by Roger Cohen
ALSO BY ROGER COHEN
Soldiers and Slaves:
American POWs Trapped by the Nazis’ Final Gamble
Hearts Grown Brutal:
Sagas of Sarajevo
In the Eye of the Storm:
The Life of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf (with Claudio Gatti)
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2015 by Roger Cohen
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Graywolf Press and Mary Szybist for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Another True Story” from Incarnadine: Poems by Mary Szybist, copyright © 2013 by Mary Szybist. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the author and Graywolf Press. www.graywolfpress.org.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cohen, Roger.
The girl from Human Street : ghosts of memory in a Jewish family / Roger Cohen.
— First edition.
pages cm
A Borzoi Book.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-307-59466-2 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-385-35313-7 (eBook)
1. Cohen, Roger—Family. 2. Jews—Lithuania—Biography.
3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Lithuania—Biography. I. Title.
DS135.L53L54 2014
940.53′18092757′91AB 757′912 23
2014017900
Jacket images courtesy of the author
Jacket design by Abby Weintraub
All photographs courtesy of the author’s family unless otherwise indicated.
v3.1
For my father, Sydney Cohen
And to the memory of my mother, June
“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
—LEWIS CARROLL, Through the Looking Glass
Set your flag at half mast,
memory.
At half mast
today and for ever.
—PAUL CELAN, Shibboleth
“When people go to Johannesburg, they do not come back.”
—ALAN PATON, Cry, the Beloved Country
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Family Tree
CHAPTER 1 Circle of Disquiet
CHAPTER 2 Bones in the Forest
CHAPTER 3 Gin and Two
CHAPTER 4 In the Barrel
CHAPTER 5 Château Michel
CHAPTER 6 Picnic in a Cemetery
CHAPTER 7 Patient Number 9413
CHAPTER 8 Jews in a Whisper
CHAPTER 9 Madness in the Brain
CHAPTER 10 The Lark Sings and Falls
CHAPTER 11 Death in the Holy Land
CHAPTER 12 The Ghosts of Repetition
CHAPTER 13 A Single Chain
Acknowledgments
Notes
A Note About the Author
Family Tree
To view a full-size version of this image, click HERE.
CHAPTER 1
Circle of Disquiet
The promontory of Bellagio tapers to the Punta Spartivento, the point where the wind divides. I stand at its tip watching bright cumulus clouds puff over the ridges into a still blue Italian sky. Ferries of unromantic doggedness plow their zigzag white furrows across the water. Cypresses, aligned like sentries, cast their shade over shuttered villas of pale pink and ocher. I look north to Dongo, where Mussolini was captured, and beyond to the snowcapped peaks where Italians by the tens of thousands starved above the tree line during World War I. To the southeast lies Lecco, and to the southwest, Como. The water is clear and the peace abundant at the confluence of the three-limbed lake. Europe has long since quieted itself after its suicidal convulsions. Not a breath of wind stirs at the division of the winds.
Yet I find myself uneasy. Calm surrounds me but eludes me. A journalist’s life is agitation. What brings me of a sleepy afternoon to a place where the bells of Bellagio toll the hours and the half hours is a whispered admonition: “Stop!” I have grown suspicious that all the running in my peripatetic life might not have been toward something but away from something. Stillness feels like the most dangerous state of all.
My life has been spent crossing lines, gazing at the same picture from different angles in order to evoke it. The journalist moves in the opposite direction from the crowd, toward danger, often leaving the settled majority perplexed. Why, people ask, do you do that? In search of a fair understanding, you say, and they shake their heads. There is nothing to understand, they insist, just write the truth!
But truths are many, and that is the problem. Memory is treacherous, as distinct from history as emotion from form. Every war is fought over memory. Violent nationalism is revived memory manipulated as revealed truth.
Conflict is incubated in the contested “truths” the past bequeaths. Questions swirl: Who came first to the land? Who planted the millennial olive trees? Who killed whom first? Does the church predate the mosque? What of the synagogue that may precede them both? The slaughter on that dusty plain where skulls were piled has never been avenged nor set on the scales of justice. As for the rape of the daughters of the house, it will not be forgiven until the last tree withers.
Identities are assembled piece by piece. Each drop of blood shed, each shrapnel scar on a wall, each land grab, is annotated in the Book of Unforgiving. In the Middle East, the events of a thousand years past can seem as vivid as yesterday’s, their poison undiluted. The enemy imperatives of Arab and Jew demand that memory, like the fuse for a bomb, be shaped for maximum explosive effect. Truces last no longer than a cheap umbrella in a storm.
The river of discord runs on. Its tributaries are fed by the fashioning of myth. So, with reluctance, I have concluded that the only truth I can know is my own. However small, it is mine. Being a Jewish story of the twentieth century, it bears upon migration and displacement and suicide and persecution and assimilation. It also recounts bravery, a passionate quest for learning, obstinate love, and the pursuit of beauty. From Lithuania and then South Africa, the family path winds on through Britain to Israel and the United States. Joseph Brodsky wrote: “If there is any substitute for love, it’s memory. To memorize, then, is to restore intimacy.” The restoration of intimacy is more than an act of love; it is an attempt, by writing down a lost world before it dissolves, to bring memory closer to truth.
It has taken me a long time to piece all this together. Memories come not like heavy rain but like the drops falling from leaves after it. There were elements missing. At last I knew I would not be whole until I found them.
On May 7, 1945, my uncle, Capt. Bert Cohen of the Dental Unit of the Sixth South African Armored Division, Nineteenth Field Ambulance, made the following entry in his war diary:
After lunch Hilton Barber lent me his jeep and I scudded away on a delightful jaunt. We traveled through twisting country byways until the town of Monza. There we followed route 36 northward to Lecco. As we bypassed the town we got our first view of the famous Alpine lakes … an azure strip of unbelievable blue flanked by great mountains.… We passed through several icy tunnels and the beauty of the scene grew more breathtaking as we neared Bellagio, a wonderful village nestling in the fork of the lake beneath the majestic mountains.… A drove of little boys clambered onto the jeep
, an incredible number appeared from all over the place. At one stage Wilson counted 21 of them on the jeep. Bellagio was indeed delightful. It was while there that we heard that the war was over, a report that was subsequently verified as we drove on down Lake Como to Como.… All along the road from Bellagio throngs had lined each village street and flowers in profusion had been tossed into the jeep.
So, in Bellagio, right here, feted by children and flowers, my uncle’s war ended. “GUERRA FINITA!!!”—“WAR OVER!!!”—he exulted in his diary. He was twenty-six and far from home. As a young dentistry graduate from the University of the Witwatersrand, he had enlisted in Johannesburg on January 15, 1943. After training, he flew by stages to Egypt to join the Allies’ North African campaign. From there, in April 1944, he embarked for Italy, on the lowest deck, landing in Taranto, near the heel of Italy’s boot. Churchill had called Italy “the soft underbelly of the Axis,” but resistance to the Allied assault was stern. Bert’s progress northward through Naples, Rome, and Florence to Bellagio was no sunlit Italian passeggiata. The winter of 1944 was spent encamped high in the freezing Apennines facing a German line stretching across the country from Pisa to Rimini. He filled teeth in freezing, improvised dental surgeries.
My uncle Bert’s exultant entry in his war diary for May 7, 1945:
“GUERRA FINITA!!!”—“WAR OVER!!!”
Bert had to battle through the German lines. At Finale Emilia, north of Modena, on April 24, 1945, he was ordered into a bend in the Penaro River where a Nazi column was trapped. Skiet gemors—Shoot the garbage—was a rough guide to his Afrikaner commander’s battle code. An artillery battery pulverized the enclave. Wrecked vehicles smoldered. Wounded horses, nostrils flared in gasping horror, bayed—a terrible sound. In the carnage, ammunition exploded and tires burst. The stench of roasted flesh and putrefaction pervaded the air. Intestines of gutted animals ballooned from their carcasses. A squad of South African infantry marched through the ruins, bringing a bullet of mercy to animals that still agonized. One dead German in particular caught Bert’s eye: a blond, square-jawed young man with a long straight nose, hair flecked with blood and smoke, legs twisted grotesquely, abdomen ripped open, coils of gut spilling through a ragged gash into the dust, sightless blue eyes gazing at infinity. Beside the corpse lay scattered letters from the soldier’s mother in Hamburg. She wrote about Der Angriff, the Allied bombardment of the city that killed more than 42,000 people. Uncertain what to do, Bert returned the letters to the dead man’s pocket before grabbing a few ampoules of morphine found in an abandoned, ammunition-filled German ambulance.
That single German corpse among the more than 600,000 casualties of the Italian campaign haunted my uncle for the rest of his life. Bert dwelt on him as if this death were his responsibility, or as if he, a Jew from South Africa, might somehow have brought this handsome young man, Hitler’s model Aryan, back to the life denied him. The dead man inhabited his dreams. Bert thought that he should have kept the letters, for some reason, perhaps to return them to a bereaved mother in Hamburg. He was a link in a circle that never closed.
Bellagio also marked him. He returned four days after his first visit, on May 11, 1945, and was billeted for a week in the magnificent Villa Gerly, on the banks of the lake. His diary records a lunch that day at Silvio’s restaurant. “We lunched sumptuously on fresh trout and fresh butter,” Bert wrote. “Such food was so novel and so exciting to our palates long jaded by M and V that I for one ate far too much.” Canned meat and vegetables (M and V), tasting of neither, were the staple military diet. After lunch Bert dozed off on the grass, a siesta troubled only by ants. In the late afternoon he decided to go for a swim:
We rowed out into the middle of the lake and there I plunged in. The water was icy cold a few feet below the surface. About halfway I realized I had overestimated my swimming ability and underestimated the distance. The swim turned into a horrifying ordeal. I was fighting panic, not with complete success. It is one thing to be able to take a grip if you can stop and weigh up the situation but quite another if you can’t stop to collect your calm. I couldn’t stop. It would have been better to have doggy paddled and relaxed but driving panic made my haste frantic. I was exhausted when I reached the shore. My heart was pounding and my head was bursting with pain. It was quite the most unnerving and terrifying experience I have had since I left home.
In this way, four days after the end of the war, Captain Cohen almost lost his life in Bellagio. He would have gone out in a sumptuous manner, after a lunch of delicious fish, in the midst of a beautiful lake, beneath the mountains, a few hundred yards from the Punta Spartivento. It is a good thing, however, that he did not encounter a watery North Italian grave. What a waste, people would have said, to die when the war was over. As if the war being over made any difference to the waste and the grief. The thing about life’s chains, and the lines of memory that eddy along them, is you never know when they may get broken—in a mountainous trench, on a bend in the river, or three hundred meters down in a sunlit lake after a good lunch celebrating peace.
Europe was a return journey. My paternal family had left the imperial Russian province of Kovno, in what is now Lithuania, a half century earlier. From faraway South Africa had filtered accounts of sunlight and ostrich feathers, diamonds and gold, space and opportunity on the high veld. Set against the drab Russian winter and the anti-Semitic tribulations of the Pale of Settlement, this prospect was enticing.
The decision to leave proved prescient. Shavli, or Shavel, now the Lithuanian town of Šiauliai, was home to almost ten thousand Jews, or 75 percent of the population, when, in 1896, my grandfather Morris Cohen departed for South Africa. About eight thousand Jews were still there in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II, active in the leather and shoe industries, working as laborers and craftsmen, attending several synagogues. They, and thousands of others who came there as refugees from points farther west during the first two years of the war, would be wiped out. Starting on July 18, 1941, the Jews were herded into a ghetto. Many thousands did not get that far: they were driven into the forests and shot at the mouths of pits they had been made to dig themselves. The Nazi Einsatzgruppen, abetted by Lithuanian collaborators, massacred them in droves. The Jews of Lithuania were killed fast and killed locally.
A handful of survivors of the ghetto, closed down on July 24, 1944, were driven westward by the retreating Germans. The men were thrown into the Dachau concentration camp, where, already weakened by years of confinement and the long death march into Hitler’s heartland, most of them met a skeletal end.
A photograph of Jews in the Šiauliai ghetto shows a dozen men standing to attention against a concrete wall in front of two Nazi soldiers with their backs to the camera. The Jews have their jackets buttoned, a straining for some scrap of dignity. There is defiance in certain eyes, resignation in others, fear, bewilderment. The faceless menace of the Nazis has a gleam about it. A helmet gleams; leather belts gleam; a rifle gleams; the knee-high black boots into which their breeches are tucked gleam. This is the brilliant surface of an ideology whose murderous progress has extinguished every human stain.
That might have been the end of the line, nameless in a nameless ditch in the depths of a birch forest, dispatched by the Reich’s executioners and their Lithuanian accomplices. It is possible to die without a trace.
Matters took much the same course in the village of Žagarė (Zhager in Yiddish), twenty-nine miles north of Šiauliai, close to the present Latvian border. My grandmother Pauline (“Polly”) Soloveychik left Žagarė for South Africa in 1906, a decade after Morris Cohen. A massacre of at least 2,250 Jews in the Žagarė market square and surrounding woods would take place in October 1941.
Nazi soldiers terrorizing Jews in the wartime ghetto at Šiauliai, my grandfather’s birthplace THE GHETTO FIGHTERS’ HOUSE MUSEUM/ISRAEL/THE PHOTO ARCHIVE
By the end of that month—well before the Nazis’ Wannsee Conference in January 1942, when the “Final Solution” was formalized—t
he centennial Jewish presence in Lithuania had been shattered. Of a population of a little over 200,000 at the start of World War II, the majority had been slaughtered, many of them in villages and the surrounding woods with the help of zealous locals. The gas chambers relieved the emotional strain on Nazi executioners who had cut down tens of thousands of women and children at the edge of pits or in village squares.
Soloveychik, in Russian, means “nightingale.” When asked his mother’s maiden name, my father would always respond: “Nightingale.” The nightingale had flown the nest.
She alighted in Johannesburg. Polly and Morris were married there in 1914. Four children, two girls and two boys, followed in seven years. The last of them was my father, Sydney Cohen, born on September 18, 1921. He wrote these “fragmented memories” of his first home on the gold ridge running east to west through the nascent city:
Our house at 88 Honey Street, Berea, was commissioned by my Dad shortly before he married Mum. Johannesburg at that time was a burgeoning town, younger than most of its inhabitants, arisen from a hectic mining camp and set among flat-topped, yellowing mine dumps. The main gold reef of the Witwatersrand had been discovered in 1884 and two years later the township of Johannesburg, which boasted a thrusting population of four thousand, was proclaimed. Carts and wagons from Barberton, Kimberley and even further afield lumbered along convergent dusty roads loaded with building materials and elementary mining machinery. By 1914 the original shantytown had acquired the trappings of urban order and a population close to 100,000. The most desirable suburb, originally Doornfontein, had edged progressively over Hospital Hill to Hillbrow and Berea and spread to the commanding ridge of Parktown.