The Girl from Human Street

by Roger Cohen

  Gens survived the war. He was tried and convicted by the Soviets, who dispatched him to a labor camp in the Arctic. During his trial, he protested his innocence. “The question was to be or not to be,” he wrote in letters. “To be meant to survive being continually downtrodden and detested and hope that one day justice would prevail. It was pointless to rebel without guns.” Order and work, he insisted, were the only deployable weapons in the fight for survival of the Jewish people. “Today I suffer for saving the majority of the ghetto residents, for their being able to enjoy life.”

  This is the self-importance of the coward. In fact, all but a few hundred of Šiauliai’s Jews had been slaughtered by 1945, as had the Vilnius Jews overseen by Gens’s brother.

  The Gordimer boys were favored by chance. Their aunt and uncle, Rochelle and David Glickman, lived with them. Rochelle, Ira’s sister, was sick the day of the Kinderaktion and did not go to work. Hearing of the hunt for children under thirteen, she hid George in a barrel and his brother behind an old mattress in a shed. George was five years old, Seymour six. George recalls climbing out of the barrel and going from the shed into the house. The room his family shared had been ransacked: closets emptied, beds overturned, drawers pulled out, possessions hurled across the floor. He felt panic for the first time, a constriction in the neck, a cold sweat.

  The Germans carted children and old people—the innocent and the wise—off to annihilation. Parents came back that evening to find their offspring gone. Ira and Sophia Gordimer were spared the contemplation of that abyss. The boys were alive. They were hidden now in the cellar of another house.

  Ira faced a choice: continue to obey, as Gens obeyed, or gamble on escape. Obedience would mean death for his children at least. There were no children’s voices left in the ghetto. He thought of Kalendra, a regular customer at his Papilė store, and was able to contact him. On the third night after the Kinderaktion, he contrived, perhaps through the privilege of his police position, to smuggle Seymour out of the ghetto in a potato sack. He handed the boy to Kalendra, who took him on a horse-drawn cart to his remote farm. George did not see his older brother again until the end of the war.

  On March 30, 2000, in a declaration written for the Commission for the Designation of the Righteous at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, George set down his recollection of the events that followed:

  The morning after my brother was transported to the Kalendra farm, my mother took me out of the ghetto under her coat while everyone was going to work. With the help of a Lithuanian policeman, my mother took me to a house where Antanas Plekavičius (a good friend of Kalendra) and my father were waiting. Antanas Plekavičius then transported my parents and me by horse and wagon to the farm of Steponas and Marijona Garbačiauskas. Marijona was Kalendra’s sister. During the three weeks we were in hiding at the Garbačiauskas farm in or near Žarenai, I developed a severe throat infection. Because it was too dangerous to call a doctor, Marijona held me down while my mother broke up the blisters in my throat with the handle of a wooden spoon.

  George kept moving, sometimes with his parents, more often without them. For a time he was at the farm of Augustas and Klara Vaškys, other good friends of Kalendra. In December 1943 he moved alone to the property of their sister, whose boyfriend did not want George around and took to beating him. Six months later he went back, still by himself, to the Plekavičius farm. “I remember the day I found a bullet in the field. I detonated the bullet by striking one end of it with a sharp edged rock. My ears rang for almost a full day. I remained at the Plekavičius farm until March or April 1945, when my parents came by truck to pick me up. I remember that I was afraid to go with them and I hid behind Mrs. Plekavičius.”

  George Gordimer, at the age of six, ended the war hiding from his father and mother.

  The Gordimers’ saviors did not fare well. War’s end in Lithuania was only the beginning of another struggle, for liberation from Soviet occupiers. On July 29, 1945, Augustas and Klara Vaškys were killed by Red Army forces. Their farmhouse was burned to the ground. Their sister, like Andrėjus Kalendra, was sent to Siberia, joining the approximately 200,000 people deported by Stalin from the Baltic states between 1941 and 1949. Unlike Kalendra, she survived. Selective silence fell on the tumult the Gordimers had lived through. Lithuanian history, and the story of its Jews, was now the Soviet Union’s to shape. Memorial obelisks to “victims of fascism” went up under five-pointed red stars rather than Stars of David. The number of Jews killed by the Germans in the Soviet Union remained a state secret.

  Today Šiauliai is a dismal sprawl. Unlike Žagarė, it retains scarcely a flicker of the past, apart from the smokestack and warehouses of the Frenkel factory, transformed into a kitschy museum. One Jewish survivor, Boris Stein, oversees a small, drafty Jewish community center where there is not enough money to heat more than a single room at a time. In his shiny blue overcoat and gray woolen cap, he bears the imprint of the Soviet empire that shaped his life. Stein, if he’s lucky, can muster 180 Jews from the entire region for High Holidays. Like Isaac Mendelson, the last Jew in Žagarė, he survived in Russia, escaping as a child with his family in 1941 to the Kazan region of Tatarstan.

  Stein shows me a file with Nazi lists of the people confined in the Šiauliai ghetto. There’s a Reiza Soloveychik, born a few years before my grandmother, in 1886, and a Ginda Soloveychik, born in 1931, and a Simon Soloveychik, born in 1934. The Nazi Kinderaktion of 1943 probably took these last two namesakes of my grandmother. There are eight Cohens on the list.

  Stein’s parents lived to see the end of the war by avoiding the ghetto. His father died in 1954 and was buried in the Šiauliai Jewish cemetery, whose only trace is a handful of overgrown and lurching gravestones. The Soviets closed the cemetery in 1965. They ordered all bodies exhumed. There were scarcely any Jews left for the task. Bone by bone Stein took the remains of his father to the municipal cemetery.

  When George Gordimer was an undergraduate at MIT in the spring of 1961, he did nothing for months, immobilized by depression. He would go to sleep around five a.m. and wake up as other students returned for dinner. He was inert, suffocated by a great weight. MIT had a standing offer of five free psychiatric sessions, but he never took the college up on it. He figured he could get by on his own. His father had. Nobody at MIT knew anything about his Lithuanian past; he was not going to start blabbing. Discipline was important. He graduated in September 1961 and was immediately hired as a research chemist by Rohm and Haas Company in Philadelphia.

  Three years later Gordimer got a summer job in a small lab belonging to the Kendall Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There he met Dorothy Bowdren, who had just graduated with a chemistry degree from Duke. Part of his job was to train her. They started dating. Together they did research on pressure-sensitive adhesives that were to be used in Kendall’s Curad bandages.

  George told Dorothy nothing about his own untended wounds. She was from a liberal Protestant background. He hid the fact he was Jewish, though he would not have framed his decision that way. He didn’t want anyone defining him through some extraneous factor, like where he happened to have been born or whether or not he was a Jew. Dorothy laughs about it all now. “George,” she says, “face it, you were hiding something.”

  After dating Dorothy for more than two years, Gordimer proposed to her. He felt the time had come to say something. “Just in case this makes any difference to you,” he began, “let me tell you about my background.”

  It was the same phrase he came to use with doctors, “Just in case this makes any difference to you … I am two years older than my papers say.” In case it makes any difference, George Gordimer is not who he appears to be. Dorothy, some of whose family came over on the Mayflower, had thought he might be Jewish but refrained from asking. When she told her mother about Gordimer’s Lithuanian Jewish past, she said: “Oh my God, is he at least a citizen?”

  Gordimer had been a U.S. citizen since 1952. He officially turned twelve that year but was in fact fo
urteen, having lived about half his life in Europe. Between the ages of three and eight, the brain is forming. Connections are made, but if the psyche is under too much stress, the right connections are not established. Gordimer thought some of his own connections—the wiring of his brain—might have gone askew in the barrel or the cellar or the lonely Lithuanian farms where he sheared sheep. It was possible although, as he sometimes insists, not provable.

  One of the things Gordimer told Dorothy is that not only did his family have to survive the Nazis, they also had to escape the Soviets. Double occupation, the double man says, requires double evasion. Mendelson’s Sixteenth Brigade of the Soviet Red Army had scores to settle: any Jew who had remained in Lithuania and survived was suspect. It was not easy to get out of Lithuania in 1945.

  Soviet troops caught up with Ira in Vilnius, where the family had gone by truck from Šiauliai in August 1945. Who are you? Did you cooperate with the Nazis? What did you do? These questions, in some ways, were unanswerable or had many different answers or had answers that made no sense.

  His father, born in 1903 when Lithuania was part of imperial Russia, spoke fluent Russian. So did his mother. Ira had a diploma from a Russian school. This helped. Once again, he managed to talk his way out of a tight corner. He was determined now to get to America. George remembers a train journey into Poland and his father hiding money in his shoes and screaming at him: Just be quiet!

  They traveled westward, past the lines of poplar and birch, the bombed-out villages, the stragglers in their rags. In Stettin, Poland, they found a truck to take them to Berlin. It was midwinter. The truck broke down, and they started to walk, snow crunching beneath their feet, icy wind in their faces. A group of Red Army soldiers picked them up. They threw Gordimer and his father into a dark East Berlin cellar. For six weeks they were allowed out once a day for a brief walk. Food was limited. They feared they would be shipped back to Lithuania. The Soviets did not seem to know what to do with this stray family. Then, without explanation, the Gordimers were allowed passage to the West. An American officer gave Gordimer a red apple.

  A half century passed before George was able to go back. The journey to Lithuania in 1998 was a turning point. By then Seymour was dead at the age of fifty-five, and both their parents were long gone. George and Dorothy, who had a mild stroke in 1968, had no children. “I thought somewhere in the back of my mind that having children might be too much for me,” he says. Having corresponded since 1996 with the Kalendra family, he wanted to see for himself. Loose ends needed to be tied up.

  His neighbors and friends in Cranford, New Jersey, where they have lived since 1970, were surprised. When they asked why he was going to Lithuania, he told them. The journey was a big production, too much of one for his taste. Everywhere he went—Vilnius, Šiauliai, Žagarė—Lithuanian TV was on hand to record the visit of the returning American Jew and to mark the courageous deeds of Andrėjus Kalendra and his friends. He was happy to meet Kalendra’s daughters, Zofija and Morta, and later happy at their recognition in 2009 by the State of Israel as “Righteous Among the Nations.” But he has no wish now to return.

  Religion, for Gordimer, is still “definitely below zero.” He feels no particular identification with his Jewishness. In the end, he still thinks, he’s a Jew because that’s what somebody else said he is. Still, he feels an affinity with Israel, which he puts this way:

  “I do identify to some extent because I think the Jews need some place where they don’t have to put up with being in a pogrom once in a while. There are two peoples, Jews and Palestinians, coming from the same place and one said finally, ‘We are not going to take it anymore, and we’re going back to where we originated, and too bad if people don’t like it, because nobody protected us and we went from country to country, and every place we went—be it Spain or eastern Europe, central Europe—wherever we went, including the United States, there was some next-door neighbor who was going to call you a dirty Jew.’ That’s it: nobody took care of the Jews, and Israel is their ancestral homeland, not Madagascar where Hitler wanted to send them, and that’s my feeling on that.

  “But I think there’s a bunch of crazies in Israel, the extreme religious groups who want to pick on an eight-year-old girl because she’s exposing too much flesh—these people are nuts. They are no better than the jihadists. They are like the white extremists in this country. Extreme groups are all the same, they just have different labels: jihadists, extreme Orthodox, whatever. I’m not too fond of people like that, especially when they base their beliefs on absolutes. I don’t believe in absolutes. I know only one thing that’s absolute, and that’s the speed of light.”

  For the fiftieth reunion of the class of 1961 at MIT, Gordimer was asked to write a brief account of his life since graduation. He hesitated about what to reveal to a class that had known him as a quiet guy “raised” in Elizabeth. At last he wrote:

  In the summer of 1998, Dorothy and I went to Lithuania to visit and thank the families who rescued the Gordimer family during the war years of 1941–45. I am a child survivor of the Holocaust. It required five families to rescue my parents, my brother, and me. On November 5, 1943, after more than two years of incarceration in a ghetto in Šiauliai, Lithuania (my birthplace), a Kinderaktion (Children’s Action) was carried out by the Germans and their collaborators. Approximately seven hundred children were deported from the ghetto for extermination. My brother and I were hidden in the ghetto for three days after the Kinderaktion. Then our family, with the aid of Lithuanian farmers, escaped from the ghetto and was hidden on separate farms by our Lithuanian rescuers.

  The hardest words of all for Gordimer were these: “Although we physically escaped, we did not escape psychological damage. In my case I also ‘lost’ my childhood. From the age of three to eight, my life was totally chaotic and at times traumatic.”

  The damage was indelible. He was one man in order to conceal the hurt man underneath. I know well enough how that game works. When I gazed at him once in the lobby of a midtown New York hotel, his eyes twinkled: he was in one of his hyper moods. It would be followed by a deep trough, a sagging of voice and skin, depression, and inertia. I have watched such changes all my life in my own family—the chiaroscuro of the bipolar mind. He, too, would crawl into bed.

  The Gordimers’ simple, two-story house in Cranford is painted pale green with a darker trim called Provincial Olive. Dorothy still finds it a bit “rinky-dinky”—she wanted a more substantial Victorian home—but they have grown used to it over time. The big oak trees in the back cast the yard into shadow. Dorothy’s occasional attempts with flowers have failed. Of late neighbors have been putting up fences, first in metal, then another in wood to hide the metal, barrier after barrier where once children roamed free. George hates the fences. The biggest change he and Dorothy have made since they moved in forty-two years ago was to convert the porch into a den.

  It is quiet in Cranford except when the flight pattern into Newark Airport disturbs the peace, but George is afflicted with a ringing, or sometimes a buzzing, in his right ear. He thinks it may stem from the day he exploded the bullet he found on the Lithuanian farm. When he is tense, the sound grows louder. Old age, he says, is rough on a perfectionist. Everything has to be just right to overcome the chaos he was in. But his body gathers imperfections. “I’m all screwed up,” he says. His prostate is enlarged. He takes statins for his heart. He has to get a finger fixed—an accumulation of collagen has limited its movement, and soon the finger will be bent all the way into his palm.

  The decoration in the house is sparse—needlework made by Dorothy before she gave it up, an upright piano she no longer plays, a single sofa, a hi-fi bought in 1958, and an old wooden speaker. There is little light in the small rooms. George prefers to keep the curtains drawn all day. Dorothy misses light. She does not like to live in a permanent penumbra. She is a woman who, in George’s phrase, has rolled with the punches.

  “Closed curtains keep the house cooler in summer and warme
r in winter,” he says. “I’m not big on light.”

  A video records his visit to Lithuania in 1998. It shows him meeting with Morta Jakutienė, the daughter of Andrėjus Kalendra. As he speaks of his late brother to the Lithuanian families gathered to meet them, George breaks down. He tries and fails to repress a sob. Morta, too, starts to cry. It is the first time I have seen Gordimer lose control—a quiet surrender, a crumpling. Gordimer turns from the video to me and says: “I’m still not out of there. I’m still in the barrel.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Château Michel

  The mansion, called Amberly, at 44 Fourteenth Avenue, in the jacaranda-shaded Houghton suburb of Johannesburg, was known among the cognoscenti as Château Michel. It was here that my mother’s grandfather Isaac Michel, the nineteen-year-old “prospector” who sailed on August 16, 1896, for South Africa, lived the last decade of his life. On his tennis court, in the summer of 1948, my parents first set eyes on each other. She loved him, she said, from that moment.

  Immigration is reinvention. Lands of immigrants excise the anguish of the motherland. They invite the incomer to the selective forgetfulness of new identity. Isaac arrived penniless from Lithuania. He died on an urban estate with its arboretum, giant mulberry tree, fishpond, and aviary, surrounded by African houseboys and gold-inlaid bibelots, his turquoise, fishtailed Cadillac parked in the beautiful curving driveway waiting to purr to life in the hands of a tall, slim handsome chauffeur known as Kleinbooi.