Out of the Shoebox (9 page)

"A
few weeks before Passover, in March 1942, the Seret River overflowed from the
snowmelt and flooded Mr. Weiser's new flour mill. The grain in the storerooms
on the ground floor got wet. Jews were ordered to remove the wet sacks of grain
and carry them to the upper levels. My brother volunteered for this task. The
German SS men supervised the Jewish workers, abused them and made them run as
they carried the sacks. Those who struggled were beaten half to death. My
brother was a strong, healthy man and he excelled at this chore. He and his
friends would help other Jews. Mr Drohowicer told us that my brother carried
his sacks as well. Two SS men, who saw my brother at work, were impressed by
his abilities and his willingness to help so invited him to row the boat they
used to cross the surging river. When, in the middle of the river, one of them
bent over and rocked the boat. The SS men then accused my brother of trying to
drown them and one of them shot and killed him. When everyone came back from work,
and my brother still had not returned, my mother had a feeling that something
bad happened. She was so wracked with worry that she had a heart attack. She
kept mumbling "my son is gone, my son is gone..." That night we
learned my brother was one of three victims who were murdered that day. Early
the next morning Frimka (my sister) and I went and pulled my brother's body out
of the water with great difficulty. Not only was he a large strong man, but his
body was waterlogged. We carried him together, off the beaten track, and buried
him in the cemetery.

“His
death was a harsh blow. He was a gentle man, always willing to help his fellow
man and, around there, were many people who needed help. That was the reason he
had volunteered, in the early days, to the Judenrat Police..."

It
was Friday, December 28 2012. As I was driving, back from an early get together
with friends, I heard the horoscopes on the radio. It said Virgos are
experiencing an improvement in their health, and they are at their best. I
smiled to myself and decided to change my morning plans. I went to visit my
mother. As I was driving, I thought it was time for her to say a few words,
after a silence of a year and a half. When I arrived at the nursing home I
found my mother looking at me, her eyes open. When I said "Hi, Mom,"
she responded clearly "I'm happy to see you." I led her in a
wheelchair to a quiet corner and tried to get her to talk. When I got home I
wrote to Hanna and Miri:

"I
visited my mother today at the nursing home. She's been unresponsive for a year
and a half. Most of this time she just sat there with her eyes closed, and
hasn’t spoken a word. She is a hundred and one years old and three months. I
told her how you told me about your mother Tonia, and that for the first time
I'd heard of Pepe Kramer. I asked her, "Who was Pepe Kramer?" She opened
her eyes and lucidly answered, "Pepe was Tonia’s best friend. She lived
with my father and mother after we left... she was a little girl." We
talked in the dining hall where the morning activities take place. The nursing
staff present were all surprised. I loaded a picture of Pepe, your mother and
another friend from the Chortkow website on my iPhone and asked my mother to
try and recognize the people in the photo (her eyesight is fine). When I
pointed to Pepe my mother said her name, and when I pointed to your mother she
very clearly said "that's Tonia." She did not recognize the third
girl in the photo. I then showed her the photo of Pepe and Tonia in the boat
and asked her where it was taken. Without a moment’s hesitation she replied "the
Seret River." Long story short, it was an amazing, totally unexpected
experience. I thought you might like to know..."

On
August 6th, 2012 I received an email and photo from Miri.

"I'm
enclosing a group photo of my father's friends who went out to the woods
together to have this picture taken before he left for Eretz Israel in the fall
of 1936. Among the people in the photo is your uncle; Moshe Kramer. My father
is in the back row, third from the left. Moshe is wearing the Polish high
school uniform. Jewish students in Chortkow were slowly being pushed out of the
Polish school because of the numerus clausus law (a limit on the percentage of
Jewish students in Universities). This means he was an excellent student and
the family had the money to pay the outrageous tuition Jews were charged. For
that reason the Jewish school was founded a year later in 1937. In 1938 it was
recognized by the authorities as a Jewish public school with its own public
school uniform and badge. I think classes stopped with the Russian occupation,
but I'm not sure. My father didn't study at the Polish school, which is why he
did not wear the typical uniform. My father told me, as it also says in your
mother's memoirs, that the Kramer family lived across from the bus station. I
currently don't have any photos of it, but when I come across one I will send
it along. My mother translated some of your postcards, the parts written in
Polish. If you go into Letters at The Kramer Family on the website you will
find her translation..."

Moshe Kramer, front row third from
the right. 1936

I
could easily identify my uncle. A smiling, good looking boy who looked exactly
as he did in my mother's photos. The hard part was reading the partial
translations of the postcards my parents received after returning to
Palestine.  Chortkow had already been under Soviet rule for a year when the
postcards were sent.

The
return address had changed after the family business was expropriated and they
were cast out of their home and had to move to Szkolna St.  The letters are in
Yiddish and Polish. Mendel Kramer wrote in Yiddish, and Selka, my mother's
sister, wrote in Polish. Here is the translation of the Polish:

January
1940:
"My dears, since our dear father left
me no space I simply send kisses. Sela"

March
1940:
"Dearest ones, last week we received
your postcard and we were delighted. Thank you. We are grateful that you are
well. We are the same. Our lives continue and that is all. Why do you not
write? Tell us whether Junio has work and what kind of work it is? Is he making
any money? How is our dear Ilana? Does she miss us as we miss her? Write to us
at length and tell us all about it. Wishing you a happy holiday and sending
kisses. Sela. Have a kosher Passover."

The
last postcard from July 10th 1940:
"I thank
you for the photos, thank the lord... we are lucky... you are lucky that you
made it to Palestine. We are all healthy. Junio, I ask that you write to us
about everything, how Ilana is growing, and what she says. She is our great joy
and comfort. Kisses. S Kramer. Chortkow."

This
partial translation was enough to make the family's feelings abundantly clear.
The despair they felt, trapped under a hostile Soviet regime that saw them as
enemies of the revolution. These were the last words from Chortkow. Then there
was only silence. Infinite silence.

My parent's visit to Chortkow with
Ilana 1939, from right to left: Ilana, Rivka Finkelman, Dr. Sima Finkelman,
Mom, Selka Kramer

***

On
April 25, 2012 I received a letter from the office of the Custodian General:

Re:
Property registered to Shlomo Zvi Finkelman

The
authorized committee in our office discussed the release application submitted
by you and decided to grant your request and release said property.

The
property, half of parcel 40 in block 11398, was transferred to the State’s
hands in 1996 – attached is a copy of the order.

In
order to release the property, you must apply to the Israel Land
Administration, Acquisition & Expropriation Department, 15 HaPalyam Blvd,
ground floor, P.O.Box 548, Haifa 33095.

For
your information, the number of the parcel was changed several times, and at
present it is part of parcel 197 in block 11398 (it was combined with another
parcel, and its area is 3,121 square meters).

Sincerely,

Shira
Gordon, Atty.,

Attorney
for the Custodian General

I
felt great. I succeeded in doing the impossible. I completed the circle; an
action begun by my father and Mordechai Liebman in 1935 has been completed by
me. Part of the lot purchased by my father is being returned to its legal owners.
My euphoria was somewhat dampened by the fact that Mordechai Liebman apparently
had no beneficiaries. I still hope that when this story is published, it may
lead to finding any remaining relatives of Mordechai’s.

The
first thing I immediately did was try to locate the lot. With the help of my
partner, Hanan, and the Land Administration website, we located the lot within
minutes. The original lot had been combined with other lots in this block and
re-divided, but the actual location had not changed: in Kiryat Haroshet
(“industrial town”), an area of Tivon on the southern slopes of the hills
facing Mt. Carmel along the Kishon River. Just coming across the name Kiryat
Haroshet set the bells ringing – it was so similar to the name I recalled from
my mother’s stories and my childhood memories. I’d remembered it as Kfar
Haroshet (“industrial village”), as I wrote in the declaration submitted to the
Custodian General, but it turned out the accurate name is Kiryat Haroshet.
Also, from my mother’s stories, I remembered the character of a crook; as it
turned out, there was a rabbi involved in the history of settlements in that
region, but judging from the information I now found, he was a tragic figure,
far from a crook.

Location of the lot in Kiryat
Haroshet (marked by a pin)

Rabbi
Yehezkel Taub of Yablona began selling the Kiryat Haroshet lands in 1933 for 37
lira per dunam (1000 m²). On Lag Ba’Omer (a Jewish holiday occurring around
mid-May) of 1934 the cornerstone to Kiryat Haroshet was laid, named after the
biblical “Harosheth Hagoyim”, the dwelling place of Sisera, captain of the army
of Jabin king of Canaan (Judges 4:2). Opinions regarding the location of the
biblical Harosheth Hagoyim are divided; some think it was at present-day Amakim
Junction or near Yokneam. Other scholars think Harosheth Hagoyim was an early
name of the forested mountains in the north of the country rather than the name
of a single city involved in industry or craft. According to these scholars,
Harosheth Hagoyim is the woodland that used to stretch from Jezreel Valley
northward to the Galilee.

The
young rabbi, living with his followers in Yablona, Poland, wanted to become a
Zionist entrepreneur and bring his followers along to Palestine, to take part
in redeeming the land. In 1924 Rabbi Taub established in Warsaw a company to
sell land, called Nachlat Yaacov. Through the mediation of Zionist leader
Yehoshua Hankin, Taub bought some land on the Sheikh Abreik hills from
Hachsharat Hayishuv (The Jewish Palestine Land Development Company). The
original land owner was a Lebanese Christian named Sursock. After the purchase,
Rabbi Taub began selling plots of land to his followers, and established a
Hassidic agricultural settlement called Nachlat Yaacov. But the settlement
could not cope with the day-to-day hardships. Security and financial
difficulties proved to be too much for the Hassidic settlers, so they turned to
the JNF (Jewish National Fund) and asked them to exchange the treacherous land for
other lots more suitable for settling. The swap took place: Rabbi Taub returned
to the JNF all the land he’d bought to sell, and in return received new land on
which his followers established an agricultural village called Kfar Hassidim.
This stretch of land was both more fertile and further away from hostile Arab
villages, which enabled the new settlement to flourish.

However,
despite his obligation to JNF, Rabbi Taub did not return all the Sheikh Abreik
lands to JNF, but kept for himself a lot of some 900 dunam (~222 acres) on the
slopes of the hills opposite Mt. Carmel, along the Kishon River. The rabbi, who
had a shrewd business sense as any modern day real estate developer, felt that
despite the inhospitable topography and marshes in the land he held, it was
worth his while hanging on to it and trying to sell lots for the construction
of a new, urban-rural settlement. He believed that the railway, the western
route of the Jezreel Valley railway,  would enable people to live in a rural environment
yet work in the city of Haifa, which was only a half-hour’s train ride away. In
his vision, he saw a place where people would grow and consume their own fruit
and vegetables, strengthening the rural aspect of their lives, while being
employed or owning a business in Haifa. The rabbi also tried to attract light
industry to the area, such as metal workers, textile and upholstery workers,
and so develop a town based on the model of rural towns in central Europe.

Rabbi
Taub succeeded in selling dozens of lots for building, but still the settlement
did not flourish. The new immigrants, scared of the nearby Arab and Beduin population,
preferred living in the big cities. The tension reached its peak after the
murder of two Jewish guards who were guarding a pool nearby, close to today’s
Yokneam, and the development of the settlement came to a halt.  But Taub did
not give up. He imported two shiploads of lumber, had some forty portables
built, and embarked on a new marketing campaign: Buy a dunam of land and
receive another dunam, a wooden cabin, a grant of two lira a month, and free
transportation to Haifa. This campaign was a success, the settlement developed,
and by the end of 1937 comprised of 460 families. In addition, there were two
small factories; one for hats and one for shaving brushes, kindergartens, where
a school and synagogue were built. Reality came even closer to Taub’s vision
when the railways opened a special commuter line, with two trains; morning and
afternoon, providing residents working in Haifa with convenient transportation
to work and back, all for a monthly ticket costing 40 grush (0.40 lira). It
seemed like a huge success story, until all hopes were dashed tragically. On
the night of June 20th, 1938, a gang of Arabs raided the settlement shooting
everywhere indiscriminately, burning down the school and the synagogue, and torching
houses with their residents inside. Three of the Gutterman family and two of
the Spiegel family were burned alive. The residents immediately started
fleeing. The Valley train stopped at the settlement every half hour, picking up
the fleeing residents and their baggage. Forty-eight hours later there were
only a dozen people left in the settlement out of eight hundred. Kiryat
Haroshet did not recover for sixty years.

Rabbi
Taub got in over his head financially. The clerks working under him may have
stolen what was left of his money. He couldn’t make his loan payments, and in
1938 the Magistrates Court in Haifa ordered that his assets be sold to cover
part of his debts. Taub escaped to the US, abandoned religion, changed his name
to George Nickel and worked as a real estate developer and contractor in Los
Angeles. In 1980 Taub returned to Israel, went into a retirement home in Afula,
and re-adopted religion. In May 1986, at age 91, he died and was buried in the
section of the early Hassidim in the cemetery of Kfar Hassidim, the village which
he had established.

The
correlation between my childhood memories, the discovery of Father’s and
Mordechai’s ownership of the lot, and the info I gathered about Kiryat Haroshet
were fascinating and shed light on my father’s actions in buying the lot. I
have no doubt that Rabbi Yehezkel Taub’s initiative to build a rural-industrial
community connected to Haifa by rail was the talk of the town among town
planners, architects and pioneering settlers in the Haifa region of 1934.
Though there was a construction boom in and around Haifa in those days, this
project was definitely unique.

A notice in the daily Davar: the
bailiff’s notice regarding the auctioning of Taub’s effects to cover his debts.

The
official notice states the place and date of the auction, the sum of the debt
24.646 Israeli Lira [Palestine pounds], and the terms of sale. The items
listed: a Hebrew Remington typewriter; a calculating machine, two office desks,
and five chairs.

Rabbi
Taub, originally from Poland, marketed the lands especially to the Jewish
middle class of Haifa and Poland. The idea of combining rural living with
commercial enterprise and setting up industrial plants was very attractive to
people who saw this model as one enabling them a lifestyle similar to what they
had in their homeland. Father, who left Palestine for Poland that year in order
to propose to my mother, must have told his close friends and Betar activists
in Chortkow about Taub’s enterprise. Father and his good pal Mordechai Liebman
then decided on jointly buying a lot for the purpose of building an industrial
plant of some sort. Father returned to Israel with Mother, and bought the lot
jointly with Mordechai.

As
pleased with myself as I was for completing the puzzle, I was rather shaken by
certain thoughts that pervaded my consciousness. Thoughts about the residents
of Kiryat Haroshet, many of whom had recently arrived from Poland, weighed on
my mind. They’d come to start a new life, only to go through the trauma of
attacks complete with the burning of schools, synagogues and houses with their
inhabitants. But, this time, the attackers were not Poles, Cossacks or
Ukrainians, but local Arabs and Beduin. I have no doubt that in the
subconscious of many of these residents there lurked a post-traumatic experience
of persecution and attacks, which they were now re-living. That may have been
the reason that most of the settlement’s residents never returned, and the
place was deserted for decades.

I
never found the plans for the structure Father had designed for that lot, and it
is obvious it was never built. I can’t be sure why, but I can well imagine. My
father probably put all his energy into designing apartment buildings in Hadar Hacarmel
neighborhood and never got around to that project. Or maybe Taub’s failure to
sell the other lots during 1935-36 cooled Father’s enthusiasm. Later, once the
place was deserted due to the attacks, the lot lost its value, became
irrelevant and was forgotten over time. The copy of the official papers I received
from the Land Registry after the Custodian General confirmed my ownership of
the lot and provided the exact location, showed that only in 1954 was the lot
registered to my father and Mordechai Liebman in equal parts. What I couldn’t understand
was why the Custodian General registered half the lot to my father and the
other half to the name of a person who died in the Holocaust. I never
considered the possibility that my father wasn’t aware that the lot was
officially put in his name well after the actual purchase -- in fact, only
about four years before his death.