The House of Twenty Thousand Books

by Sasha Abramsky

  No matter that from the summer of 1939 until Operation Barbarossa sent German soldiers streaming eastward in June 1941 Stalin had been an uneasy ally of the Fuhrer’s, carving up Poland with the Nazis, occupying Finland, devouring the Baltic states; no matter that in 1939 there had been a schism in the British Communist Party over the decision of its leadership to toe the line on the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact, with Party theoreticians arguing that good Communists should fight against the ‘imperialist’ war and seek to replace the leadership of Chamberlain and then of Churchill with a ‘people’s government’. Now that the fight was joined, now that Soviet Russia was fighting for its very survival, no rhetoric was to be spared in urging the successful prosecution of the war. In the early 1990s, newly opened Soviet archives revealed the extent to which British Communists during those crucial early days of the war chose to follow edicts from Moscow. ‘Direct your fire against capitulationist anti-Soviet elements’, the executive committee of the Comintern had ordered its British comrades, New Statesman journalists Paul Anderson and Kevin Davey reported, in an article dated 4 February 1994 on the revelations contained in the archives. Support a ‘united national front around the Churchill government’, the Comintern urged. Opposing that government, the Moscow scribblers wrote, now would ‘bring grist to the mill of pro-Hitlerite elements in England’.

  In May 1943, the twenty-six year old Chimen edited a pamphlet on behalf of the Jewish Fund for Soviet Russia. Titled Calling All Jews to Action!, it issued a stirring decree: ‘Fellow Jews of Great Britain, America and the other countries, if you want to prevent Hitler from exterminating us, if you want to save your own lives…help the great heroic Red Army’. In February 1944, in a pamphlet also published by the Jewish Fund for Soviet Russia (a rare copy of which is now housed in a special collection in the University of Sheffield’s library) the United Kingdom’s Chief Rabbi, Joseph Hertz, saluted the Soviet Union for saving ‘so many of our brethren from bestial torture and fiendish annihilation’. A year earlier, in another Jewish Fund publication, Hertz had called on all people of faith on Red Army Day to pray for a Soviet victory. The President of the Federation of Synagogues wrote, in a letter published as part of a collection of tributes by the Fund, of ‘the brilliant victories of the Russian armies against the German sadistic hordes’.

  ***

  Further cementing Chimen’s belief that the Soviets had the interest of Jewish communities at heart, immediately after the war ended, Russian writers such as Vassily Grossman, nowadays best known as the author of the magnificent, sprawling Life and Fate, were instrumental in bringing to light the horrors of the Holocaust and what they termed, with careful precision, the Annihilation Camps. Grossman, and his colleague Ilya Ehrenburg, had toured the liberated camps, detailing the conditions, interviewing the skeletal survivors, documenting Nazi book-keeping figures on the numbers of Jews who had been sent to each camp, calculating how many had been killed and how. They had detailed their findings in The Black Book: The Ruthless Murder of Jews by German-Fascist Invaders. It was the earliest comprehensive overview of the slaughter to be published, and it created shock waves around the world. (Not that that did Grossman any good; as Stalin became more anti-Semitic, so Grossman fell into official disfavour, and for many decades his books were rendered unavailable to Soviet readers.)

  Among the cities the fates of which it chronicled, The Black Book detailed the way the Holocaust had been implemented in Minsk and Slutsk, the towns of Chimen’s childhood, both of them in a region controlled by the sadistic Hauptstormführer Friedrich Wilhelm Ribbe, and both of which, even by the monstrous criteria of the Holocaust, witnessed extraordinary outbreaks of creative violence, a horror show that took peculiarly twisted imaginations to organise and reserves of stamina to implement. Pretty much every kind of torture designed by man was unleashed in the ghettos of these towns between 1941 and 1943. By the end of 1943, the Minsk ghetto – which at one time had housed between 75,000 and 100,000 Jews– was no more. Over a two year period all but the few thousand who had escaped to join partisan units in the surrounding forests had been killed. (Minsk was, as documented by the historian Barbara Epstein, in her book The Minsk Ghetto 1941–1943, one of the few ghettos where Communist partisans outside the ghetto and resistance inside managed to successfully co-ordinate their actions.) They were murdered either inside the ghetto itself or shot into mass graves dug at Tuchinka and other villages outside of Minsk. Even before Auschwitz and the other annihilation camps were fully ‘functional’, the Jewish communities in Byelorussia which Chimen had been born into had been destroyed. The people were slaughtered; grenades were lobbed into hideouts, and the buildings were razed to the ground so as to bury any survivors who might have successfully hidden during the mass killings. Gallows lined the town squares, and the Jewish population was progressively culled; its members hung, gassed in mobile killing units, shot or stabbed.

  Regarding the massacres in Slutsk, Ehrenburg found a letter from a young woman by the name of Manya Temchina, who had managed to escape the slaughter by jumping off a truck that was transporting her to the murder grounds: ‘On Monday, February 6, 1943, the entire area was surrounded, and they began to load people onto trucks. Pinkhos was taken first. Then they took Mamma and the children. That was at 9:00 a.m. They took me at one in the afternoon. I can still hear the screams of our little sisters as they were taken to be shot’. In towns like Minsk, contemporary writers who lived through the savagery, and who were grasping for a language to describe what had been unleashed, wrote of ‘pogroms’. They wrote of wave after wave of pogroms, on a scale unimaginable even by those who had survived Kishinev and the other atrocities during the last decades of Tsarism, pogroms conducted by local policemen as well as by Einsatzgruppen killers from the Waffen SS, which would take the lives of thousands of people, sometimes tens of thousands, in a couple of days of uncontained savagery. But the word could not do justice to the totality of the crime. Within a few years, a new term would have entered the lexicon: Holocaust, or, in Hebrew, Shoah.

  For Chimen and his fellow Jewish Affairs Committee theoreticians, during the war years and well into the post-war period, the answers to the grotesque questions raised by the Holocaust were simple, even if they often seemed contorted to outsiders. In their ten-point typed-out list explaining to a British audience ‘why Jews should vote Communist’ in the aftermath of the Nazi’s defeat and at the onset of the Cold War, they wrote that ‘The Communist Party knows that the days of pogroms and anti-Semitism in Russia are gone, and Jews there stand free and equal with other Soviet citizens. It is against this that European and American capitalists are arming, and that a new Nazi revival is being encouraged. They are all becoming fascist-minded’.

  ***

  And, again, I return in my mind to my grandfather’s determination to identify a safe haven for the people and the culture out of which he had come, for a place not riven by murderous attacks on Jews. His embrace of the Soviet Union in his youth came, at least in part, out of that search. After all, while the USSR was only too quick to persecute religious leaders, it had, in writing, declared anti-Semitism – the persecution of the Jewish people – to be a serious crime. And in the late 1920s, and more particularly from 1934 onward, it had promoted a form of internal Zionism, by setting up the ‘Jewish Autonomous Region’ of Birobidzhan in Siberia and encouraged the migration of Jews to this place where Yiddish culture would, supposedly, be allowed to flourish. In 1944, community leaders in Birobidzhan apparently marshalled 72,000 signatures on a document they sent Stalin praising him for his war leadership, for his role as ‘the wise and capable strategist of the all-conquering strength of progress, whose services to history and humanity are as innumerable as the stars in the heavens, and the sands on the sea-shore!’ It was a somewhat startling number given that, according to a 1941 report by the New York City-based Institute of Jewish Affairs, at its height no more than 60,000 Jews had relocated to the territory. Then again, the exaggerated number was, pe
rhaps, a lesser sin than the literary nonsense that accompanied it. Like so much else about Eastern European Jewry, like the Jewish East End in which Shapiro, Valentine & Co was situated, Birobidzhan was simply another echo, a ghostly, ethereal presence from the past, by the time I was old enough to rummage through Chimen’s books, its Jewish identity attenuated in the purges of 1936 and 1948–52. It still exists, but largely in name only, the ideal of a Yiddish-speaking homeland, a self-contained community-within-a-country long-shattered.

  Shortly after I read Dawidowicz’s work, I told Chimen that Hitler must have been crazy. I remember my grandfather, his eyes fiery with passion, becoming furious with me; such a diagnosis, he told me, his accent even heavier than usual, his index finger wagging in my face, gave Hitler and the Germans a free pass, it somehow negated the enormity of their crimes. To understand the Holocaust, he believed, you had to explore the gigantic systems – political, economic, bureaucratic – that underpinned it. These systems did not, could not, explain why the Holocaust had been unleashed; but they did help to explain why Germany had slipped into the sort of chaos that had paved the way for a monster like Hitler to assume power; and why, once in power, he was so able to use Germany’s formidable bureaucratic institutions to turn Europe into an abattoir. The mechanisms of the Holocaust were, Chimen felt, rationalism turned in on itself, science perverted, philosophy hijacked. The results were madness, Dantean in their vision of cruelty, but they sprang from a self-contained, bureaucratic logic of evil. An evil that carefully categorised Jews into workers and the unemployed, specialists and non-specialists, healthy and sick; that gave people in some categories jobs and food and immediately killed the others. An evil that assigned individuals not just colour-coded badges, but also individual numbers. An evil that methodically and minutely tracked who would die now and who would be set aside to kill later. ‘The German people’, Chimen wrote to a friend, forty years after the end of the war, ‘spewed the Jews out, killed them, looked for the final solution’. Barbarous it most certainly was, but crazy? Not by Chimen’s reckoning. To reduce it all to the psychotic tics of a few insane leaders was, Chimen felt, an insult to the memory of the individuals who had died and the communities that had been wiped off the face of the earth. As importantly, it was to underestimate the ever-present human capacity to inflict evil, to obey heinous commands.

  Left Book Club founder Victor Gollancz wrote in his pamphlet What Buchenwald Really Means, published in April 1945, just weeks before the Third Reich’s final defeat, that the Holocaust was a ‘sin against humanity – this sin so great that even to speak of it, even to think of it, makes one ashamed to be a man’. How, Gollancz wanted to know, could so many people have turned a blind eye, despite years of evidence of the scope and depravity of the unfolding genocide? ‘And now ask yourself, reader – what did you do about it? Nothing? Why? Because you didn’t care enough? Because it was none of your business? Because you couldn’t bear to think about it, and so averted your eyes? Or because – because – “well, what on earth could I, an ordinary, powerless individual do anyhow?” They are all poor answers, all those. They say little for your citizenship, for your humanity, for your active belief in the brotherhood of man’. Gollancz’s cri de coeur represented well Chimen’s thinking on the Shoah. It was so monstrous, so vile, that for the rest of his life it would hover over him, haunt him.

  In the 1940s, Chimen still believed that Communism could offer a way out for humanity, a way to prevent such horrors from recurring. ‘In the Soviet Union, where no threat of extermination exists’, Chimen and his National Jewish Committee comrades wrote in 1944, ‘where there is no national discrimination, and where the fullest democratic freedom is enjoyed by the whole people, there is no Jewish question’. The ‘Jewish question’ they believed, could only exist when and where anti-Semitism flourished. Abolish anti-Semitism, and the question itself disappeared. ‘A new world will follow the defeat and extermination of fascism together with its oppression of the Jews and other peoples: a world of freedom brought into being by the united efforts of all decent mankind and guaranteed by the presence of the USSR, the proven champion of all oppressed peoples’.

  During the latter years of the war, in keeping with this hope, when Chimen and his fellow National Jewish Committee theoreticians were hard at work turning the Jewish East End red, leading Communist figures frequently visited Chimen and Mimi’s various homes. In November 1943, the Soviet Jewish poet Itzik Feffer, and the director of the Moscow Yiddish Theatre Shloyme Mikhoels, came to Britain to rally support for the Russian effort against the Nazis, and to call for the swift creation of a Second Front in the west. Thousands of men, women and children showed up to hear them talk in Manchester, Glasgow and London. Invitations to receptions at which the duo would speak were sent out, on small off-white calling cards, by the Jewish Fund for Soviet Russia. Prominent Jewish figures were invited to write letters to Soviet Jewry expressing solidarity with their struggle. In early November, after a huge gathering, the two men met the Chief Rabbi and his colleagues – probably including Chimen’s father, Yehezkhel. Then, according to the historian Henry Srebrnik, in London Jews and British Communism, 1935–1945, they stayed up until three in the morning meeting Chimen and his fellow National Jewish Committee members: Lazar Zaidman (a Romanian Jew who had been blinded in one eye by his captors during years of incarceration for his political activities in Romania in the 1920s), the Imperial College mathematician Hyman Levy, Jacob Sonntag and Alec Waterman. Their strategy was blunt: to use the organising powers of the Communist Party, and in particular its Jewish committee, to rally the British and American public to the Soviet fight. They talked several times that week, Chimen told his young friend David Mazower sixty years later, at the Hyde Park Hotel, where the Soviet pair had been accommodated.

  ***

  Chimen’s fears about the vulnerability of Jews to extraordinary violence did not end with the Allies’ victory over the Nazis. Immediately after the German capitulation on 8 May 1945, while the war with Japan was ongoing, shadowy publications such as The Patriot and The Vanguard started circulating in English towns, blaming a Jewish conspiracy for Hitler’s defeat, and warning England to expect its own demise as Jewish financiers and radicals sought to gain control over this country too. In Parliament soon after the war ended, while revelations of the scale of the Holocaust against the Jews of Europe were still fresh in everybody’s mind, the virulently anti-Semitic Conservative MP, Captain Archibald Ramsey, proposed re-enacting the Statute of Jewry of 1275. (Among other things the code contained was a requirement that Jews wear identity badges, precursors of the yellow Stars of David enforced by the Nazis.) In December 1945, Oswald Mosley, whose British Union of Fascists had marched through the East End before the war, took fascist salutes from his followers at a gathering in the Royal Hotel in London. A year later, several fascist groups decided to unite under the auspices of a National Front. Meanwhile, yet another of the would-be dictators, a fascist leader named Victor Burgess, responded to growing numbers of attacks against British forces by Jewish organisations in what was still the British Mandate of Palestine, by urging Britain to engage in retaliatory punishments. For every British soldier injured, he recommended, one hundred British Jews should be publicly flogged. It was an alarming echo of Nazi practice in occupied Europe.

  In the wake of the revelations of the Holocaust, these groups were almost entirely marginalised, but their existence alone was enough to frighten Chimen and his friends. When the ten-year-old Raph Samuel and one of his mates, Peter Waterman, crept out onto Hampstead Heath in August 1945 to join in the celebrations of the victory over Japan, Chimen and Peter’s father Alec rushed out in a panic looking for them. They feared that the fascists would make trouble; that, having lost the war they would wreak revenge by beating up young Jewish children. When Chimen and Alec found the two boys celebrating in the light of the bonfires at the start of what was shaping up to be an all-night party, they dragged them back to the safe confines of Hi
llway. Decades later, Mimi would express that same fear, in a letter that she wrote to me in September 1993, a month after I had moved to New York. ‘We have had a terrible political shock this week. In a ward bye-election in Tower Hamlets the British Union of Fascists have won a seat by seven votes’. Casting an eye back to the days surrounding the war, she continued that, ‘Stepney was always a stronghold for the Mosleyites’. Ironically, the same poverty and daily anxieties that had generated support for the Communist Party in London’s East End had also made it fertile recruiting territory for the Fascists.

  Perhaps more significantly, the activities of the British Union of Fascists and the National Front in the post-War years crystallised for Chimen his sense of terror that the Holocaust was, somehow, an incomplete project, that other vastly destructive political movements would arise to try to finish off the job of extermination that Hitler had begun. He worked, ever more feverishly, on trying to understand how to secure safety for Jews in a world of mechanised killing. He concluded, in the war’s immediate aftermath, that the answer was not a Jewish state but a socialist world. He put his faith in a universalist ideology, and hoped that the new economic relationships he wanted to see created would be powerful enough to counter fascism.

  It was probably in the front room at Hillway, shortly after the end of the war, that Chimen helped to write a ‘syllabus’ on the Jewish Question, for the Communist Party’s Jewish Committee. Question seven asked, ‘What is the Party Attitude to Zionism?’ The answer: ‘The influence and propaganda of Zionism is pernicious and harmful to the Jewish people and to general progress and must be combatted and countered’. It was probably also in this room that the Committee talked over their fourteen-page memorandum on how to oppose British rule in Palestine without endorsing Zionism. ‘Ever since the Balfour Declaration, Zionism has sought to be a lackey of Imperialism by forming a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism’, they declared. ‘For more than a quarter of a century it has kept the Jews apart from the Arabs in Palestine.’ These were arguments that would have been largely familiar to Jewish political thinkers and activists in the Eastern Europe that both Chimen’s generation and that of his parents had been born into. Chimen and Yehezkel were on very different sides of this debate at that time, but by this point in his life Chimen did not argue about politics with his father: instead, he fought out these disputes with his secular friends.