What You Did Not Tell

by Mark Mazower

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Zachar

  Max always kept this last letter from his brother Zachar. It had been sent from Vilna on May 20, 1940:

  Dear Frouma and Max! If your stingy writing habits were unable to kill my familial attachment in peacetime, the chance for it is even smaller now in wartime. I hope you received my letter: I still have not heard from you. Inform me immediately: How did you survive the winter? We had an incredibly harsh one. How are you feeling now? How is your health? Do you live in London now or someplace farther away? How do your children react to events? To sum it all up: write about everything and immediately. Everything here is the same as usual: to be more precise, the situation keeps deteriorating … I had news about Semyon a couple of months ago—that he had been bedridden for a couple of months, but then, it seems, recovered. Stay healthy and unharmed and write to me without fail.

  He had signed off “Z. Mazoveras” in the Lithuanian style, because the Lithuanians had taken over Vilna the previous October in a deal with the Russians: they were converting the city as fast as they could into a new national capital, targeting both the Poles, who had run it for the past two decades, and the local Jewish inhabitants as well. It was a completely futile effort because less than a month after Zachar’s letter was sent, the Red Army marched in, the city became the capital of a brand-new Soviet republic, and tens of thousands of its inhabitants were arrested by the NKVD. One year later, the Germans launched their invasion of the Soviet Union, and for Zachar and his family the time of writing letters was over.

  Max in London; Zachar in Vilna; Semyon in St. Petersburg: Three brothers and three choices, or better—since choice does not feel quite right—three wagers on fate is how it might seem. In hindsight, time becomes a series of might-have-beens, history a slalom course, a battle of wits with whatever lies round the next corner. When Max passed through Vilna in early 1920, on his way out of Russia, Zachar’s address was 5 Portowa Street, a large building on a wide street where he and his family rented an upper-floor apartment, number 18. Apart from an old people’s home in a fin de siècle block nearby, there were few other traces of communal Jewish life, for this was not at the heart of the old Jewish quarter. We know his address from the application Zachar made for a Lithuanian passport and from Max’s simultaneous application for Polish papers. We know too that Zachar had by then become a dentist. He had a ten-year-old daughter, Rebecca, and he was married to a woman called Perel, or Pearl. And that is about it.

  Some while ago, when I was trying to find out more about Vilna, and about Portowa Street in particular, I came across the memoirs of Litman Mor: I had never heard of him but he turned out to have been in the Zionist youth movement in interwar Belorussia and had ended up as a civil servant in Israel. The crucial point was that for the first year or two of the Second World War, Mor had stayed in the same apartment block as Zachar. In October 1939 Mor had come to Vilna to escape the Russian troops flooding into eastern Poland. The parents of one of his friends owned the building at 5 Portowa Street.

  Thanks to Mor’s memoir, we know that one night shortly after the arrival of the Wehrmacht in the summer of 1941, Lithuanian police acting on German orders searched the building from top to bottom and took away all the Jewish men they found. Mor and his friend were hiding in what the police thought was an unoccupied flat, and they heard screams as the men were forced to leave, and the cries and yells of the women and children left behind. When the raid was over, they stayed on for a time in one of the apartments. But when the ghetto was established that September, the remaining Jewish residents of Portowa Street had to leave the building and find lodgings within the ghetto, and Mor and his friend collected their belongings and entered it voluntarily. Soon the rumors reached them that people were being taken to the nearby Ponary forest, a prewar picnic spot a few miles out of town, to be shot. “All roads lead to Ponar now / There are no roads back,” run the words of a lullaby written by an eleven-year-old boy in the ghetto.

  Growing up in North London in the 1960s and ’70s, I think we always felt fortunate that our sense of our family background was not defined by the Holocaust, not bound up with the kind of obsessed fascination with the death camps that was fast becoming part of public culture on both sides of the Atlantic. In thinking about ourselves this way we did not ignore Zachar’s story; it simply did not impinge on us. Actually we did not even know who this long-forgotten uncle of Dad’s was.

  When I started to search among the databases, quite numerous it turned out, of Holocaust victims, I came across some information in a list in the Yad Vashem Archives. It contained a surprising number of Mazowers or Mazovers, although almost none of them, so far as I could tell, counted as close relatives. There was one reference, however, to a Zachar Mazover. It came in the file of Riva Zilberbach, who was listed as having died with her baby, a girl called Tonia, in 1942 in Vilna. No mention was made of the fate of her husband or her father. But the Mazower connection is specified as Riva’s maiden name was Mazover and her father’s first name was given as Zachar, and her birth date is given as 1912, close enough to the information on an earlier Lithuanian file for Zachar’s daughter’s birth date as 1910: Riva is an obvious abbreviation for Rebecca. An adjacent file referred to someone who was probably her mother, Pola, listed similarly as having died in the ghetto in 1942. Was she Zachar’s wife, the same woman named on an earlier document as Perel? As very few Mazowers lived in Vilna between the two world wars—to judge at least from the telephone directories of the era—almost certainly what I had found was a reference to Zachar and his family, his grown daughter, about thirty and newly a mother.

  Unexpected confirmation that I was on the right track came a little later. In Paris my French cousin Patrick handed me two plastic shopping bags. The envelopes inside contained a trove of family correspondence—dozens of letters in Russian, mostly from Frouma over a span of twenty years to her brother and sister in Paris. In one of them, dated late July 1945, Frouma reported that they had just been visited by a young Polish Jewish refugee couple from Vilna: Markus Klok, who was a Bundist, and his wife, Syma. The Kloks had managed to flee the city at the start of the occupation, thanks to the papers issued by a very remarkable man, the Japanese vice-consul in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara. The so-called Sugihara visas, mostly given out in defiance of the orders of Sugihara’s superiors, entitled the bearer to cross the Soviet Union, and enabled thousands of Jews to escape the Nazis, among them the Kloks. They had made the epic journey along the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Japan and Shanghai, before managing to find a ship to Cape Town and finally reaching Britain at the end of 1942. England became their base for the rest of the war and they often stayed in Oakeshott Avenue; in official documents, they would give the Mazowers’ address as their residence in England. They were friends.

  The Kloks would have been able to tell Max much about the city he knew so well and about what had happened there in the years leading up to the war. In the summer of 1945, they also learned what had happened after the Germans had taken over because Markus met some survivors from the Vilna ghetto while he was working in a former concentration camp in Germany. They broke the news to him that his family had been killed, and so had his wife’s. And there was more—they reported that Max’s brother had been in the ghetto as well. Shortly after, Markus returned to London and told the Mazowers. “It means that [Zachar] died,” Frouma wrote, “because the Germans only transported out 1,700 men and 1,700 women, aged 18 to 30, and the others were wiped out … I cried so much for two days as I haven’t in a while.”

  A photograph taken by Syma on the day they shared the news, or very shortly after, shows Max, Frouma, and Dad on the doorstep of 20 Oakeshott Avenue. The hydrangeas are in bloom in the front garden, contrasting sharply with the darkness of the hall behind them. Dad is as smartly dressed as his father, and both of them have a quiet, courteous smile for the camera. Frouma does not: She looks pensive and her arms are emphatically folded. Standing between them, she seems to me a
n embodiment of strength, the protective deity of the household. On either side, her two men, the aging Russian past and her English future. I came across the picture more or less by accident, while I was searching through a collection of Syma’s papers online; her married name had changed by the time her papers had been catalogued, she had died, and the picture was filed under a misleading heading. Yet there it was, rising unexpectedly out of the sea of the Internet. I stared at it a long time. It seemed then, and still seems to me, to contain within it some essential aspect of the household in Highgate, a kind of marker of where the three of them stood in the world, a family and a home, a hard-won achievement.

  It is almost certain therefore that Zachar’s family was among the tens of thousands of the Jews of Vilna who either died in the ghetto or were shot by executioners in the sandpits amid the pine trees at Ponary. Any who did not die there met their end in Sobibor, where the elderly survivors of the ghetto were sent—Zachar would have been sixty-five in 1942. The only other possibility, but it is remote in the light of Frouma’s letter, is that the Yad Vashem files referred to someone else entirely with the same name, and that Zachar and his family were not in Vilna at all when the Germans entered. At various times, Dad seems to have thought they had ended up in the port town of Sopot or in Riga; neither offered better prospects for Jews than Vilna. What is certain is that after the war Zachar and his family were never heard from again.

  The thing that really surprised me in the whole story was Dad’s lack of clarity about something as fundamental as where his uncle had been living when the war came. Evidently the subject of Max’s brother had been mentioned so seldom in Oakeshott Avenue that even though Dad had almost certainly been at home on the day the news from Vilna came in, he most uncharacteristically did not remember the details. Perhaps one’s capacity to forget painful news can be trained, a kind of defense. Or it may have been a choice on his part, an opting for the future over the past—the future of his homeland over the dismal news from a country he had never seen. The Kloks’ visit had coincided with the Labour Party’s historic victory in the first general election after the war. Dad, who had just joined the party, had been working hard locally. He and a group of friends had been on the streets getting out the vote, and he had been jubilant when the results came in. It was a moment in which to look forward, and while the figure of Zachar floated inchoately in his memory, the summer of 1945 always meant for him that great feeling of excitement and hope.

  The original silence must have been Max’s, I suppose, and if so, it was certainly not an expression of indifference. Max’s brothers were both younger than him and he had looked after them once their father died. They had shared an allegiance to revolutionary Jewish socialism and the experience of being targeted early in the century by the Tsarist authorities. Zachar had joined the Bund after Max but he had suffered no less, enduring years in exile before returning to Vilna in 1913—one Okhrana letter mentioned him as the Bund’s “librarian” there—and settling down with his wife and baby girl. Once in London Max had continued to care about them. With Semyon in Petrograd, contact had been difficult. But Max was in touch with Zachar for some years more, sending money and possibly seeing him on trips abroad; he only stopped visiting Poland in 1931. Around 1926, to help his brother out, Max had set up a trading company exporting goods from England to Poland so that Zachar could market the goods and share in the profits. When that did not pan out, Max did something more. He sold his house and moved to a smaller one round the corner, at 20 Oakeshott Avenue, where the family would live until his death, thus freeing up money to send to Zachar. In this sense, the very presence of the Mazowers on Oakeshott Avenue testified to the closeness of the bond between the two brothers.

  Although Max had not been to Poland for nearly a decade when it was invaded in 1939, he was following the news coming out of there closely. Yet when the fighting and the killing ended and there was no more to be done, he put that last letter away in a drawer, kept the tiny photos it had contained of Zachar and his wife, and retreated into silence. This may have been out of a sense that talk could do no good; it may even have been, in some less articulated way, a kind of gift to those around him, a desire to allow them the space, Dad in particular, to form their own relationship to past and future rather than to impose some kind of duty of grief upon them. After Max died in 1952, Zachar’s memory faded with him. And this silence was emulated by Dad, who never met his father’s brothers, and as a result, to him they were little more than names.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Expanding Silence

  During the Second World War there were not many people in London better placed than Max to have made a knowledgeable assessment of the prospects facing the Jews in Nazi-dominated Eastern Europe. In the postal censorship service, where he worked during the war, he was valued for his expertise in German, Polish, French, and Russian, not to mention his precision and discretion. But he possessed a far more important source of information than that. Beginning in 1941, Leon Feiner, a leading Polish Bundist, was sending top-secret reports on the Nazi treatment of the Jews from German-occupied Warsaw to the Bundist representatives with the Polish government in exile in London. Feiner’s conduit was the astonishingly courageous Polish officer Jan Karski; Feiner had actually helped Karski to enter the ghetto through the Warsaw sewers to see conditions there for himself. Their reports provided the earliest precise intelligence to reach the Allies on the extent of the killing.

  Max would have known about much of what those reports contained because he was on intimate terms with the leading Bundists in wartime London, notably with the man to whom Feiner was sending his materials—the party’s main representative in London, Shmuel Zygielboym. Zygielboym was one of the many Bundists whose stay in the gray, unfamiliar British capital was cushioned by Max and Frouma’s hospitality in Oakeshott Avenue. He had been born in Vilna at about the time that Max was beginning his socialist work there and had served on the Bund central committee since 1924. In December 1939 he had been smuggled out of the country, leaving behind most of his family, and after a long and roundabout journey he had reached London in March 1942 where he joined the Polish government-in-exile as one of its two Jewish members. Two months later, he received a report from Feiner that detailed the extermination site at Chelmno and the use of gas there, and estimated that 700,000 Polish Jews had already been murdered. Zygielboym managed to get articles based on this published in British newspapers and to speak about it on the BBC. The details were strikingly accurate and appeared just as the German leadership was finalizing its plans for the complete extermination of Poland’s Jewish population.

  Zygielboym’s wife and two sons were among those trapped inside the Warsaw ghetto, and he was in a terrible predicament and consumed with guilt for having abandoned them. Feiner’s instructions were that he should use the information to get the Allies to do something to stop the killing, but the failure of the Bermuda Conference, which was called to address the issue of Jewish refugees in April 1943, depressed him deeply. It was clear that there was no political will on the Allied side to act with the speed and on the scale required. On May 11, in his West London apartment, Zygielboym took his own life. He had hoped news of his death would shame the Allies into action, but it did not.

  There were dozens of mourners at the Golders Green crematorium later that month, among them, it seems probable, Max and perhaps Frouma, in a gloomy hall filled with the dark overcoats and sad faces of the survivors paying tribute to their comrade. Eleven years later, in 1954, two years after Max died, there was another memorial service and this time it was Dad who attended. He listened as the speaker, another veteran, mentioned Max and the support he had given the Bundist leadership in those wartime years. Max’s obituary in the New York Bundist press had said the same thing: “His welcoming home became a meeting place for colleagues and Bundist workers who performed important tasks to aid the Jews in Poland.” It was not only Zygielboym: Leon Oler, the man to whom Zygielboym addressed his
farewell letter before his suicide; Emanuel Scherer, who took over from him after his death as the Bund delegate to the Polish government-in-exile in London—these and other leading Bundists, strangers in London, wanderers, all passed through the front door of Oakeshott Avenue and sought some respite there as they grappled with the negation of all that the Bund had ever stood for.

  So it would not be odd if after the war Max, who had never been one to waste words, felt nothing remained to be said or done on the larger issues for which he had once risked his life. A significant portion of Soviet Jewry survived the war but remained in the hands of men whose views and temperaments he had known at first hand for more than half a century. In Poland, only ruins were left. The forests he had once traversed on clandestine Bund business had seen atrocities on a scale no one in those days had imagined possible. In his birthplace, Grodno, the Gestapo chief had made the head of the Jewish council don a top hat and tails and then paraded him through the streets seated upon a barrel of excrement. He had made town elders clear away the snow with teaspoons. He had hanged children. Vilna, Łódź, Warsaw—the once flourishing cities where Max had lived and played a role of some import—were vestiges, unrecognizable. As for the triumph of Zionism in the Middle East and the creation of an independent Jewish state, this represented the antithesis of everything Max had believed in, and there is no evidence that I have come across that Israel’s founding moved him in any way. Silence and loyalty were all that remained. In 1947 he had a bout of jaundice and in the photos taken then he looks suddenly aged, stooped, and thin-cheeked. He became increasingly withdrawn and listless. There were a few more trips across the Channel to the Normandy coast he loved but no traveling beyond that. Other ailments followed and the life went out of him. After a period of illness, he died in the spring of 1952, taking most of his secrets to the grave.