, and populations of buck, porcupines, monkeys, and other wild life. The mountains were reached by the whole family in a large ox-wagon drawn by sixteen slow-moving oxen, led by the black voorloper pacing along slowly at their head. On arrival at the “kloof” as we called it, the voorloper would tighten brakes made of large blocks of wood pressed against the rear wheels. We would start down the incline, and I remember the fear I felt during the steep descent behind the bellowing oxen. It is hard to believe that in the eighteenth century the mass movement of the Afrikaners from the Cape to the far north a thousand miles away was made in the same kind of wagon.
