The Girl from Human Street

by Roger Cohen

  Zofija is the link to George Gordimer. Her father, Andrėjus Kalendra, organized the rescue operation that saved the Gordimer family from the Nazis. A farmer, he had come to know them through Ira Gordimer’s hardware store in Papilė, which he frequented in the 1930s. A network of his friends, all farmers, hid members of the family after they escaped from the Šiauliai ghetto following the Kinderaktion in late 1943. It was too dangerous to hide four people in one place; the Gordimers were dispersed. They stayed at various times on farms owned by the Kalendra, Vaškys, Plekavičius, and Garbačiauskas families. Their survival constitutes a rare example of an entire family of four living through the Nazi slaughter in Lithuania.

  Zofija hands me letters she has received from George Gordimer since 2006. After the war, Gordimer’s father was in touch with Andrėjus Kalendra to ask if he needed anything. Kalendra responded that he did not save Jews because he expected something in return. Her father, Zofija says, was the kind of man who was charitable even toward a thief. The Soviets deported him to Siberia in 1951 because he opposed collectivization. He died there the following year at the age of sixty-eight, having fought through small deeds the two totalitarianisms of his age.

  Few resist. In a time of terror, the great mass is enthusiastic, compliant, calculating, or cowed. The righteous move to an inner compass. Their anonymous acts, however hopeless, constitute the most powerful rebuke to perpetrator and bystander. Resistance is never pointless, even if short-lived or doomed.

  After Kalendra disappeared with his family into the Soviet wilderness, communication between the Gordimers and their rescuers was interrupted for more than four decades. The Cold War cemented a silence built on fear in the East and evasion in the West. Only in 1996 did Zofija’s younger sister, Morta Jakutienė, manage to make contact with Gordimer through a physician in California, a hand and finger specialist named Ben Lesin with a particular interest in Lithuanian Jewry. Memory was pried loose from its totalitarian clamp.

  A newly independent Lithuania, confronted with the extent of its Nazi collaboration, sought out and celebrated its righteous few. Morta wrote, “Dear George, it is very hard to put down the history which is 50 years long in one letter. I think that we will be in touch for a long time, and our contact will not be broken.” Gordimer responded, beginning a late-life return voyage to the childhood he had kept secret. On June 22, 1998, he and Dorothy traveled to Lithuania for the first and only time. They met Morta and Zofija. Gordimer has a relentless character. He began to burrow into everything that had been left behind.

  A letter from Gordimer to Zofija lies among her papers. It is dated February 7, 2006, and reads: “The past year has been somewhat of a difficult year for me. Since February 2005, I have been depressed and have also developed a great deal of anxiety. I am now seeing a doctor and have been taking anti-depressants as well as a tranquilizer. Lately my depression has improved and my anxiety level has decreased.”

  Snow falls with a whoosh from a tree. The cat stirs and then thinks better of it. Zofija is talking about her father: how he called both Hitler and Stalin bandits, how when the Nazis were at the gates of Stalingrad, he said the Red Army would be back; how when they duly came back in 1944, he scoffed at the notion they were Lithuania’s “liberators”; how the only happy thing about the Russian return was that the few surviving Jews could emerge from hiding.

  In 1989, long after Andrėjus Kalendra died in Siberia, the family had him exhumed, after a protracted struggle with Soviet bureaucracy. His remains were transported the thousands of miles from Soviet Asia to be buried on his Lithuanian farm, beside an oak tree he had planted, beneath a gravestone inscribed with the words “One must do good.” Zofija thinks that on the whole, this was a waste of time. After death, she says, the body does not matter anymore.

  A second Gordimer letter, of July 28, 2008, reads:

  In the past year I have been treated with 3 anti-depressants and none of them helped me. This depression is cyclical and comes and goes. The psychiatrists and psychologists that have treated me say that my traumatic childhood and/or the genetic inheritance may be responsible for this depression. I basically agree with them. From the age of 3 to 8 years my life was very chaotic. I also recognize that my parents had emotional problems. So from a genetic and environmental perspective I can understand my tendency to have periods of depression.

  It falls to his wife, Dorothy, who has a solid disposition, to steady Gordimer. “If I went out with anyone with emotional problems, I’d be gone in a heartbeat,” he says. As it is, he has survived a second bypass operation, a quadruple bypass when he was sixty-one, as well as the repair of his mitral valve.

  His father died in June 1982, a few weeks after George’s first bypass. The last years were difficult. Ira would lash out at people, especially the police. If a cop stopped him and asked if he’d given him the finger, he’d say: “Yeah, I gave you the finger, and what are you going to do about it?”

  He would go wild and then get very low: the same bipolar symptoms that affected George, who took a while to realize that. His father had no time for medicine or psychotherapy. A couple of times Ira ended up in jail. George would have to bail him out. For several years he and Dorothy kept five hundred dollars in the refrigerator for this purpose.

  After Ira died, Gordimer received checks the German government was sending his father as compensation for his wartime loss and suffering. He established an account in the name of the estate of Ira Gordimer, signed his name to it, and deposited the checks. A year later, having learned of Ira’s death, Germany demanded the money back. Gordimer said to himself, They ain’t gonna get this money, no matter what they do. He sued the German authorities, acting on his own behalf, and wrote down 250 interrogatories for them to answer. What really ticked him off was that the Germans had written “pension payment” on his father’s checks. This was no pension. They had the gall to write “pension,” as if his father had worked for them voluntarily in some gemütlich office in a suburb of Hanover.

  “My father,” he wrote, “did not work for you because he wanted to work for you. You take that word ‘pension’ off the check.” Lawyers kept sending letters in an attempt to retrieve the money. Gordimer responded: You answer the 250 interrogatories and remove the word “pension,” and we’ll talk about it. He knew they would not go through all that work for $5,000. Sure enough, when he went to court, nobody showed up for the German government. The case was dismissed.

  Gordimer has a stubborn streak like his father. If Ira had not been as half-crazed and tenacious, he would never have made it through the war. As for George’s mother, she was paranoid, always imagining plots against her by strangers or even friends. Once, when she was shopping, a flashbulb went off. She was convinced they were taking pictures of her. “Ma,” George said, “who the heck is interested in you? Why would they be after you?”

  But of course they had been after her and Ira and their two little boys. The odds had been against the Gordimers from the moment the Nazis rolled into the Šiauliai region in June 1941. Ira’s mother, Gita, and two sisters were rounded up in Papilė and never seen again. Gordimer believes his grandmother was killed in Žagarė on October 2, 1941, along with other Jews from nearby villages.

  At the time of the Nazi invasion, the Gordimers were living in Šiauliai. About six thousand Jews were thrown into the warren of alleys behind barbed-wire fences that formed the Kaukazas and Ežero-Trakų sections of the Šiauliai ghetto. Ežero-Trakų comprised the area surrounding the smokestack of the Frenkel footwear factory and tannery, established by Chaim Frenkel, a Jewish entrepreneur, in 1879. Because the Wehrmacht needed the output of the Frenkel factory, a category of “useful Jews” was created. Other “useful” Jews worked out at the Zokniai military airfield, which the Nazis were enlarging, or in peat bogs, or on construction sites, or at a sugar factory. A pattern of bribes, sexual exploitation, and vicious humiliation characterized relations between Nazi overlord and Jewish serf.

  A smaller tanning and le
ather workshop was owned by Hirsh Davidov; a few dozen Jews were employed here. One survivor, Leiba Lipshitz, recalled that high-ranking Wehrmacht officials and members of the Security Services and Gestapo were customers. “Germans brought fox and wild boar skins,” he wrote. “Large amounts of rat and polecat carcasses were brought by Germans for fur-coats to be made for their wives.” Meine Liebe, mein Schatz, here’s a little something from the Lithuanian front …

  George, after the first panic attack in 1971, asked his father what happened once they were confined in the ghetto. Ira said little. His attitude seemed to be: “You were there. I was there. Why should I have to tell you?” Only over time did George glean that his father had worked until their escape for the Jewish ghetto police, headed by Ephraim Gens. The small Jewish police force of little more than a dozen men operated under the Jewish Council, or Judenrat, which also ran departments for food supplies, housing, work distribution, and health. Jews, Stars of David on their police uniforms, administered Jews in death’s shadow. They joined what Primo Levi called “the gray zone,” the ambiguous area of a system of terror where a “hybrid class of prisoner-functionary” could succumb to the illusion of having choices.

  The dubious bargain gave rise to various forms of self-justification whose essence was that obedience to the Nazis could save lives. Jacob Gens, Ephraim’s brother, commanded the Jewish police in the Vilnius ghetto. “When they ask me for a thousand Jews I hand them over,” he once said, “for if we Jews will not give them on our own, the Germans will come and take them by force. Then they will not take one thousand but thousands. With the thousand that I hand over I save ten thousand.”

  George Gordimer, right, as a child. He survived the Nazi onslaught in Lithuania. His parents changed his name, birth date, and place of birth to facilitate his postwar passage to the United States. GEORGE GORDIMER

  The Gordimers lived six to a room in the Kaukazas section of the ghetto, which lay between the Jewish neighborhood and fashionable Vilnius Street. George’s mother, Sophia (born Sonya), worked at the airfield. On February 5, 1942, the Nazis had decreed that (1) births in the ghetto were no longer acceptable, (2) the harshest measures would be applied against Jewish women who gave birth, and (3) abortions would not be prosecuted. Dr. Aaron Pik, a senior doctor in the ghetto who kept a diary later published in Hebrew as Notes from the Valley of Death, wrote, “The day that our representatives were informed of this humiliating decree reducing us to the level of animals will be remembered for generations.”

  Pik, like another diarist of the ghetto, Dr. Eliezer Yerushalmi, was reminded of the book of Exodus: “And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river, and every daughter ye shall save alive.” Even Pharaoh, in persecuting the Hebrews, had not called for the death of every child, and it was Pharaoh’s own daughter who took pity on a male infant abandoned in a basket on the river, a child she chose to pluck from his “ark of bulrushes” and name Moses.

  Already, in a Nazi medical decree of November 1941, all Jewish patients had been ordered out of the Šiauliai municipal hospital. They were prohibited from getting medical treatment at any city facilities and from buying medicine in pharmacies. Jews in the ghetto improvised. “The only place for the hospital was in the cemetery,” Pik records, “in the room used for purifying the dead before burial. This room, with its cement floor, was very cold during our last chilly winter.” A combination of necessity, initiative, adaptability, and courage conjured a place of healing from a mortuary. Doctors did what they could. The ban on childbirth posed particular ethical problems. All live births after August 15, 1942, were forbidden; any family in which a birth occurred would be “removed” and reprisals taken. The threat was in effect throughout the ghetto. Nazis, perhaps for the first time in history, had brought mass murder of women and children to gynecology and obstetrics departments.

  The Judenrat and the doctors urged all pregnant women to have abortions. They were performed almost every day. In the case of a live birth, the baby was to be killed by an injection of poison administered by a nurse. Some doctors said they could not countenance such acts, which amounted to murder. Others argued that according to the halakah, or Jewish law, the mother’s life takes precedence over that of the child; killing the newborn where its survival would cost the mother’s life could be equated with killing a late-pregnancy fetus in the same circumstances.

  Sophia told George she got pregnant in the ghetto and was forced to have an abortion.

  Pik’s diary relates two instances in which he and another doctor had to take the lives of newborn babies. One occurred in January 1944. Pik acted to kill a baby girl just before the visit of a German supervisor:

  Injections of potent poisonous drugs powerful enough to kill an adult had not produced quick results with newborns. The previous baby had received two such injections and survived for seven days without food or water! Here the baby had to be killed immediately, without any delay. And so we decided … to drown the infant! We took a bucket full of cold water and thrust her head and ears into the water until death tremors appeared and then subsided—a total of six minutes, twice the amount of time needed to kill an adult by suffocation. We pulled out the baby, her mouth open and her nostrils covered with white foam, and covered her with a blanket. By some miracle, the supervisor did not show up that morning, so it was decided to bury the baby, the alleged fetus. How great was their astonishment when, as they went to lower the baby to the grave, they discovered that she was still alive. It was incredible. One-day-old newborns mock the entire theory of medicine, and methods of killing adults are not effective for them.

  Remember my uncle, standing before the bedraggled Jews on the floor of a displaced persons’ camp in Padua on August 24, 1945, writing in his diary: “Why do they cling so preciously to life? Is it so important to stay alive that one should surrender everything, succumb to any humiliation, in order to preserve the precious spark?” He could not recognize—to his subsequent horror—his Jewish “kith and kin” in such human refuse. The question—why do they cling so preciously to life?—is posed in turn by these acts, at once unconscionable and understandable, of Jewish doctors in the ghetto of my grandfather’s hometown. Perhaps the answer lies in the ferocious attachment to the world of that newborn girl: because they had no choice. After all, if the rational mind held sway in human affairs, rather than imperatives of the survival and reproduction of the species, why were so many children, including George Gordimer’s aborted sibling, conceived at all in that hell?

  On November 5, 1943, the SS waited for Šiauliai ghetto residents to leave for work before going after the children. Conditions had worsened that summer. In July 1943 the ghetto had been transferred to the direct jurisdiction of the SS and designated an “exterior camp” of the Kaunas concentration camp. The Gordimers were moved to the overflowing Ežero-Trakų section. It was from there that Sophia Gordimer left for work that morning and saw reinforcements at the ghetto gates.

  Levi Shalit, a survivor, noted that although word had spread of a possible roundup that day, the work brigades seemed eager to be on their way: “Both ghetto gates were besieged. Jews pushed and shoved in their haste to leave the ghetto.… Nowhere is the psychologist who will explain to us what psychological complex was at work, or not at work, among the people at that moment. Why did they hurry through the gate, leaving the children and old people alone? Were the mothers and fathers not thinking clearly—was it the blind impulse to live?”

  It is not clear what Ira Gordimer did that day. He had a back-office police job. The Jewish ghetto police, armed with sticks, were ordered to scour the ghetto and bring children to the gates. Ephraim Gens, the tall and puffed-up Jewish police chief, brought his own infant daughter as an example, pour encourager les autres. He saluted the German authorities as he handed over his child for execution, prompting Shalit to note his “dull cowardice and stupidity.”

  Although Gens had handed over his own daughter, the Nazis did no
t trust his police, who often tried to mediate in the ghetto. They took on the task of finding all the children themselves.

  The previous year, in the Warsaw ghetto, where he was head of the Judenrat, Adam Czerniaków had taken his own life rather than obey the German command to deport Jewish children. In his suicide note, he wrote, “The SS wants me to kill children with my own hands. There is no other way out and I must die.” Eight months later the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto had risen. Tens of thousands of them had died, either on the spot or gassed at Treblinka. But they had understood—not merely that old habits of malleable compliance were useless against the decision to murder them all; not merely that certain death awaited them whatever their genuflections to might; but also that the salvation of the Jews, and indeed of all humanity, lay in resistance and sacrifice even as the world shrugged at Hitler’s annihilation of half of European Jewry.

  During the uprising, as the ghetto went up in flames, Shmuel Zygielbojm, the representative of the socialist Bund to the Polish government in exile in London, killed himself in front of the British Parliament in an act of solidarity with Warsaw Jews and in protest at Allied and Soviet inaction. In his suicide note of May 12, 1943, Zygielbojm wrote, “Though the responsibility for the crime of the murder of the entire Jewish nation rests above all upon the perpetrators, indirect blame must be borne by humanity itself.” This point about the lessons of the Holocaust for all humanity was taken up later by Hannah Arendt when she wrote: “Under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not.… Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.”