A Life To Live...

by Israel Kipen

  In due course, we resumed our passage. It was still raining, the ground was soggy and movement more cumbersome, but our guide urged us to move faster. Almost mesmerised by his influence upon us in our frightened state, we responded to his command and actually ran. As though miraculously we eluded the border guards and the dogs, cleared the border and made it back to Bialystok.

  On my return, life in town was much the same as it had earlier been. The most noticeable difference was in the political re-alignments that had taken place. The Russian grip on life had visibly strengthened; the social hierarchy had altered; and where working people had now assumed positions of influence, the former elite had been displaced from theirs.

  As I proceeded to renew contacts with my Zionist friends to learn what was happening, I was surprised and dismayed to hear that all the local Zionist leaders were still in town. I approached my friend Shmuel Iwry who was at the time Principal of the Tarbut primary school and the most eloquent spokesman for Zionism in Bialystok to suggest to him that we go together to the President of the General Zionists, the lawyer Klementinowski, and persuade him to leave. Iwry agreed, made an appointment, and two days later we went to Klementinowski’s home. Klementinowski lived in Sienkiewicza Street in a three-story building next to the bridge that straddled the Biala, just one floor below Chief Rabbi Dr Roseman. It was a beautiful apartment. He lived there alone, having been divorced not long before. He received us in his tastefully decorated study. He wore a short sporty type of jacket somehow out of keeping with both his professional and leadership status. We talked a long time. He told us he was being shunned both professionally and socially; his former colleagues ignored him, socially they avoided too close proximity. When I tried to impress upon him the imminent personal danger he was in by virtue of his position, he countered, saying, “Look around you. It’s not a bad place to live. The maid still brings me my cup of coffee each morning. It’s not easy to give it all up.” My response was to indicate that he would not find the coffee served in Russian prisons particularly to his taste. For me to talk to him in this way was chutzpah of a sort. He was older than I and superior in status and in many other ways. Yet he acknowledged my right to speak as I did, perhaps because he inwardly agreed with what Iwry and I were urging him to do. Hearing us out, he nodded in mute resignation. We left at midnight, uncertain however whether we had truly persuaded him in any decisive way. I laboured under a premonition that the time available to him to act was very short. As matters turned out, our effect upon him must have been most telling. He left the next day, eluding by a mere few hours the authorities who knocked at his door the following night to arrest him. He crossed into Vilna where Iwry and I met up with him again five weeks later.

  A fortnight after my return, the inevitable happened. The authorities confiscated our factory and, next, an ill-dressed Russian arrived at our home accompanied by a local official. The Russian wore a black shiny satin Tolstoy shirt under his well-worn winter coat. After introducing himself, he announced that he had come to requisition our house furniture. Whereupon he drew out some paper and proceeded to note down an inventory of every piece of furniture in the house. Our buffet he described as wardrobe. Before leaving, he warned us that our furniture was now public property, and though we could for the time being continue to use it, we were not permitted to abuse it, damage it, sell it or in any other way dispose of it.

  Reality had finally caught up with us, with my family. To repeat the arguments I had vented upon Father six weeks earlier was now futile. Our situation was clear enough to him, but now we could not very well flee across the border. It was he who this time suggested I return to Vilna alone, something I was intending to do anyhow. So I said my farewells to my family. Father gave me a new fur coat he had made for himself but which it was unthinkable to wear in Bialystok under Russian occupation. And on the 30th December 1939 I left for Lida.

  Among those crossing the border with me were three former schoolmates. We kept close. Our guides were peasants who knew the area well. They worked in cahoots with a city contact who negotiated all costs of passage. It was deep winter and very cold. Mercifully, I had the fur coat and I carried my other belongings in a rucksack on my back. In places, knee-deep snow covered the earth and the going was hard, notwithstanding that we were, most of us, young and strong. We stopped from time to time to pause for breath and slake our thirst with the snow. After a while, one of our party, Volodia Katzenelenson, who had always been physically weak, started falling behind. Supporting him under an arm, I helped him along as best I could, but after a while he paused, slumped to the ground and said, “You walk on. Whatever is to happen to me will have to happen”. We were in a dilemma. Nonetheless, two of us, one on each side, now supported him, ourselves falling behind the party but following the footprints in the snow to keep to the route. It was an excruciating experience. Swaddled in my heavy fur coat, I found myself increasingly and uncomfortably hot; my pack seemed progressively to become more heavy; sweat poured from me for most of the night; while the march was accompanied by intense and constant fear. And yet for half the journey, scarcely athletic myself, I supported in his passage another man, in this way in the end crossing the border to an outlying village from whence by means of horse and cart we reached the outskirts of Vilna. There, to divert attention, we broke up into smaller groups and entered Vilna by morning.

  5

  Vilna

  So did I on the first day of January 1940 find myself a second time in Vilna. The psychology – the frame of mind – in which I went there this time was altogether different from that which had motivated me on the earlier occasion. The seeming normality of life I had left behind in Bialystok was no more. My parents were by now deprived of their possessions; they had no means of earning a living; they were designated as enemies of the people by virtue of their belonging to the “exploiting class”.

  On reaching Vilna I took a room with a family named Gurvitch. This family had lived in Bialystok until 1938 and their older son and I had been in the same class. Mr Gurvitch was in the timber business but by the time the war broke out, his business too was finished and he rented out a room as an aid to the family budget. I was glad to find a room in his house. Mr Gurvitch was a sociable man who was in good control of himself despite his altered circumstances. Mrs Gurvitch was tall and ample, less loquacious but friendly and motherly. Their son resembled his father in disposition while there was also a daughter who was in her middle teens. I was made to feel very much at home.

  However, after some time, my resources were depleting and, having come to an agreement with the Gurvitches, I cast about for a suitable companion with whom to share the room. I found one, a young man from Warsaw ten years older than myself, who was tall, good-looking and blue-eyed. His name was Mietek Elbaum. He was a pleasant fellow with a most disarming, almost naïve, affecting smile. His family had been renowned wholesale textile merchants, highly regarded in Warsaw’s business district of Nalewki. We established prompt rapport, which became increasingly consolidated with each passing day. Having been in charge of his family’s concern before the war, he had developed considerable expertise in business and set about establishing contacts among the Warsaw fraternity in Vilna. He was a ‘natural’ in the way he adapted to his new surroundings and through him I too became involved in business ventures, such as they were at the time. With Mietek as constant companion, I was kept well informed on such matters as business activity in the community, the exchange rates of the dollar and the pound sterling on the money market, and on other economic and political events to which we had continually to pay heed.

  Vilna, renamed Vilnius after the Lithuanian takeover, changed in character. It regained its status as constitutional capital, the de facto capital during the preceding twenty years under Polish jurisdiction having been Kovno. Vilna was much larger and considerably older than Kovno. Its university campus consisted of a cluster of historical medieval buildings. Napoleon had stayed in that city during his army’s assa
ult on Russia. The city itself however possessed no sense of wholeness or architectural harmony. The Jews lived in a patently ghetto-like enclosure; the rest of the city was large and spacious. The two parts looked so disparate that a clear dividing wall might once have separated them. Adding to whatever difficulties the Jews faced there was the renewed imposition of the Lithuanian language and other institutions upon them; they had also to cope with the hostility of the deprived and aggrieved Poles, as had already been starkly manifested through the Black Tuesday pogrom; while those who were refugees, even if like myself, they chose to flee, had to contend with separation, uprootedness, unfamiliarity with new environments and loneliness.

  To deal with these, a number of Jewish refugee clubs catering for different needs and interests were established in Vilna. One such club was the Zionist Club, created on the initiative of a number of leading personalities of the General Zionist movement in Poland. Its function was more than a purely social one of bringing like-minded individuals under a single wing for companionship. With the membership including personalities like Dr Moshe Kleinbaum and the lawyers Polakiewicz from Warsaw and Klementinowski from Bialystok among others, who had until recently occupied positions of leadership in their respective communities and throughout Poland. It served as a centre for the welfare of arriving refugees. It was an “exclusive” club of sorts with acceptance into it being very selective for fear of infiltration by government agents. It was nothing if not prudent to screen the identity and credentials of every applicant who sought entry.

  On the basis of my active Zionist association in Bailystok, I was invited to join. The club occupied the whole of the upper floor of a three-storey block of apartments. It contained a number of large rooms for its activities and was open and well frequented in the evenings. For many who were both homeless and living in refugee conditions, the club fulfilled a most necessary social need. But it did more than that. Its members being ever attuned to the many rumours current at the time and to new political developments and the opening up of opportunities, they came also to exchange news, information and experiences. Added to the social aspect of the club was another political and cultural dimension, the place being a venue for the delivery of lectures on current affairs. For me the club was a very important outlet and I gravitated towards it at every opportunity.

  A few months after coming to Vilna, I learned that Father had left Bialystok to join me. When he did not arrive, I became distraught. I had no way of finding out what had happened to him – whether he had been caught at the border and was now in some prison or even alive. One morning, Mrs Gurvitch noticed my distress. Hearing me out, she suggested I seek out a certain fortune-teller and proceeded to tell me a story of her own.

  Her brother, she said, had been conscripted to war at the end of which he did not return home. His young wife was worried and, on recommendation, went to see a fortune-teller who assured her that her husband was alive and well and would be home on a given date. The woman returned home and counted the days. On the appointed day, she awaited her husband’s homecoming but when by the afternoon she saw her waiting was in vain, she disguised her appearance and returned to the fortune-teller. As he saw her come in, the fortune-teller turned to her and said: “What are you doing here when your husband is waiting for you at the door of your home?” Thereupon she ran home and, sure enough, her husband was there.

  Had anyone else told me such a tale, I would have dismissed it out of hand, but it related to her own brother, whom I had come to know by then. I reasoned that I had nothing to lose and made my way to the same fortune-teller. This diviner lived in a cellar on the other side of town. His waiting-room was bare, apart from the presence of a few old chairs. Its walls were painted stark blue, the colour chosen by Arabs for their window and door-frames to ward off evil spirits. I was the only person waiting; another was inside. I was tense. I had the feeling of one being handed down a life-sentence. In due course I was admitted into a room which was also bare, the only furniture here being two chairs separated by a meagre table. The man who faced me was tall, had a strange face and was wrapped in an old overcoat against the cold. When I had seated myself, he started to shuffle a pack of cards, took out one card after another from the pack and placed them face upward on the table. As he did so, he spoke. He began by relating some events that had taken place in my home before the war; he then told me my Hebrew names Israel Chaim without difficulty and my sister’s Hebrew name as well. I was astonished by his accuracy. He proceeded to say that Father was at that moment in a government house and was well, and went on to relate other factual details of past events, the truth with which he recounted them sending shudders through my body. Finishing with the cards, he studied my palm. He predicted that I would soon receive an important letter from certain people abroad who did not know my whereabouts. When I emerged from his room into the street, I was unsteady on my feet and walked like a drunkard unable to keep to a straight line. Telling Mrs Gurvitch and the others of what had transpired at the fortuneteller’s, I felt emotionally drained.

  That day I wrote a letter home, telling Mother of my experience through euphemisms and synonyms that would not arouse the censor. I also began to wonder about that letter from abroad that I was to receive and concluded that it could only be from Father’s cousin in Chile, whose father, my own father’s uncle was a shochet, a ritual slaughterer. I decided to write to them first, reasoning that there would not be particularly many shochtim in Santiago. But the question arose as to how any letter would reach them when I had no precise address. I hit upon an idea. Surely, there must be a rabbi in Vilna who conducted some correspondence with other authorities abroad. Making appropriate enquiries, I did find one rabbi who carried on a global correspondence relating to matters of marriage and divorce. I sought him out, placed my position before him and asked for the address of a rabbi in Santiago. He obliged. And so I returned home to write two letters – one addressed in rabbinical Hebrew to the rabbi in Santiago requesting him to pass on an enclosed letter to a shochet by the name of Moshe Yudl Kipen, should such a person be found; the other in Yiddish to the Kipens, explaining my own family’s situation and asking for whatever help they could give. I sent the letters air mail and had all but forgotten about them when some two months later a reply arrived. The Santiago Kipens promised to contact Mother who was still in Bialystok and do whatever they could. I wrote to Mother conveying this and took care not to lose the Santiago address which was to serve me as a talisman throughout the war.

  One of the early problems confronting the leading personalities in our club related to a small group of the more fortunate individuals and families. Whilst the policy of the British Government towards immigration into Palestine dictated the 1939 White Paper which for all practical purposes halted the flow of immigrants, there was one category of people that was not affected by the restrictions and quotas imposed. Any Jew who could prove that he possessed one thousand pounds sterling and was ready to bring the money with him into Palestine could obtain a capitalist certificate. The very term “capitalist” conveys the pre-War worth of one thousand pounds. The paradox was that while those who wanted most to emigrate were the idealists and the poor, those Jews who did possess such money were the least inclined to uproot themselves and start afresh in Palestine. Nonetheless, some of these latter more favoured folk were prudent. They applied for and obtained such capitalist permits as were issued and kept them as a form of insurance policy. Such action made good sense, and for those who could afford it was a premium well worth paying, for when war broke out, they were in possession of a potential escape route from a beleaguered Europe. Many did in fact make use of their permits, coming to Vilna from which they either left by ship through the Baltic or by air and sea to Denmark or Sweden, where they arranged for further visas and means of exit. Others, however, lacked the same sense of urgency, being lulled by their certificates into a feeling of security, unable to switch their perspective from that of seeing their certificates as insurance
policies to the increasingly real one of being certificates of life. These folk were, to my mind, committing the most grave of mistakes under the circumstances and that was to believe that time was still on their side. Suddenly they were caught. As long as they saw other people leave, they were in no hurry to do likewise. But with the continued worsening of the situation in Europe, all means of escape through the north abruptly ceased. The only way out was by a southward land route to Odessa from whence access to Palestine by sea was still possible. But for this, one had to obtain a Russian transit visa, a document not to be had for the mere asking.

  The heads of our club considered the plight of those permit holders. To save them, they concluded that it was essential to make representations to the Russian ambassador in Kovno, bidding him in turn to approach Moscow for a ruling on the matter. With the assistance of a Mr Rubinstein, the editor of the Kovno Jewish daily, an appointment was obtained and a delegation consisting of Rubinstein himself and Dr Kleinbaum from our club waited on the ambassador. Dr Kleinbaum was about forty years old at the time and was second to Yitzhak Grinbaum, the acknowledged General Zionist leader of Warsaw Jewry. He was one of the chief ideologues of the movement which espoused a philosophy of political and economic liberalism as the basis for the future society in Palestine, a philosophy distinctly different from Ben Gurion’s Labor Party which was to hold sway in Palestine and, later, Israel with increasing settlement there.

  The mission by Rubinstein and Kleinbaum was held to be of great importance. Official contact with the Russian authorities had potential ramifications far beyond the immediate issue about which the delegation approached the embassy. As it turned out, Rubinstein and Kleinbaum were well received; the ambassador promised to relay the matter to Moscow; and, after some time, much to everyone’s surprise, a favourable reply was received. Those Jews holding the required capitalist permits were issued with Russian transit visas and made their way via Odessa to Palestine. These transit arrangements set a precedent for a much larger movement of Jews across Russia, a movement which affected many people, myself among them.