Leo Melamed:
Peace and War
(pages 3 -
12)
Aboard a screaming
train somewhere in Siberia, I learned my first lesson in strategy. I was eight
years old, peering over the shoulder of my father who had encouraged me to do
so. He was engrossed in a game of chess. His opponent was a brooding old man
with hunched shoulders and long white fingers constantly stroking a bushy gray
beard. Slowly the old man shifted forward in his seat, muttering to himself and
showing a measure of passion.
"Shach!" he blurted in
Yiddish as his knight snatched a pawn checking my father's king. The pause
seemed forever. My father sat there, he later explained to me, searching for
the best strategy between three options.
I do not remember
how my father countered or who claimed victory. What struck me, however, was
the calmness of the men and their focus as each methodically took his turn.
They did not seem to hear the rattle of the train's wheels that vibrated
through the car's frail underbelly. Nor were they bothered by the sleet
slamming against the windows, then moving slowly down in rivulets.
Looking back to that day in late 1940, the
scene seems almost surreal: two men playing chess, leisurely pondering each
move as if they had all the time in the world, nowhere to go, and nothing to
worry about except the chess game when, in fact, time was quickly running out.
We were a train of nomads driven by a sense of survival, escaping for our lives
from the Nazis. Ironically, we were pawns in someone else's game.
The scourge that
had swept Europe turned everything upside down, severing the tether of genes,
language, ideas, and ideologies and sending families like mine into exile. We
were among the fortunate ones. The main part of my family was still together -
my mother, father and I - and we were healthy though sometimes cold and hungry.
I wondered about my grandmothers, my favorite Aunt Bobble, and friends who had
stayed behind in Bialystok, unwittingly taking their chances with what the gods
of war had to offer.
The trip was filled
with the unknown and fraught with danger as we moved along Siberia's spine, the
5,800-mile Trans-Siberian Railroad, begun in 1891 to connect Moscow to
Vladivostok among other Asian ports. The rickety train was a pinprick against
the vast wilderness, utterly untouched, where you could travel for thousands of
miles without seeing traces of man or beast. There was beauty in this frigid
frontier, but a harsh and muscular beauty, where bear, tigers, sable, reindeer,
and wolves roamed freely among some of the greatest physical treasures on
earth. A cash cow, they said of Siberia, that accounted for one-fifth of the
world's gold and silver, a third of its iron and timber, along with an
immeasurable wealth of gas, oil, and coal. It was the largest region of the
world's largest nation, four million square miles - the size of the entire
United States - a bewildering kaleidoscope of marshy plains, dense forests,
desolate plateaus, and craggy-peaked mountains where time and place were lost.
With few roads, the
train, on its single track, was the ubiquitous carryall, the workhorse of the
Siberian transport system, like the oxen-pulled wagons stacked with children
and battered household utensils that were moving other streams of refugees in
flight all across rural Europe at the time. While they fled in panic, somehow
the oxen never realized just how critical time was for them. Nor, it seemed,
did the engineer driving our train have much concern for our simmering
anxieties. The train kept at a steady speed, its rhythm lulling us into a false
sense of security, perhaps to conserve fuel, or because of weather conditions,
or the fact that we were crossing treacherous terrain. There were no shortcuts.
Indeed, because there was only one track, we would often spend lonely hours at
designated switching points (at Oms, or Novosibirsk, or Irkutsk), waiting for
our westbound sibling to pass so that we could continue our trek to Siberia's
most Eastern point, the port of Vladivostok.
During the 1930s,
men with shovels and wheelbarrows built steel mills as part of Joseph Stalin's
plan to industrialize the Soviet Union. And when the war broke out, millions of
workers and their factories would be transported to Siberia from the
vulnerable areas, retreating like a turtle beneath its shell. It was also
where Stalin banished criminals and political prisoners to work in mines and
build in forced labor camps, and where untold millions died long before and
after the war.
I don't, however,
want to get ahead of my story. That's the trouble with memory; once it uncoils,
it tends to race. But there's magic in memory. You can stop and replay it at
almost any point, rubbing old images together for sparks of new meaning. And
one thing more about memory in passing: it's a safety valve; you survive by
memory.
Everyone sooner or later broods about the
difficult parts of his or her life - the hurts, the failures, the injustices,
all the things we like to believe we can let go to move on with our lives. But
you can never really let go of personal history because it is what shapes you
and shades wisdom.
It was nearly a
year-and-a-half before I ended up on that train in Siberia, a year-and-a-half
of my family playing hide-and-seek with the Gestapo or the KGB. I was too
young, or too shielded by my parents, to fully realize the consequences of
being caught. But I sensed our plight. While at times it seemed like one
glorious adventure, there was always the feeling we were running from something
very evil, from a bogeyman breathing down our necks. Indeed we were. While most
children my age, especially those in the United States, were busy learning the
three "Rs," my early years were shaped by the three "Fs" - flight,
fear, and fate.
I was the only
child of Isaac and Faygl Melamdovich. Both were teachers in
Yiddish-speaking schools. Mother taught first grade in the Grosser
school, Bialystok's first government-approved parochial school sanctioned to
conduct its entire curriculum in the Yiddish language. The Grosser Folks
Shul as it was called, was named after the founder and first principal. My
father taught mathematics in the higher grades and was the author of three
books on the subject. His books became the standard mathematics works for grade
school classes in the Yiddish schools of Poland. The schools were secular, in
that there was no religious training. They were the showcase and pride of the
modern Jewish society that was emerging throughout Eastern Europe. These
schools had offered a full curriculum and were accredited by the Polish
government. This meant that graduates from these schools could go on to gymnasium,
high-school, or even in rare instances college, although Jews were seldom
allowed to enter.
My parents would leave
the house in the morning when the light was still soft and shadowy. They'd
return late in the day. During that time I would wait under the watchful eyes
of my maternal grandmother, or sometimes to my delight, my father's sister, Aunt
Bobble, an exceptionally beautiful woman in her early twenties. Itke
Cyrla Barakin was my grandmother's name, but to me she was "Babba."
We all lived together in a house on Zieben (No.7) Fastowska street in
Bialystok, a city in northeastern Poland known for the production of textiles
and finished goods, near the Russian border and roughly midway between Poland's
capital, Warsaw, and Lithuania's, Wilno (now Vilnius). Bialystok was a
political football. Founded in 1310, it was annexed to Prussia in 1795, to
Russia in 1807, and returned to Poland in 1921.
However, it wasn't the weavers of Bialystok
but its bakers who exported a bit of the city to the world. Over the years,
Bialystok would leave its gastronomical mark, especially on the United States,
where bakeries, delicatessens, and food stores would sell the
"bialy," a flat breakfast roll-the creation of Bialystok bakers.
Unlike its more popular cousin, the bagel, the bialy had no hole in its center,
giving more surface on which to slather the cream cheese. As a child in the
city of the bialy, I loved bialys and ate them. with herring, the tail of the
herring. I also loved my grandmother's homemade challa, a soft braided
loaf of bread glazed with egg white.
Sitting in the
middle of the kitchen, like a headless dark Buddha, was a potbellied stove that
used coal and wood. Plenty of it. In the morning, well before dawn, my
grandmother would stoke it up in preparation for breakfast. The wood burned
like a miniature forest fire, crackling at first, then exploding into yellow flames
that shimmered through the front vent on the door to create odd shadows in the
darkened room. The stove did double duty. It provided our heat during the long
winter months and cooked our meals. But we were fortunate; we also had a white
brick modern oven that dominated the dining room. It was modern because it had
its own brick chimney built into the wall. At times, a huge pot of cholent
would be simmering inside its mysterious door, which I was admonished never to
touch. Cholent was a thick stew made with pieces of beef, potatoes, onions,
carrots, beans, and a host of spices mixed with water, and cooked. And I mean
cooked. Babba cooked cholent overnight and until noon the next day,
careful never to stir the concoction during the entire time. It was manna.
Bialystok: The
Melamdovich family
A teacher's life
was relatively comfortable and carried a certain amount of prestige in the
community. My father was one of the few elected Jewish city councilmen. We
lived in a small wooden bungalow that had been inherited by my mother from her
father, who died before I was born. There was one bedroom, a large dining room
with a daybed, a kitchen, an upstairs attic where my grandmother slept, and a
seldom-found luxury in Jewish homes, an indoor bathroom. My father, who I was
convinced could do everything, had installed the plumbing himself and took
great pride in showing me how to pull the chain that released the muffled
explosion of gushing water from the overhead box.
As a preschooler, I
was pretty much left to my own wits. Most of the children on my street were
older and were in school during the day. I would wander around outside, living
in my mind and letting my imagination soar to wherever it would take me. I
made up games and acted out stories my mother had read to me at night.
Sometimes the daybed would be a ship at sea with pirates bearing down on me.
Other times I would become an explorer and sneak about the narrow opening
between our house and the next.
Finally, it was my turn to go to school. In
August 1939, shortly before we were about to be swept up in the turmoil of war,
I entered first grade. I had just turned seven and very much anticipated seeing
my parents during the course of the day. But they had other plans for me. It
wasn't proper, they explained to me, to go to the same school where they
taught. They didn't want students, parents, or fellow teachers to perceive me
as having an advantage or to be perceived as a "teacher's pet." Thus,
to my dismay, I was enrolled in another Yiddish grammar school. The pangs of
separation were painful. For the first time, I was away from my parents and my
Babba. I felt fear and, to some degree, rejection. When I was introduced to my
new teacher and she offered her hand, I did an unthinkable thing; I slapped it.
My mother was terribly embarrassed and furious with me.
Nearly three and a half million Jews lived
in Poland in 1939, making it the world's second largest Diaspora
community. They were heirs to a Jewish culture that had thrived in Poland for a
thousand years. Of Bialystok's denizens, some 40,000 were Jews. We were
integrated, although Jews generally lived in what became Jewish neighborhoods.
There were no ghettos, but there was anti-Semitism. While it wasn't notorious,
even as a child I often heard, "Jiyd, go to Jerusalem." I recall my
puzzlement at the slur. Where was Jerusalem? Why should we go there? But it was
tolerable. After all, my father was a Jew and a member of Bialystok's City
Council - Poland was trying to enter the "enlightened era."
To the south of Bialystok, about a hundred
miles, was Lublin, the "Jewish Oxford" known throughout Europe for
its Talmudic and Cabalistic scholars. One of the first Yeshivas was established
there in the sixteenth century. In 1939, Lublin with a population of 2.4 million
also boasted a Jewish community of 40,000. After the war, there wouldn't be
enough Jews in either city to make a "minyan," the 10 Jewish
males needed to form a quorum for prayer in accordance with Jewish law. Poland
had always been bullied by its neighbors. Poland's name comes from the Polaine,
or "plains people," a Slavic group that settled in Europe before the
birth of Christ. With few natural mountains and rivers on its borders, Poland
constantly fell victim to the territorial ambitions of the surrounding
countries. In 1795, it was partitioned between Russia, Prussia, and Austria -
erasing Poland from the map altogether. It reappeared as a sovereign nation at
the end of World War I in 1918. Then, in 1939, came the German invasion of
Poland to spark World War II. Again, Poland was overrun. First it was the
Germans, then the Soviets. (In the wake of the war, Stalin would end up moving
Poland westward by annexing more than 50,000 square miles of eastern German
territory under Polish rule and another 100,000 square miles of eastern Poland
to the Soviet Union.) During these periods, when Poland ceased to exist, it was
the Roman Catholic church that became the bastion of Polish nationality and the
protector of the language and culture.
Similarly, the Jewish community and culture
were kept intact through its synagogues and Rabbis and scholars. However, I was
born into the secular Jewish movement that had taken hold in Europe since the
early 1900s. My parents were emancipated Jews. They had left the
"shtetl" ways of their parents to become the new Jewish
intelligentsia. They were rightful citizens of the world. They were worldly
Jews who had the inherent right to live as citizens of any country. In their
world ideal, race and religious distinctions no longer mattered. All humans
were equal. One of the first songs I remember my mother singing was Friedrich
von Schiller's words to Beethoven's Ninth, Alle Menchen Seinen Breeder,
"All Humans are Brothers." (How ironic that this monument to
equality was written by a German poet.) Indeed, in our home, I was raised to
believe this philosophy as gospel. It wasn't until much later in life that I
learned to my chagrin that the world wasn't really quite as my parents taught
me.
Thus, orthodoxy and religious rituals were
not part of our daily life. They were replaced by worldly precepts -
intertwined with Jewish ethnicity, its history, literature, culture, holidays,
and especially its Yiddish language. My mother and father were fervent Yiddishistn.
Following World War I, the Polish government, under a treaty guaranteed by the
League of Nations, recognized Yiddish as a language and granted Jews the right
to use it in their primary education. It also assured the Jews civil and political
equality as well as their cultural autonomy.
Although among the gentiles we spoke Polish,
Yiddish was the first language I learned. We spoke it in the house, and in
school, and on the street. But it was a literary Yiddish - that is, pure and
grammatically perfect - after all, my parents were Yiddish teachers of the
highest order. (It wasn't until I became an adult that I learned to my
amazement that Yiddish contained swear words.) My parents were the products of
Eastern European Jews who for hundreds of years were subjected to poverty,
persecution, and harassment by czars, Cossacks, and a host of local officials
whose favorite pastime, it seemed, was to plan organized riots known as
pogroms. Despite the poverty and violence and the fact that Jews were forced to
live in designated areas called the Pale, they clung to God, a memory of
greatness and a messianic hope. "For them the Bible was a living
reality," is how historians Irving Howe and Kenneth Libo put it. "It
was a token of promise, a source of wisdom, a guide to conduct."
Here is where my father departed from his
ancestors. While he fervently believed that the central value in Jewish
culture was learning, he saw no glow of messianic hope. He was an agnostic, and
as such felt no spiritual pleasure in the reenactment of ritual. My mother, although
drawing the line with respect to eating of non-Kosher foods, was among the
early emancipated women in Jewish Poland. Indeed, unlike most women of that day
and age, Faygl Melamdovich was an equal co-worker in our household and a
professional member of the teaching fraternity. She, no less than her husband,
embraced the new emancipated philosophy with zeal and fervor. In their crowd,
some of whom would occasionally gather around our dining room table, there
seemed to be little distinction between the rights of women and men - all were
considered equal. Everyone bad a right to voice his opinion, and did, as they
drank tea from glasses, ate my Babba's honey cake, and discussed the
dawning of a new era for Jews in Poland. Still, it was an oddity of cultural
European life that, in company, a woman referred to her husband by his last
name. Thus, when my mother spoke of my father, she would speak of him as "Melamdovich."
First names were reserved for private conversations. My mother called my father
by his middle name, Moishe.
I am uncertain at what exact age my father
rejected religion, since his early youth was spent in the religious upbringing
of a cheder. (Indeed, he was steeped in religious lore.) I suspect it
was sometime in the early 1920s when many of Europe's young intellectuals with
a sense of idealism turned from the dogma of religion to science and humanism.
They wrestled with the conflict of traditionalism, as embodied in a Hassidic
inheritance, and modernism, the trend of secular-progressive thought that was
sweeping through the world of East European Jewry - a legacy of eighteenth
century philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and dramatist Gotthold Lessing.
Together, these two pioneers of modern Jewish thought forged the concept of
Jewish emancipation and were first in denouncing Jewish separatism. Moses
Mendelssohn, a little hunchback from the Dessau ghetto in Germany, the
grandfather of composer Felix Mendelssohn (who was born a Christian), made it
his mission to lead Judaism out of the ghetto and into the new Enlightenment
in which the practice of Judaism would not conflict with life in a non-Jewish
world. Mendelssohn's revolutionary thought evolved into the modern Jewish
secular movement whose by-product gave the world artists, writers, musicians, and
scientists - the numbers of which were out of all proportion to the tiny
percentage of Jews within the general population. In the early 1900s, this
secular movement, although still in its infancy, was an irresistible force to
the young generation of European Jews, snaring the likes of my father and
mother in its current and causing them to leave the ways of the shtetl. My
father graduated from the University de
Liege on November 26, 1923, having completed a full course in modern
studies, mathematics, and humanities.
Thus, it wasn't surprising that my father's
favorite writer (and later mine, too) was the Yiddish author Itzchok L. Peretz,
regarded as one of the giants of Yiddish literature along with Mendele Mocher
Sforim, "Mendel the Bookseller," the pseudonym of Shalom Jacob
Abramowits, and Sholem Aleichem, "Peace be with you," the pseudonym
of Salomon Rabinovitch. Peretz was a so-called maskil or enlightened,
who had deep-rooted love for Jewish history and its folklore, but found bridges
and commonality between traditional religion and the growing new secular
cultural movement of the emerging Jewish masses. Indeed, Peretz gave new
meaning, new interpretation, and new practical application to age-old
religious precepts and rituals. Like Peretz, my father no longer believed in
divine metaphysics or in the orthodox concepts of heaven and hell, or in the
notion that there was subsequent reward and punishment for a person's acts in
life. Rather, my father believed in an even higher morality than that contained
in the Ten Commandments. Indeed, my father's morality was embodied in Peretz's
short story, Oib Nisht Nocb Hecher, "If Not Higher." Morality
for him was an inherent necessity of one's being, as was the concept of
equality between human beings.
My father was a idealist, a mathematician,
and teacher by trade; a skeptic by nature. On top of that, add stubborn.
Taking a stand in what he believed became a leitmotif in his writings and
personal philosophy. Small in stature, but ramrod-straight with receding hair,
he was an independent man who followed his own conscience throughout his life.
Sometimes that path took strange turns, as it did shortly before the Nazis
marched into Bialystok.
Germany's attack on Poland on September 1,
1939, all along its frontier brought on World War II. And though Bialystok was
hardly a military threat to the Third Reich, German bombers were sent over the
defenseless city. Their bombs were randomly dropped on "to whom it may
concern" targets. One of them was City Hall, an early nineteenth century
edifice, which had been reduced to cinders. It was only a matter of time before
the Blitzkrieg would be storming the city gates. The mayor hastily called a
meeting of the city council of which my father was a member. There was only one
problem: There was no longer a city council chambers. The city's major
synagogue, Die Groyse Shul still stood intact, and the mayor asked its
rabbi if the council could gather in its hall. The rabbi consented on the condition
that all the councilmen wear hats or yarmulkes, skullcaps, as a sign of
respect before God as prescribed by Jewish religion when entering a synagogue.
The mayor and the other councilmen all agreed. There was only one holdout. My
father, who happened to be one of a handful of Jewish councilmen, refused to
enter the Shul if he had to cover his head. In principle he wouldn't
acknowledge any form of religion, and to wear a hat was to reenact ritual.
Vintage Melamdovich.
Although he boycotted the meeting, he went
along with the consensus for an escape plan. The mayor and the entire city
council, which made up Bialystok's political backbone, intended to leave the
city along with the other prominent citizens before the Nazis showed up. The
city fathers had been advised that the Nazis would use Bialystok's prominent
citizens as hostages. If anything went wrong, the hostages would be held
responsible. In their naiveté, they believed families left behind would be
safe. What we didn't know was the Nazi scheme to isolate Jews from the Poles by
expelling them from small towns and villages, forcing them to make their ways
to the larger cities where eventually they would be concentrated. Bialystok
along with Warsaw, Lublin, Cracow, Wilno, and Lodz would become the major
cities where Jews were confined to ghettos, and later six million of them would
be transported like cattle and exterminated in the death camps. But this was
long before the world had heard of Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz-Birkenau,
Maidanek, Bergen-Belsen, or Treblinka. By late September 1939, Germany and
Russia would divide Poland. While Stalin was banking on his non-aggression pact
with Hitler, Russia concluded pacts with Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia,
obtaining rights to set up military bases. In return, Russia ceded Wilno, which
had been part of Poland, back to Lithuania. Wilno, hard on Poland's border, had
been Lithuania's historic capital. Europe's geopolitical machinations were in
high gear.
I, of course, knew nothing of my father's
escape plan until the middle of a moonless night, a few days after the council
meeting. My mother woke me and dressed me.
"We are going to say goodbye to your father," she whispered,
taking me by the hand and leading me out into the deserted and totally
blackened streets of Bialystok. While I couldn't see any traces of war, I could
hear them: the constant echoing throughout the buildings of the ack-ack of
gunfire around us.
On an empty lot we came upon a group of
people milling around a large canvas-covered truck. There were other children,
wives, and family members of the councilmen saying their goodbyes. I saw my
father and ran to him. There were tears in my mother's eyes. There were tears
in everyone's eyes. My parents clung to each other for a brief moment. Then my
father and his fellow councilmen piled into the truck and left. No one knew
their destination.
I don't remember my father's precise words
that night, but he said his goodbyes in a tone that tried to be reassuring.
Politics had driven him away. Perhaps it would bring him back. But the world in
the 1930s didn't work that way. The norms of safety, the norms of self-respect
no longer mattered. Europe had been swept up in the momentum of politics all
right, but power politics backed by the machines of war-tanks, planes, and
mobile armies-swept across lands like the Mongol hordes that once stormed out
of Asia.
Before I heard the bombs, my own vision of
war at that time centered more on the swashbuckler than on the swastika. I
imagined the war would play out as sword fights in the main streets of
Bialystok. The brave Bialystokers against the barbarians, up one avenue, down
another. But the war would take place only on the big streets. Life on the side
streets, such as the one I lived on, would carry on as normal.
Such childish thoughts were soon jolted by
reality. Suddenly the world was noisy and frightening. The noise of church
bells. The noise of air raid sirens. The noise of rumors. The noise of bombs
and gunfire echoing throughout the streets. The dark and shrouded nights. The
fear evidenced on faces. The tumult of agony and despair with the crushing
armies of the Nazi war machine.
My child's vision of a fantasy war, it
turned out, wasn't that far-fetched. Unfortunately, the Polish military machine
was a relic of the nineteenth century like many of the buildings in our town.
Slogging through mud and cold rain, the Polish cavalrymen charged Nazi tanks
with lances and sabers. Poland fell in 27 days.
Now we could only wait for our conquerors
and our fate.
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Last Updated
October 30th, 2003