A Wanderer by Rafael Klein

A Wanderer Rafael Klein

“We have a topography of survival by now; a nearly complete mosaic of collective Holocaust narration. We know the map and the means through which people made it to the end” Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge

“Check out your origins. Look into the past of your family. Learn about your ancestors.” So many genealogy sites to help you learn where you come from! “Was your grandfather a WW1 hero? Was your great great aunt a famous actress?” It is completely natural to want to explore your roots. After all, what defines us but where we are and where we come from? I am an ex-pat American, now a dual national UK citizen. I come from Brooklyn. When I returned from the University of Chicago, my family had moved to Florida. So when I moved back to New York, I settled in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where my grandparents lived after emigrating from Poland and Austria. Was I trying to return to the homeland of my grandparents? After all, I was living only a few blocks from the apartment of my bubbala, at 194 Avenue C.

But if my intention was to return to the world of my forefathers, I was disappointed. The old Yiddish signs were now mostly in English and Spanish. The only remnants of what had been a vibrant recreation of the shtetl of east Europe was now the famous Katz’s delicatessen, and a halvah company. All of the old Yiddish tailors and kosher butchers were gone. In fact, my old neighbourhood near Coney Island in Brooklyn where I grew up had been more like the shtetl than this neighbourhood, now full of hippies and artists. When my father was growing up there he was part of the spirited vibrant life of the street market. At the age of 10, he sold pickles from a barrel. I asked him if he worked on Saturday when he had no school. “No, on Sunday of course. What do you think, are you crazy? Saturday was Shabbat. I sold them until there were none left.” “After the pickles, I got the idea to buy lollipops and sell them off a push cart. I would buy them by the box, and sell them four for a nickel. That was cheap! I would rent a pushcart, and sell the lollipops.” But when I asked him about his family origins, he claimed to know very little. “My family came from Austria - I don’t know what city. They didn’t talk about that. Mom’s family was from Bialystock. (Poland/Russia)”

I stayed in New York, living in the East Village when my parents and sister moved to Florida, and when my brothers moved to California. But I was restless, and still felt rootless. I ask myself, “am I a Jew if I don’t have the religion?” My Jewish background is undeniable. I surely would have been classified as a Jew in 1931 in Europe and probably would have been transported. Maybe it is in my wandering, my sense of not really belonging anywhere, that makes me a Jew. My work as an artist explores the ways we impose our own personal narratives on the world we inhabit. But all of the places I have explored in my work - whether the Florida of my parents, the California of my brothers or the Coney Island I grew up in, I haven’t satisfied my need to find the place where I felt I came from. So I moved to Europe. From the little my father had told me, I knew my mother’s family had come from Poland. And so shortly after leaving the US I visited Warsaw. But the Jewish ghetto there felt empty of Jews. I took a side trip to Krakow, and visited Auschwitz. There I saw a tree – solid, healthy - and I imagined that it was here that my inheritance rested. It seemed that the blood of my unknown relations had enriched the roots of this strong tree, and it had grown to this great height.

A short while ago I discovered a document which gave me more information about my family’s origins. On my grandmother’s Petition for Naturalization her place of birth is given as Łomża, and on this as well, there is the confusion of whether that is in Poland or Russia. Łomża had only 157 Jews in 1808. In 1931 there were 8,912. It was an important centre of Jewish study, and the magnificent stone synagogue was built in 1881. On 12 August 1941, a Łomża Ghetto was created. Between 10,000 and 18,000 Jews were brought into the ghetto from neighboring villages. . Over two thousand people were murdered in the Giełczyn Forest outside of town. Many Jews perished from malnutrition and diseases such as dysentery and typhus. The rest were shipped to Auschwitz. The Łomża Synagogue was destroyed, along with what remained of the Ghetto, in 1942. Very few of the Jews of Łomża survived the Holocaust.

My grandparents had emigrated at the end of the 19th century – long before either World War, but the pogroms were many and various. When I asked my grandmother about the family members left behind when she emigrated she only shrugged her shoulders. I can still hear my Bubbala’s Yiddish voice. But any questions about her own ancestors were met with silence. That familiar blankness, a dark empty place. And from what I have discovered about her native city, it seems unlikely that any of her family who remained in Łomża after 1931 would have survived.

"Ivan Grigoryevich imagined.....talking about people who had departed into eternal darkness. Many of their fates were piercingly sad; even the tenderest, quietest, kindest word about these people would have been like the touch of a rough, heavy hand on a heart that had been torn open. No, there were things that could not be spoken." Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows

My grandparents might have been running from an oppression which was as old as history itself. For the members of their families who stayed behind, a boycott of Jewish shops in 1933 would have surely given an indication of how things were going. “On every Jew shop was plastered a large notice warning people not to buy in Jewish shops…. and often you saw caricatures of Jewish noses.” Letter from Lady Rumbold, British Ambassador in Berlin quoted in Martin Gilbert Sir Horace Rumbold: Portrait of a Diplomat, 1869-1941 In 1934, the antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer was repeating the conspiracy theory of ‘Blood Libel’ about Jews using the blood of Christian children to make matzo during Passover. When Kristallnacht came in 1938, with its destruction of Jewish shops and synagogues, my relations would have seen that things would be reaching a climax.

But was it just possible that my ancestors had managed to flee into the Giełczyn Forest outside of town? Maybe they survived the war by hiding there, continually moving, sleeping in makeshift hollows in the ground. Spring through autumn they could have gathered plants, wild berries, nuts and birds’ eggs. Some slept on leaves, under a makeshift tent of branches. Or maybe they joined groups of partisans and fought alongside them. Perhaps they survived hiding in an underground shelter in the forest.

Hiding rarely led to survival. A Jewish farming estate which had been taken over by the Germans was burnt down by Jewish partisans, A man from Warsaw, who had hid for over a year under a cattle trough, was driven out by the flames. “His clothes were torn, he couldn’t stand on his two feet, and he looked like a skeleton. ….the man was Yankel (one of the partisan’s) relative… from Warsaw. We walked to our base, and tried to help him. He couldn’t hold any food, and the next day he died.” Harold Werner, a partisan, as recorded in The Holocaust, Martin Gilbert

Perhaps members of my family ended up in the Warsaw Ghetto. At first the ghetto was formed in a Jewish area in the city. But so many Jews lived in Warsaw, it became necessary to transport Jews from all over the city into that area, making it very overcrowded. Also Jews were brought from other villages in the ghetto. Plans to make Jews live in some remote and forgotten place changed in 1941 when the idea of extermination camps began to be realised. Some Jews felt it would be safer to accept being transferred to the ghetto, thinking that hiding outside the ghetto would be more dangerous. Despite the dangers, people stayed outside the ghetto. Some hid in attics.

Others hid in basements, and garden sheds. Whole families hid under floorboards, in spaces so small that they couldn’t even turn over in the night.

When the ghetto was enclosed by a wall in November 1940, things became far more dangerous. The overcrowding and rationed food meant people were dying from starvation as well as diseases like typhoid. Could these have been family relations of mine? There were still those, who through agility and courage, could slip between the two worlds. The ‘smuggling’ this allowed was a lifeline for many in the ghetto. The municipal courts on Leszno street was a secret corridor. Maybe some of my relations risked their lives to slip through the ghetto walls, bringing food and cigarettes with which to barter.

Warsaw had a Jewish population of about 360,000. But with Jews being transported from elsewhere in Poland, the ghetto housed as many as 460,000. With this overcrowding, there were, on average, seven people to a room. At first, the plan seemed to be to push Jews to some remote and forgotten place. But later, in 1941, more radical plans emerged, imagining extermination rather than expulsion. The closing of the ghetto walls was a step in this plan. The Holocaust was not a single event but one that unfolded in a series of improvised steps. Before the idea of gas chambers and ovens in specially constructed death camps, there were ‘Gas Vans’. These could accommodate a number of Jews who could be suffocated with the exhaust fumes from the engine. The first victims were inmates of mental asylums and hospitals. The van drove up to a hospital and collected patients, who were then suffocated with carbon monoxide fumes as the van drove away. The vans were also used at Chelmno extermination camp, until gas chambers were developed.

I picture one of these vans in front of my grandmother’s house on Avenue C on the Lower East Side.

Some who had survived in the forest through the winter thought their chances of survival might be better in a ‘work camp’ ghetto. But what they found there was even more terrible. Any Jew found outside the ghetto was liable to be murdered. And there were rumours about the destination of those who were transported, supposedly to ‘work’ camps. It was impossible to believe that these horrible rumours were true. None of these people were ever heard from again. If my relations were among those, who knows what would have become of them?

In Warsaw, around 28,000 Jews lived in defiance of German restrictions outside the ghetto. Most were hidden by non-Jewish Poles risking their own lives. ‘About 11,500 survived the war. One credible estimate is that 7-9 percent of the non-Jewish population of Warsaw gave assistance to the Jews - that is 70,000-90,000 people.” Laurence Rees, The Holocaust So it may be possible that members of my family were among those survivors.

In the end, the ghetto was completely destroyed. And after the Warsaw uprising, most of Warsaw itself was razed to the ground. If my family had managed to survive there this might have been their fate in the end.

When I visited Auschwitz I saw immense glass display cases. In some there were huge mounds of eyeglasses and personal items which had been collected. Recycling was incredibly. I couldn’t tell what one of the glass cases contained, but then I realised - they were shoes. And the number of small children’s shoes was very upsetting. “Leather shoes had to be sorted from other shoes, whole shoes from half shoes. Men’s, women’s and children’s shoes had to be separated. Right shoes had to be sorted from left shoes, ‘whole shoes from half shoes’, black shoes from brown shoes, and finally, ‘and this was the hardest job of all’, the matching pairs have to be ferreted out.’ The penalty for theft from this mass of shoe leather brought into the ghetto was execution.” Łódź Ghetto Chronicle, September 6 1943 Martin Gilbert 'The Holocaust’ In another was a large pile of suitcases, each with the family name painted in bold letters. And quite a few of these had the name Klein painted on them. Is this where my father’s family finished? 36

In the end, I will probably never know where my ancestors ended up. I will just have to return to that strong, tall tree I saw in the gardens outside Auschwitz. And think of these words of the poet:

'Spilled blood is not the roots of trees but it's the closest thing to roots we have.' -Yehuda Amichai

‘For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best’ Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning