by Roger Cohen
He worked for a time on a collective farm, almost starving, before joining the Sixteenth Lithuanian Division of the Red Army. Soviet authorities had been suspicious of recruiting Lithuanian refugees, but the need for military manpower overcame mistrust. The division was an unusual unit, including more than five thousand Jews who had fled into Russia and now fought to return. The shtetl Jew, as later in Israel, was transformed into a soldier; Mendelson became an infantryman and machine-gunner. Relations between the three main “nationalities” (as they were termed) of the division—Russians, Lithuanians, and Jews—were sometimes strained, but it held together. Initial combat in February 1943, near Orel, southwest of Moscow, was followed by a long, battle-scarred march westward to the Lithuanian port city of Klaipeda (Memel in German), which was liberated in January 1945. The division numbered more than twelve thousand at its peak in 1942; it took 7,065 dead. Mendelson was injured but battled his way back to Lithuania with his huge two-wheeled, water-cooled Maxima machine gun.
Nothing forges or reinforces identity faster than persecution. In the Sixth Company of the Second Battalion, 167th Brigade, a unit of the Sixteenth Division that was overwhelmingly Jewish, commanders gave orders in Yiddish, and songs were sung in Hebrew. Zionism stirred. There was talk of the Land of Israel and of creating a new Jewish future if the war to go home was ever won.
Home had in fact ceased to exist for the Jews of the Sixteenth Division of the Red Army. In Žagarė, while Mendelson was gone, the danger that had been intuited and experienced by my family decades earlier—that Europe could not and would not assimilate the Jews—reached its logical yet unthinkable culmination. Hell in a small place is an intimate affair of neighbor upon neighbor. The only thing anonymous about death in Žagarė and the other small provincial towns of Lithuania was its nameless aftermath.
As soon as Soviet forces left in 1941, a group of nationalists known as the Žagarė Activists, headed by Stanislovas Kačkys, embarked on retribution against “Bolsheviks” and Jews. On July 25, 1941, the mayor ordered all Jews to wear a yellow Star of David and move into a ghetto adjoining the market square. They were not allowed on the sidewalks. They were forbidden to draw water from wells not belonging to other Jews.
From surrounding towns, Jews were ordered into the Žagarė ghetto. There were 715 Jews in the ghetto on August 25, 1941; a month later that number had grown to 2,402. Many came from nearby villages. Their “Jewish and Bolshevik” property was registered by local authorities and valued at a little over five million rubles. A barbed-wire fence enclosed the ghetto. Local police, headed by Police Chief Juozas Krutulis, formed the guard. Jews were forced to work cutting timber in my grandmother’s beloved woods when they were not being selected for humiliation or random execution. Men were made to spit in the face of the rabbi, Israel Reif. If they refused, they were shot. In late August, thirty-eight Jewish men were dragged from the synagogue and executed at the Jewish cemetery in the old district of Žagarė.
On the morning of October 2, 1941, Yom Kippur, all Jews from the Žagarė ghetto were ordered to assemble in the market square. Several Einsatzkommando members had arrived from Šiauliai over the previous days, as well as Lithuanian “self-defense” units and the ultranationalists known as White Armband squads. The Nazi commandant appeared on a balcony overlooking the square. He declared that the Jews were to be moved to another location, where they would all be given work. But when he blew a whistle for the Jews to form lines, he saw passivity turn suddenly to violent resistance.
Jäger, the chief of Einsatzkommando 3, in his painstaking report on the elimination of Lithuanian Jewry, writes of the 2,263 Jews murdered by his reckoning in Žagarė: “As these Jews were being led away a mutiny arose, which was however immediately put down; 150 Jews were shot.” At least seven of Jäger’s local henchmen were injured in this brief uprising as Jews, realizing at last the fate awaiting them, used knives or their bare hands to tear at their captors.
Once quelled, the doomed Jews of Žagarė were loaded onto trucks and driven out to the Naryshkin estate, near the stables whose horses commanded local renown. A large pit had been prepared. A survivor of the Žagarė ghetto, Ber Peretzman, described—in testimony taken at the displaced persons’ camp in Feldafing, Germany, on March 2, 1949—how the Jews were made to strip naked at the edge of the pit before being shot. To save ammunition, small children had their heads smashed by being swung against trees, or they were buried alive. Isaac Mendelson’s sister-in-law, Rochel, went into labor at the edge of the pit. Peretzman writes, “The murderers laid her down on the ground, allowed the child to be born, then killed both mother and child.”
This is what it took to end Jewish life in Žagarė. These were the facts of which Mendelson would not or could not speak.
In the depths of Russia, he had known how young men and women bled to death in the snow, heard the cries of the dying, fallen asleep as he walked, collapsed on the bare floors of charred villages, seen how the bones of the starving are etched through their skin, breathed the stench of putrefaction in fields littered with cartridges and corpses, cooked meals from dead horses dragged out of the ice, seen plains before him so wide they broke the spirit, rammed shovels into the frozen earth as he struggled to dig trenches, felt his coat rendered hard as metal by the freezing air, watched those around him fall in a storm of German machine-gun and mortar fire on some forsaken hill. A man might be no more than a black speck in the snow.
Now he was “home,” in the town where Nazis and their Lithuanian henchmen had slaughtered Rochel Mendelson and her newborn child, and where Stalin was determined to quash such memories of specific Jewish suffering.
Soon after the war Mendelson married Sonya Swarcbram, a Jewish survivor, in Vilnius. When their son was born in 1947, they gave him the name of Mendelson’s late father, Mejeris. He is a quiet, mild man who bears with dignity the wounds of a hard life. Growing up in Žagarė, he felt something was gone but found that thing hard to identify. A mother of a friend once mentioned the former “Jewish presence” and the massacre. He was teased at school as a Jew. But it was taboo to talk.
Locals no longer wanted to call his father “Isaac,” for obvious reasons. He was known after the war as “Petras.” The Mendelsons divorced; Sonya left for Israel. Mendelson’s second wife, Aldona, born in 1927, was Christian. They are buried together beneath a black granite gravestone at the municipal cemetery. On the Day of the Dead, November 1, wreaths of bright chrysanthemums are propped against the graves, lined up neat as shoe boxes. Families pay their respects. Nobody goes to the Jewish cemetery in old Žagarė or to the Jewish cemetery in new Žagarė, where Hebrew inscriptions on listing stones fissure. The Jewish past has no name in Žagarė. It is an enigma. There is no local trace of the Žagarė Soloveychiks, my grandmother’s family. Simon Gurevičius, a leader of the small surviving Jewish community in Lithuania, told me almost all records of that period disappeared or were destroyed.
My paternal grandparents came from two Lithuanian towns twenty miles apart, separated by flat fields and copses. Some Jews from Morris’s town, Šiauliai, were taken to Polly’s town, Žagarė, to be shot in 1941. Other Šiauliai Jews survived in the town’s ghetto long after the Žagarė Jews were liquidated because they were required for labor in a leather factory.
Morris and Polly met far from Lithuania, in downtown Johannesburg, in the general store in which she worked as a teenage girl. A wholesale grocer, Morris would come around on his horse and trap, and she would smile at the familiar exchange with the owner:
“Hello, Joel, how are things?”
“Oh, terrible, business is dead.”
“Anything you want?”
“Can’t even sell what I got.”
“What about some flour?”
“Well, maybe I take a little flour.”
“What about soap? I hear soap is going quite well?”
“Okay, maybe I take a little.”
Her smile was demure, her dark hair pulled back off her pale fa
ce. She had poise beyond her years. He was ten years older than she. They spoke in Yiddish. As they had started life not far from each other in a northern land of dense forests, they had much to talk about. The year they were married, 1914, World War I began in Europe.
The marriage was a happy one. She called him “Meissele”—little Morris. The four children called him “M.J.” Polly had once scoffed at a friend with airs who insisted on calling her husband by his initials—“so pretentious,” she said. The children seized on this, invented a middle initial “J” for Morris, and that was that.
When the Nazi catastrophe came to Šiauliai and Žagarė, Morris and Polly knew little or nothing of it. They never talked about it to their four children. The two boys, my father Sydney and my uncle Bert, had gone off to join the allies in World War II. My father did not return from Europe in time to see his father again. The year apartheid was enacted, 1948, Morris died at the age of sixty-four. It was also the year that the modern state of Israel came into being and faced the first of many wars. Morris had suffered a heart attack a decade earlier but would not change a diet rich in chicken fat, although he did give up his beloved oval-shaped Loyalist cigarettes. He left these words in a letter to Polly:
My darling wife, after my illness I feel that my state of health was such that there was some danger that I may leave you suddenly without having the chance of saying goodbye. With heart trouble we must be prepared. This fact worried me. To meet this difficulty I decided to write this letter. I hope that what I tell you will be of some comfort to you. My dear little chum, with the sincerest feeling I want to express my gratitude for the great help and happiness you gave me from the day we were married to the present. I tell you in all honest truth that I found in you the ideal wife and mother. I have lived the happiest married life of anyone I know. My dear Babe, I want you to be brave, carry on for [us] both, see to help our dear children, as far as possible, safely settled and happy, and please my darling try, try very hard to make the best of the remaining days of your life. As you know my pet I have not the popular beliefs after death [sic], but if my spirit will exist, and can do anything for you and our children, be sure it will watch over you and help you even more than in life. I desire to spare you and the children the suffering I went through when I lost my dear parents. If possible, do NOT attend my funeral. I sincerely desire that you and the children should think of me as when you knew me alive. I want no prayers. Avoid it as far as possible. Understand my love, without any boast but in perfect truth, I feel I have lived a clean, moral and honest life. I am prepared to meet whatever there may be beyond without the least fear.
At the Jewish cemetery in the Brixton neighborhood of Johannesburg, the ground was hard, stones and gravel. When, as demanded by tradition, Morris had been obliged to shovel earth onto the caskets of his mother and father, the sound was harsh and unforgiving. It had haunted him.
Morris went on to talk about his estate, which he reckoned just sufficient to keep Polly and the four children “in fair comfort” and to say that he would like, if there was anything to spare, to “assist those less fortunate” by giving fifty pounds to a needy medical student and fifty pounds to a needy dental student.
In brackets he added a stipulation: “Jew or Gentile.”
CHAPTER 3
Gin and Two
South Africa took a grip on my childhood imagination. Perhaps it was the light after the dull skies of England, the brilliance of the air on the high plateau of the Transvaal, the dark-leaved avocado trees, the glistening orange groves, the sun-plunging abruptness of the dusks. Flowers burst into exuberant bloom, bats swooped as night fell, and the horizon was a distant line across the dry veld. I went to live there when I was four months old, crossing the seas from London in my mother’s arms. When she had me, she wanted to go home, to the South Africa that would always take her in.
We arrived in the midst of the African summer. I would come to know those Southern Hemisphere summers well: the palms draped in bougainvillea, the canopy of purple-blue jacaranda blossom over the broad avenues of Houghton, the smoke from family braais wafting over the bamboo and swimming pools as red meat sizzled. My mother was happy in South Africa. I picture her laughing against a backdrop of golden sand tapering to a faraway point. Love is warmth, heat. Everything seemed untroubled, unless you caught a glimpse of ragged black men in ill-fitting shoes being herded into police vans. Then a cousin might say, “I suppose they don’t have their passes. Enjoy the swimming pools—next year they’ll be red with blood.”
Our return in 1955, the year I was born, to my parents’ birthplace coincided with my father’s appointment as dean of Douglas Smit House, the residence at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand reserved for black students. A small number could still attend the university at the time, even if they were not allowed to play rugby, that inner sanctum of the white Afrikaner. A decade earlier Sydney had qualified as a doctor at Wits. That was before the victory of the National Party and the imposition of apartheid in 1948. We lived at the residence. My parents employed a black nanny. I enjoyed riding around on her back.
One of the particularities of apartheid was that blacks were kept at a distance except in the most intimate of settings, the home. They cooked and set the table and cleared away; they washed and darned and dusted and beat the rugs and made the beds; and they coddled and cared for white children. Every white household, it seemed, had its Trusted Black Mammy. After the Shabbat meal on Friday night, guests might leave some small token of appreciation on the kitchen counter (“Shame, I don’t have much change”) or slip a few rand into a calloused black palm. The black women—Betty or Johanna or Doris—who bathed me as an infant touched my skin. Their world was untouchable.
Douglas Smit House was run on the cheap compared to residences for white students, where black waiters provided service. It stood in the midst of white suburbia, and so the black students housed there were subject to a labyrinth of legal restrictions designed to keep Africans out of such areas. Every black South African over the age of sixteen had to carry the dompas—the damned passbook—complete with fingerprints and permission from the government to be in a particular area at a particular time for a particular employment or reason. Arrest was arbitrary. An irregularity of some kind could always be found in the dompas. University students were given special exemptions, but these were seldom respected. Much of my father’s time was spent in police stations negotiating the release of black students from white cops.
He arrived once to hear an Afrikaner policeman taunting a young black woman who was close to qualification: “You think you’re some clever student, but really you’re just a kaffir.” The term kaffir, originally an Islamic word for “unbeliever,” was picked up by Europeans and deployed in Africa as an insult. Two pillars of apartheid were control of black mobility and prevention of blacks’ acquisition of skills. They were to be “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” Blacks could carry bricks to the white bricklayer but not lay the bricks themselves or use a trowel because they would then overstep a boundary reserved for a skilled laborer.
The system guaranteed a large supply of cheap, menial labor. South Africa was built on mining fueled by it. White industrialists could pay starvation wages. Apartheid perfected and formalized the system with a host of new rules but did not invent the oppression of the native population. A black woman near qualification as a doctor walking the streets of white suburbia therefore threatened to upend cornerstones of a deep-rooted ethos. My father was outraged at the treatment of his students.
Nelson Mandela had been at Wits a few years earlier. In the late 1940s, Indians and the mulatto South Africans known as Coloreds were allowed on the same trams as whites as long as they sat upstairs in the rear section. Blacks were required to use separate trams that stopped running at night—unless a white passenger accompanied them. One evening Mandela was traveling with three Indian friends on a “white” tram. The conductor tried to eject them: “You coolies are not allowed to
bring a Kaffir onto the tram; only whites can do that.” Such were the minutiae of South African policing by pigment. If you could whiten yourself, you could elevate yourself. But the barriers were intricate. A popular test of people’s blackness was whether a pencil would wedge in their hair.
Later, in a 1978 interview given in London to the Herald, my father would reflect on his time at Douglas Smit House: “Men and women of different color got to know each other. It is a tragedy for South Africa that this arrangement was later terminated by the government. In this vital segment of potential leaders, blacks and whites mixed over the fairly lengthy period of their courses, this was a vital human experience and close bonds developed. To have lost that—the higher education of black and white together—has deprived South Africa of potential leaders with genuine understanding of each other.”
For many years I was too young to understand. Beauty was abundant, yet a shadow lurked. That is how I absorbed racism, like a twinge, the first hint of a microbe in the blood. Fear, shadowy as the sharks beyond the nets at Durban, was never quite absent from sunlit South African sojourns. The beach at Muizenberg, near Cape Town, was vast and full of white people. The surf leaped. White bathers frolicked. Blacks waded into the filthy harbor at Kalk Bay. They slept in concrete-floored outbuildings whose single small windows resembled baleful eyes.
Duxbury, the house of my maternal grandfather, Laurie Adler, looked out over Main Road and the railway line near Kalk Bay station to the ocean and the Cape of Good Hope. There was the scent of salt and pine and, in certain winds, a pungent waft from the fish-processing plant in Fish Hoek. I would dangle a little net in rock pools and find myself hypnotized by the silky water and the quivering life in it. The heat, not the dry highveld heat of Johannesburg but something denser, pounded by the time we came back from the beach at lunchtime. It reverberated off the stone, angled into every recess. The lunch table was set, and soon enough Betty would appear with fried fish, usually firm-fleshed kingclip, so fresh it seemed to burst from its batter.
