A mother’s letter exposes Eastern European pogroms

MIRAH LANGER

Now, the story of Feiga Shamis, a mother of 12 who survived wave after wave of this violence, has become the lens through which these horrors are exposed in a new documentary.

“Anti-Jewish violence in the aftermath of World War I? Why had I never heard of this?” So says LeeAnn Dance, the documentary’s director, of the impetus for her involvement in the film. “Surely, if mankind is to understand a tragedy as great as the Holocaust, then we must understand its roots.”

As World War I bled into civil war in the region made up of what is now known as Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldovia, Jews were caught in the middle of the power play. As faction upon faction claimed control over these territories, Jews became convenient scapegoats. Their targeting culminated in a series of massacres, leaving up to 300 000 Jews dead. In particular, these killings were marked by an intention to torture, rape, and loot.

Dance, “a non-Jew in Northern Virginia” as she describes herself, became aware of this history through a series of serendipitous personal circumstances which brought her to the story of Shamis. It was a connection that would eventually result in the creation of My Dear Children, the first documentary ever to focus exclusively on this wave of pogroms.

Dance, who previously worked for CNN, along with the co-producer of the documentary, Cliff Hackel, suggests that these pogroms have been little studied for a number of reasons. First, archival information was inaccessible until the fall of the Soviet Union. Second, deciphering the documentation requires specialised language skills. Researchers have to be able to speak Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, German, and French in order to make sense of the information. Third, the sheer horror of the World War II Holocaust that ensued, largely directed the focus of public attention away from previous examples of anti-Jewish violence.

The basis for this ground-breaking documentary is a 174-page letter, handwritten in Yiddish, which Shamis painstakingly copied into three different notebooks. The letters were intended for three of her children, two of whom, Mannie and Rose, she had given up for adoption. At the age of eight and 10 respectively, these siblings were brought to South Africa by philanthropist Isaac Ochberg.

While Mannie was later adopted by the Favish family in Johannesburg, Rose refused all offers of adoption, apparently hoping that her mother would come back to claim her.

Even once he had married and had children, Mannie did not speak openly of his past. As such, it was after Mannie’s death, that Judy Favish, his one daughter, decided to investigate her father’s origins. Along with her own daughter, Favish chose to travel back to the Ukraine and trace the path detailed in Shamis’ letters.

“In part, it was a way of trying to connect to him and reap some kind of closure in a chapter of his life we didn’t really understand,” she says in the film about her trip.

The film documents Judy’s visits to the ruins of villages to which Shamis and the family fled throughout the years of expulsion, displacement, and chaos. Chillingly, in location after location, evidence of once thriving Jewish communities is almost entirely obliterated. It is an erasure that makes Shamis’ letter, in which she details the everyday trauma of Jews at the time, all the more remarkable and rare.

Shamis suffered huge losses at this time. Her husband died of typhus and at least one child, a son, was murdered in the pogroms. While two older children managed to get to America, Shamis was left solely responsible for the remaining children.

It was under these conditions that Shamis, as other Jewish parents did at the time, placed some of her younger children, including Mannie and Rose, into a Ukrainian orphanage for safe-keeping.

While she would later take back her youngest daughter Yente in 1921 she signed permission to allow Mannie and Rose to leave for South Africa. It was a decision that would haunt her for the rest of her life. In the documentary, a number of academics place Shamis’ personal plight in the larger political context.

For the Jewish population of Eastern Europe, the violence experienced was unprecedented both in terms of its sadism and scale. The perpetrators took pleasure in finding new ways to kill Jews that would inflict the most pain and suffering. In the documentary, descriptions and photographs attest to slaughter beyond imagination: a baby spiked on a bayonet; people with limbs cut off and eyes gouged out; girls raped in front of their parents; traumatised victims slipping into insanity; families torn apart; in some cases, entire villages wiped out.

The perpetrators of these acts were mostly teenagers – their ages pegged at between 14 and 20. One of the particularities of the killing was the proliferation and normalisation of non-Jewish neighbours killing their Jewish brethren and then seizing all their property and possessions.

These two aspects of the killings have led some academics to suggest a clear thread between this wave of pogroms and World War II. After all, when German officers entered Eastern Europe during World War II, they reportedly enjoyed significant co-operation – and often keen participation – by locals in the rounding up and killing of Jews. It seems plausible that many of these local populations comprised the same pogrom killers, just somewhat older and more than eager to adopt the Nazi agenda in order to finish off a job started two decades before. In particular, there were few moral qualms about betraying and butchering neighbours, a cultural value that, it has been suggested, had to have had its tendrils in an earlier time.

For Shamis, by the time the war had broken out, out of the children who survived the pogrom period, five, including Mannie and Rose, had left Europe. The rest were scattered across the continent.

Shamis had by then moved to Palestine with one of her older daughters. It is during this time, between 1939 and 1941, that she is believed to have started composing her epic letter.

By the end of the war, a bitter irony would be revealed. All of her children who had remained in Europe had perished in the Holocaust. Her decision to give up Rose and Mannie, had, in fact, saved their lives.

In 1950, during a brief and disastrous reunion between Mannie and Shamis, she presented him with the letter intended for him and Rose.

By then, Rose and Mannie could no longer speak Yiddish, the language in which the letter was written. The letter languished for years until eventually Rose went to a rabbi in Johannesburg to have it translated. She did not share the contents with her family, but cried for “days and days”, her daughter reveals in the documentary.