Alongside the excitement, though, the young couple also found a good deal of disquiet in Paris. These were the years of the Great Depression, and they were very difficult in economic terms. At the start of 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, and the Nazi threat closed in on them from several points. Predictably, Hitler’s victory emboldened the anti-Semitic parties of Romania, where Misha’s parents, brothers, and other relatives still lived. The Hitlerian menace thus touched Misha and Noemí directly though Eastern Europe. But also, Paris itself was threatened. On February 6, 1934, activists of the French extreme right marched on the National Assembly, leaving fifteen people dead and two thousand wounded. The rightist march was sufficiently threatening to provoke a general strike in protest, organized by the General Confederation of Labor.114
My grandparents also experienced the insecurity of the times in a private way. On June 17, 1932, my mother was born. They named her Larissa, in honor of the journalist Larissa Reisner, about whom an article or two had been published in Amauta. From a very young age, Reisner had edited a journal opposed to the Great War; later she had joined the Bolshevik Party and married Fyodor Raskolnikov, a naval officer who had helped organize the Kronstadt Mutiny, although they later divorced. She also collaborated with Leon Trotsky, was a correspondent for Izvestiya and Novaia Zhizn, Maxim Gorky’s newspaper, and covered the 1923 revolts in Germany, where she fell in love with the Marxist leader Karl Radek, a man who would later be arrested by Stalin. Reisner died from typhoid in 1926 when she was only thirty years old. Six years later, my grandparents gave her name to their firstborn.
My mother’s name speaks of the spirit of the times, and of the closeness people felt to lives shaken by the storms of war and revolution. But there was another thing: because she was born in France to Judeo-Romanian students, Larissa Adler had no nationality. This was in part because the status of her parents as Romanians gave them no protection whatsoever from the Romanian government, which issued travel papers to Jews only so that they might leave and not so that their children might inherit that nationality, but she also had no nationality because Larissa was not a française de souche, that is, the daughter of French citizens or persons to whom France had given some sort of official migratory status beyond that of students.
The lights of Paris did not translate into an offer of citizenship to a girl who was born there, as a result of the expulsion of Jews from Eastern Europe. This could not have been a very comforting sign, and I imagine that Misha and Noemí understood its message with perfect clarity: their time in Paris was transitory, a passage and not a destination. It was certainly in Paris that Noemí developed her keen sensitivity to the hypocrisy of imperial civilization, with its exalted humanism always blemished by a relentlessly self-serving politics.
Nova Sulitza
The political experience that they had gained with Mariátegui in South America, their involvement with the Institut d’Ethnologie, their socialist and antifascist activism, and their ethnological studies oriented toward a critique of racism must have made Misha and Noemí keenly aware of just how dangerous it was for them to stay in Europe. In 1934, Misha toured Poland. He was in Warsaw and a few other places giving talks against the racial pseudoscience of the Nazis. I don’t know the details of that experience, such as where the invitation had come from or even what exact places he visited. All that I do know is that he gave his talks in Yiddish. I imagine that it must have been disquieting to feel Germany’s proximity, with Hitler already as its chancellor, and to speak there against “race science” at a time of such virulent anti-Semitic rhetoric.
It is interesting to me that Misha was able so keenly to zero in on the racial problem. My impression is that the Americas provided useful elements for scientifically grounded skepticism with regard to European racism, and Nazi race science in particular, for a number of reasons. First, Misha had experienced treatment as a racial inferior in Romania (“a Jew”), and then as a racial superior (“a European”) in Peru and Colombia — he could offer direct testimony on racial myths and their perversions. Second, he had been part of two major racial emancipation movements: the rise of emancipated Jewish modernism, and the reconfiguration of Peruvian nationality, turning on its indigenous society. Finally, he had seen how ethnic groups emerge out of slavery and into freedom: the Chinese in Peru, and Afro-descendants in both Peru and Colombia.
The Nazi movement and anti-Semitic parties in Poland and Romania wanted to intimidate and suppress a people who were legally emancipated, and who had all of the elements needed for collective identification: a language (be it Yiddish or Hebrew), a tradition, a history. They sought to do this on the basis of pseudoscientific ideas concerning race and “natural” hierarchies. Misha’s experiences with emancipatory movements in Peru and Eastern Europe were now wedded to formal ethnological training with one of the world’s leading critics of racism and “race science,” so he decided to take this knowledge to those living close to the heart of the beast, and traveled through Poland in 1934.
After this tour, Misha and Noemí decided to travel with Larissa to Nova Sulitza. Noemí would get a chance to meet her in-laws there, while Misha’s parents, Hershel and Leah, would be introduced to their new granddaughter. Above all, the return trip to Nova Sulitza would be an opportunity to try to convince Misha’s family to leave Bessarabia for good, and join the young couple in Colombia.
There is little documentation of this interesting moment in their lives — just a couple of photographs, really. According to my mother, Misha devoted the two years that they stayed in Bessarabia to traveling to different villages to try to convince the greatest number of Jews possible to emigrate. I don’t know which villages he visited, nor with what organizations he may have tried to work, but going back to Bessarabia like this was certainly both a risky and a daring decision.
The situation for Jews in Romania had gotten considerably worse in the ten years that had passed since Misha left Nova Sulitza in 1924. At the time of his move to Peru, Cuza’s anti-Semitic party (the National League of Christian defense, or ANC) had just been formed. Three years later, the Legion of the Archangel Michael (more commonly known as the Iron Guard) was also formed. Both organizations now wedded political propaganda to regular intimidation of Jews in the public schools and universities and agitation among peasants in the countryside. Many of these peasants already felt animosity toward the Jews, who controlled much of the commerce in the region. However, Bessarabia’s traditional anti-Semitism, with its religious leanings, received a decidedly genocidal charge thanks to right-wing agitation, which enjoyed the added prestige of coming from Romania’s main cities and having the support of activists in the universities.
And the international scene had also changed. At the beginning of the 1920s, the governments of Romania were at least vaguely liberal, and they had a tense relation with fascist parties, even when they tolerated the intimidation and even the murder of Jews. Now Hitler was chancellor of Germany, so within Romania the prestige of Nazism was on the rise and its anti-Semitic parties were finding allies in the government.
The Great Depression had also impacted Romania’s exports and, given the Jews’ pivotal role in the commercialization of agriculture, it was easy to blame them for the downturn and so to channel peasant unease in their direction. The extent to which Romania’s two anti-Semitic political parties were able to convince peasants to dehumanize their Jewish neighbors is shocking. Reporting during the Second World War, barely five years after Noemí and Misha’s departure, the Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte described one of the many ways in which these peasants, now soldiers, murdered Jews:
At times in the riverbed and on the sandy banks that sloped up from it, the reeds and willows would tremble slightly as if, upon hearing a human approaching, some animal had hidden there. Then, shouting, “Mice! Mice!” the soldiers would take up their rifles and fire into the reeds. Women, uncombed girls, men dressed in long coats, an
d children would then emerge, running and tripping over themselves, falling and then picking themselves up. These were Jews from nearby villages who had escaped and hidden themselves among the reeds and willows.115
This process of dehumanization was already well on its way by 1935, when Misha, Noemí, and Larissa returned to Nova Sulitza. Even so, I don’t know how successful Misha was in his efforts to save his fellow countrymen. In his own house and family, he only met with mixed success. The decision to leave the village and region where one was born is never easy. Together with the natural reluctance to leave behind one’s home, the travel costs were high, and the greater part of Bessarabia’s Jewish population was poor. By the mid- and late 1930s countries like Peru were no longer encouraging Jewish emigration either. Bribes were often required in order to gain visas, and even that path was not guaranteed. To these impediments one must add yet another, which came from the town’s living memory. During the First World War, the Austrian army came to the town, taking food — which was always abundant in Bessarabia — before going on its way. Nova Sulitza had not been a strategic point of military occupation, nor had any battles been fought there. It is true that after the war there were bandits who set fire to part of the village, but the inhabitants had organized militias that successfully fought them off, and the damage that they inflicted was not lasting.
My great-uncle Zuñe (Alfonso), my great-grandmother Leah, and Misha Adler at the family home in Nova Sulitza, c. 1934.
Misha, Leah, Noemí, and my great-grandfather Hershel seated on the railing of the Nova Sulitza house, c. 1934.
Hershel and Leah Adler did not face an insurmountable economic impediment to emigration, since they were relatively prosperous, but they didn’t want to leave their home and start their lives over on a different continent. They also had a vivid memory of the Great War’s low local impact. Even so, they were not completely insensitive to Misha’s arguments either, nor were they entirely oblivious to the realities that surrounded them, and so they supported the departure of their children, Misha, Ana, Rebeca, and Zuñe, while deciding themselves to remain.
Hershel and Leah at their home in 1935 with their two granddaughters, Meri Meilijson (left) and Larissa Adler (right).
Misha Adler (standing on the right), Noemí Milstein (at the back of the line), and Larissa Adler (in front). I’m not sure at whose house this photo was taken, nor if these friends or relatives survived the Holocaust.
Each one of their children already had a South American connection, in any case. Ana had married Israel (“Susye”) Meilijson, from Nova Sulitza, who had worked as a peddler in Cumaná and later emigrated with Ana to Caracas. Their daughter, Meri, then only four years old, appears in a photo taken in Nova Sulitza next to my mother. Rebeca, of whom I also have a photograph from this time, seated on her mother’s lap, would marry Simón Vurgait, a friend of Misha’s who had emigrated with him to Peru, and who also ended up spending his life in Caracas. For his part, Misha’s younger brother Zuñe had also worked as a peddler in Cumaná alongside his future brother-in-law, Susye, back in the 1920s, and both had returned to Nova Sulitza. After Misha and Noemí’s visit, Zuñe left for good and established himself in Bogotá, where he opened a shoe store.
Rebeca Adler, with her parents, Leah and Hershel, c. 1935.
The four siblings left Nova Sulitza together in 1936. They were among the last who were able to leave before the outbreak of the war. Hershel and Leah stayed and died in a concentration camp at Bershad.
CHAPTER TEN
Genocide
Transnistria
What was it like for Leah and Hershel to remain in Nova Sulitza without their children? Maybe they felt a sense of peace knowing that their children would be safe, mixed with sadness at the thought that they might never see them again. Even in the best of cases, transatlantic travel was not a minor undertaking, and world politics made it progressively more difficult for one to acquire the necessary visas for any foreseeable reunion. At the local level, things were just getting worse. Economics professor Alexandru C. Cuza, the founder of the anti-Semitic League of National Christian Defense, had formed an alliance with the National Agrarian Party of Octaviano Goga, and together they created a new fascist party, the National Christian Party, which brought the Goga-Cuza duo to the head of the government. Although the pair lasted only one year in power, official anti-Semitism gained general acceptance, and the way was now well paved for an alliance between Romania and Hitler’s Germany.
The Goga-Cuza government promoted regulations that effectively either excluded or restricted the number of Jews in the fields of medicine, law, pharmacology, industry, business, and administration, making it in all cases a requirement to demonstrate Romanian citizenship. In passing these regulations, the government knew very well that the majority of Jews in Bessarabia had been prevented from acquiring Romanian citizenship, despite the laws of 1923. These policies were accompanied by a ferocious media campaign that filled the Jews of Bessarabia with fear, except that by this time, leaving the country was practically impossible.
Energized by Hitler’s new power, the anti-Semitic party of Cuza launched a campaign of terror. Nova Sulitzers were worried, because the Goga-Cuza party had carried out pogroms in the nearby villages of Vorsha and Arad, and Jews were being attacked randomly on the trains. The fear increased when Cuza’s party set up offices in Nova Sulitza as well is in the neighboring towns. Nova Sulitza’s Jews were convinced that they were soon going to be the target of a pogrom, and their feeling of dread was made even more acute after Germany’s annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia. By that point, the people became terrified and began to look for visas in order to emigrate to any country at all, but by this time it was too late.116
Instead of people managing to get out, though, something entirely unexpected happened. Hitler and Stalin had signed their nonaggression pact, and among its secret clauses was a provision allowing the Soviet Union once again to take possession of Bessarabia. This indeed took place, and on June 29, 1940, Soviet troops entered Nova Sulitza, with a great deployment of tanks and troops, while the Romanian army was forced to withdraw in humiliation. Given the rising tension with the Romanians, Soviet troops were received as liberators; Nova Sulitzers had been living in a state of terror under the policies of Cuza, and they were expecting a pogrom at any moment. The Romanian army would later exact revenge on Bessarabia’s Jewish communities for having so happily received the Soviets, using that as a pretext for murder and pillage.
The first Soviet annexation of Bessarabia lasted only one year (June 1940 to June 1941), and while official Soviet anti-Semitism was much less pronounced than its Romanian counterpart, the local effects of occupation were terrible nonetheless. We know the history of this period thanks to Rabinovici’s invaluable book, since communication between Nova Sulitza and its South American diaspora was abruptly cut off after the Soviets occupied the town.
The first effect of the Soviet annexation was that the economy of Nova Sulitza, which had been declining since the 1920s, now entered into a free fall. Bessarabia was now cut off from the West, so all export business came to a grinding halt. Nova Sulitza was a small commercial city, with almost no industry, and without the business of exporting produce to the West, its economy collapsed. The Soviets also outlawed the free movement of people, further asphyxiating commerce and causing the ruin of Jewish businesses. Despite the region’s agricultural wealth, there was now hunger and famine. To deal with the problem, the Soviet government forcibly sent a hundred young Jewish men away to work in Russian coal mines, in conditions of freezing temperatures, hunger, and illness, a move that reduced these young men to being slaves of the state.117 Bonded labor was back. Those young men never came back, and most of them died in the mines.
The Soviet administration of Bessarabia also instituted a new system of governance, new identity papers, and above all new ways to classify the populati
on according to its loyalty to the regime (real or supposed). An office of the secret police (NKVD) now opened in Nova Sulitza, and it introduced a fear-based system of social control, based on a wide network of informants. The old local leadership was replaced by party cadres from Ukraine or Russia. The Soviets then began to expropriate private homes and force the former owners to share them with other families from within or beyond the village. There is no proof of this, but it seems very likely that Hershel and Leah had to accept other families into their home during this period. Rabinovici explains that the first houses to be expropriated were made of stone, which were those of the wealthiest families, but the wooden homes, such as that owned by my great-grandparents, were expropriated soon thereafter.
Political disappearances also began to take place. A politics of silence was gaining ground in Nova Sulitza. Nobody knew anything, nobody said anything. And it was best to know nothing. The people worked in the jobs to which they were assigned, and they survived as best they could. The economy was so depressed that there was hunger everywhere, and theft became so widespread that each workplace had to employ guards both day and night so that food didn’t disappear.118
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