by Israel Kipen
I cannot say that I showed my guest much attention that evening. From my box-seat, I had an excellent view of the whole theatre and could not keep myself from studying with tantalised curiosity everything I saw. The first thing which struck me was the party in the adjoining box. In the very front sat a woman in her fifties or older, beautifully groomed in a black dress of a past age and social order. Her bearing was aristocratic and her composure, manner and personality inordinately stately. She was so patently different from anyone else around her. I found it hard not to keep staring at her. It also struck me that the 24 years intervening since the Revolution had scarcely affected her. She remained something of an anachronism in a society that had been greatly levelled. Most of the other patrons in the hall were middle-aged. The interior of the building, designed and decorated in a Classical Italian style, lacked the lustre of the Warsaw Opera House, as did the foyers where at least one huge tapestry was decidedly aged and betrayed neglect. Nor was the performance particularly memorable while the costumes could have done with some upgrading. On the whole, however, the evening proved enjoyable and I managed to put out of mind, if temporarily, the realities outside. After the performance, I took my companion home by tram. The tram was decked within by a solid blanket of ice while the passengers were mostly young folk who looked no different from any other late straggler returning home after a night out. As I was leaving the young woman at her door, she asked whether she would see me again. I placed the onus on her, asking in turn whether she could afford to be seen in my company on three successive nights. Her answer in the affirmative seemed to me unconvincing, but she brushed aside any doubts she may have had and we agreed to meet again the next evening.
On rising the following morning, I visited the famous Tretiakov Gallery which was billed as holding the second largest collection of art after the Louvre. I had never truly understood visual arts. Till that time I had no experience of major art exhibitions, apart from one on display in the Gubernatorial Palace in Bialystok before the War which had left me unmoved. Here, however, from the very outset, as I walked through the first rooms which displayed early church paintings, I sensed that I was witnessing something quite different. Some pictures arrested my attention more than others and I tried to absorb as much as I could. As I passed from hall to hall and studied the changing subjects and themes, my appetite became increasingly whetted and my aesthetic senses more discriminating. Here and there, an artist sat behind a canvas, copying a famous painting. Comparing the two – the original and the copy – one could the more clearly appreciate the masters. As I continued on, I suddenly came across a sculpture standing very close to the entrance of one particular hall, half obstructing it. It stood six to seven feet in height, was hewn from grey-green marble, and depicted a king on his throne. On glancing at it, I persuaded myself that it must be the famous sculpture of “Ivan the Terrible” by the Vilna-born Jewish sculptor Mark Antokolski on whose house of birth I had seen a commemorative plaque recently. The catalogue confirmed it. I stood before it a while. I recalled a lesson given by my Hebrew teacher Moshe Zabludowski who, in discussing the nature of cultural assimilation, cited Antokolski’s sculpture. His argument was that if Antokolski had not been culturally assimilated, he would not have needed to resort to a Russian subject for his masterpiece. Had he been conversant with Jewish history, he could as readily have used as his subject the Jewish King Herod who was known for his fierceness and implacability. Moving away from the sculpture, I continued to tour the vast gallery with enhanced interest, roused all the more by seeing the originals of what earlier had been mere photographs in history books.
I emerged from that gallery about three o’clock in the afternoon. On my return journey, I paused to inspect more closely the department store opposite the Kremlin that I had passed the previous day. The notion of a department store was novel to me. There were no such stores either in Bialystok, Vilna or Kovno. Even in Warsaw I had not seen one; and if such existed there, I knew nothing about it. Entering, I was overwhelmed by its enormity. It was huge; the central ceiling rose four or five storeys in height; wrought-iron balconies were a striking feature of its decor. There were many people inside. What also struck me was the process of purchasing goods. When customers had selected their merchandise, they were obliged to queue before another counter to pay, and then return to the original one to await their turn to collect it. The total time wasted through that procedure must have cost the economy very dearly in terms of man-hours which could have been more profitably spent in productivity or purposeful relaxation.
In all, the day had proved an eventful and enlightening one, opening my senses to new cultural experiences till then known to me only at second hand. Considering that at that time travel was the privilege of very few and that I was travelling less as a free agent than as a refugee with artistic pursuits scarcely a high priority under the circumstances, those two days in Moscow were a distinct bonus in extending my outlook on life and its riches. Even so, the day was not yet done. I had still to meet again with the young woman I had taken to the opera the previous night. I had no clear idea how and where we should spend the evening. As it turned out, it did not matter. She did not appear. I waited for some considerable time at our appointed meeting-place uneasily, uncertain whether she had taken seriously my comment about it not being in her best interest to meet with me in such quick succession or whether she had come to some harm over her spontaneity with me.
That day at an end, one more half-day remained to me in Moscow. I spent it roaming the streets and absorbing mentally everything I could about day-to-day life in that large metropolis. In the early afternoon, together with the others who were tracing the same route as myself, I was driven from the hotel to another railway station to resume the forward journey. On the way, I caught sight again of yet another queue, this time outside a bakery. Some folk carried bread; others missed out; and this at a time – February 1941 – when, unlike Poland or Lithuania which laboured under conditions of war, internal Russia was far from the front and not at war. The sight was a most sobering experience.
The train we boarded had been specially put on for us. The carriages were not of the Pullman sort. Each cabin accommodated four people, this being the number it could sleep overnight, with upper bunks being lifted out from the walls. A restaurant car provided three meals a day. Tea and hard sugar were available from the carriage guard on request.
The journey took twelve days and nights and was by and large uneventful. Stopping stations were days apart. At some of these we were permitted to step out and look around. At Khabarovsk, for instance, I was struck by the long lines of full soup plates set out on tables in the dining-room for the locals, as also by the people’s excitement at seeing us. Elsewhere, we were not permitted to come among the people, as was the case in one station where I saw a number of them pressing against a wire gate, staring at us as though we had come from another planet, and begging for certain things. We reached Irkutsk on a beautiful day. The sky was clear and the temperature minus 40 degrees centigrade. Yet I walked about without an overcoat. The air was crisp and dry and the cold not too severe.
Towards the latter part of the journey, the train stopped at Birobidjan which was of particular interest to us all. There, we were permitted to leave the train, there being no locals present for us to meet and mingle with. Our interest in Birobidjan lay in the fact that the place had been designated in the early ‘thirties by the Russian government as a Jewish autonomous region with the promise of cultural autonomy. As such, it had caused great excitement among Jewish communists around the world who, in their naiveté, left everything behind them to live there. The stories, both written and oral, that subsequently emerged from there told of evaporated dreams, vanquished hopes and ruined lives. The station building was little more than a dilapidated wooden structure carrying the name Birobidjan in Russian and in Yiddish. It symbolised well the ruins attending promises unfulfilled.
On leaving Birobidjan, we continued on towa
rds Lake Baikal, the largest inland sea in the world. For a full day and a half, the rail tracks skirted the water line. The beauty of the region was breathtaking. Then, at last, we reached Vladivostok. Arrival there proved a release for all of us. The protracted confinement in restricted surroundings with people thrown together by chance and not always compatible had made the journey unwholesomely tedious. In all, I have little recollection of those people. I was too preoccupied with the almost unbelievable reality of actually leaving Russia against all odds and the uncertainty of what still awaited me. In addition, the knowledge that we were still in Stalin’s Russia made us circumspect in our conversation and expressions of opinion.
We stayed overnight in Vladivostok, where, with considerable excitement, I boarded the vessel that was to take us across the narrow straits into Japan. It was the first time I had seen the shore of a sea or been in a boat. That boat was a converted Japanese cattle-boat, and we were housed in the hull in conditions that were indeed more suitable for cattle than for humans. Nonetheless, our mood was one of elation. The long eastward journey was almost behind us. A Russian officer came on board to escort the vessel out to sea. Some way out, he was lowered into an accompanying Russian craft. With this we recognised that we were now in international waters, we became still more elated, and ate dinner heartily, much to our later regret. For, as the vessel proceeded on its journey, the waters became rougher. We went down to our communal sleeping quarters below deck, there on the floor trying as best we could, each at his neighbour’s expense, to find positions of comfort. By midnight, the boat was being tossed like a match on giant waves and people became sea-sick. Midway through the night, I too had to run on deck, where I spent the next four hours in excruciating retching. There were moments I wished I were dead and it took all of whatever little strength I still had left to grasp the rails and not be swept overboard. As the morning star appeared on the horizon, the sea calmed and I saw that I would reach Japan after all. What we had not known at the time and learnt only long after was that, on leaving Vladivostok, we were about to cross one of the roughest straits on the globe in a craft that was no longer sea-worthy.
At midday we arrived at the port of Tsuruga. Recovering from the ordeal of the night before, I was glad to be setting foot again on firm ground. The relief was overwhelming. It was the first time in some eighteen months that I felt myself to be out of perpetual danger. My spirits soared. I was also struck by the contrast between two so-different realities brought so close together. Throughout the trans-Siberian journey, I had seen Russian railwaymen going about their tasks in bulky, thickly padded, dirty coats. Here, on the other hand, in the railway marshalling yards, the first man I noticed was a Japanese railway worker walking along the lines. He was dressed in a light-blue work uniform and wore clean white gloves on his hands in which he carried a long stick with which he picked up every bit of waste he spotted. The yards were clean; everything conveyed the impression of order and neatness. That Japanese in his white gloves, whom I could not but see as a quirk of an exotic culture, reminded me of chimney sweeps who wore top-hats as trademarks.
Before long, a locomotive passed us by while shunting to a different set of rails. It was a classical steam locomotive, but what was again so striking was the fact that both the driver and fireman wore white gloves, even as the fireman shovelled coal into the furnace. The contrast between the picture I carried in my imagination and the reality which unfolded before me was great. I knew nothing of Japanese society; the only Japanese I had ever seen were in photographs. To a European, the country and its people were as quixotic as they were mysterious. What I saw at the Tsuruga marshalling yards seemed to mock that which was European. I was led to admire what an oriental culture could do when it adopted Western technology, and marvel at how it could put the originators of that technology to shame. Then, I noticed some people walk about with gauze masks over their mouths and noses, held in place with loops over their ears. Some of the kimonoed women also wore these masks, which looked particularly out of keeping with their otherwise dainty appearance. I learned later that the masks were commonly-used safeguards against respiratory illness. It said something about a society motivated by the wish to protect the well-being of others around oneself, rather than be concerned with one’s appearance.
First impressions have long been important in the formation of attitudes. The railway station at Minsk, for example, had been built precisely with that wisdom in mind. It was large, spacious and grand. Here, however, in Tsuruga, in Japan, there was no sign of any premeditated effort to impress. Not a hint of ostentation could be discerned. On the contrary, there was a distinct understatement about the setting which made my first impression here, too, so distinctly and agreeably overwhelming. I found myself both buoyant and optimistic, even though, had I looked at my situation objectively, I should have had scarce reason for such headiness. After all, I had arrived in Japan with little money, the Intourist ticket having accounted for nearly all my cash. I held a mere ten days’ transit permit, with nowhere to go from there. We, all who had come there, had some vague advance information that the American Joint Distribution Committee had set up some basic care facilities in anticipation of our arrival, but even this was hazy and uncertain. Yet, despite all, I was – and, I suspected, most of the other arrivals too – in a frame of mind of easy contentment and satisfaction with my lot.
From Tsuruga, we were taken by train to Kobe where we were to spend the next six months. Kobe had a minuscule Jewish community which consisted mostly of Russian Jews from Harbin and Tientsin engaged in the export trade. They had a little synagogue of their own. It was in the vicinity of that synagogue that accommodation was found for us, a number of rented houses furnished with mattresses and bedding. The number of people to a room was conditional upon the number of mattresses the floor could accommodate. The house I stayed in was on a steep hill rising from the synagogue. There were eleven people in my room.
On the evening of the first day in Kobe, I set out towards the business centre of the town to become acquainted with my new surrounds. I found my way easily. The shopping centre was in a long street, closed off to all but pedestrian traffic. The houses on both sides of the mall, mostly single-storey buildings, abutted on one another. The displays, the lighting of the streets with Japanese lanterns, the shop-fronts, the milling crowds, the women almost exclusively in kimonos, the clatter of their wooden shoes on the pavement, the sounds of Japanese music coming from different directions – all these mingled into an enchanting scene that resembled a fairy tale more than any living reality. By the time I returned to my room, I was ready for a night’s sleep, irrespective of the number of mattresses on the floor.
Our life as a refugee community quickly settled into an orderly pattern. I was in the second influx of arrivals. Some degree of communal organisation had been established by then, centred in the rooms adjoining the synagogue. My Vilna room-mate, Mietek Elbaum, arrived with the next influx and was found accommodation in a private hotel at the foot of the hill leading to the house where I stayed.
In the first weeks following our arrival, we were idle. We did not know what we could do, while, against this, there was little we could do. We were officially in transit through Japan by the grace of its government and, hence, had no legal right to engage in work. Everyone’s mind turned beyond the Pacific Ocean. America became the magic word in our lexicon and the ultimate objective of everybody’s thoughts. Increasingly drawn by the possibility of getting to America, some tried to recall any contact there while the optimists among us set out to learn English. My name appeared on a list of Zionist askanim, (communal activists), forwarded to the Zionist Organisation of America for special attention and rescue. This was at a time when a Zionist refugee committee had come into being with the purpose of co-ordinating rescue efforts aimed at securing passage of Jews to Palestine and the United States. On the committee, among others, sat Zorach Warhaftig, the Mizrachi leader, who was to become the Minister for Religion in the
first Israeli Ministry after independence and in a succession of later ministries. With him sat Leon Ilutovitch, former secretary of the Jewish deputies in the Polish parliament, later to become executive director of the Zionist Organisation of America based in New York, and Shmuel Iwry, former headmaster of Bialystok’s Tarbut primary school, later to become head of Baltimore Hebrew College and ultimately Professor of Biblical Studies in Baltimore and Johns Hopkins Universities. The local office for refugee affairs was managed by a short, thin and wiry man called Chodorowski who was, much later, as Menachem Savidor, to serve as Speaker of the Knesset during the Begin Ministry.
The financial needs of the refugees in Kobe were met by an allocation of one yen and ten cents per person per week. This sum, for which we queued outside the communal centre each week, was a rock bottom amount, just adequate for sustenance. On one occasion, a short elderly man was standing ahead of me, leaning against a wooden fence. He was no other than Senator Szeroszewsky, the owner of the largest private Jewish bank in Warsaw to whom old maids from the provinces would entrust their dowries. Seeing him there also in the queue prompted me to reflect how war levelled all and to wonder how he, as a onetime moneyed tycoon, must have felt standing in that line in full public gaze.