Left behind: family reunited after 100 years

PAULA SLIER

My grandmother, Sarah, came to South Africa at the age of 11. She couldn’t speak a word of English, and for years, had been scavenging for food on the streets of Brest Litovsk, a Belarusian city bordering Poland. She was embarrassed to wear skirts because a bullet wound in her right calf had scarred badly. She could never properly explain how it got there. She also wasn’t sure how her parents had died. A childhood friend of hers refused to wear the colours white and red as they reminded her of blood on the snow.

It was 1921. Half a million Jewish orphans roamed the icy streets of the Pale of Settlement. World War I was over, there was plague, hunger, and pogroms. Into this inferno arrived a Ukrainian Jewish man by the name of Isaac Ochberg who had relocated to South Africa. He’d secured permission from the Pretoria government to bring 200 Jewish orphans to the country. He drove into one remote village after another, collecting desperate, desolate souls as he went.

His rules were strict: no families were to be broken up, and no sick children would be chosen. But he made exceptions.

One orphan had sheltered his baby sister as the Cossacks (Russian horsemen) who plundered and murdered Jewish villages entered his home. They shot his father dead in front of him and threatened to cut out his sister’s eyes. But the little boy managed to shield her as they hacked off his hand. With one arm carrying his little sister, and a stump hanging where his other hand used to be, he joined Ochberg’s group.

Many, many, years later, I interviewed another orphan, Solly Jossel, in Johannesburg. At 100 years old, he was the oldest orphan still alive. He handed me a small photograph of a woman smiling into the lens. The tears which had been slowly falling from his eyes, dropped onto the picture frame.

“She’s my mother,” he sobbed, stopping the interview for a few minutes so he could compose himself. “She could not care for all her children, and when she heard that a man from Africa was collecting Jewish children to look after them, she begged him to take me.”

A few months later, after the orphans had settled in South Africa, an elderly couple came to visit them one Sunday afternoon. “The woman looked so much like my mother that I ran up to her crying, grabbed her skirt, and refused to let go,” Solly remembers sadly. “She already had grown-up children of her own and wasn’t looking for any more, but bless her, she adopted me. She wrote to my mother to tell her I was being cared for, and she needn’t worry.”

Solly’s real mother replied. But the letters eventually stopped coming. He later learnt she’d been sent to Auschwitz.

For Ochberg, it could not have been easy choosing the children. From 500 000 youngsters, nothing short of a miracle led him to my grandmother, her two sisters, and brother. He found them in a local synagogue where they’d sleep at night. If not for “daddy Ochberg” as they came to call and love him, they most certainly would have died in the gas chambers of Nazi Europe.

But there was one thing that Ochberg did – or rather didn’t do – that would forever change my family. It took my grandmother and her siblings half a century to correct it. Only now can I finish their story.

Ochberg left behind a sister, Faigel.

Last month, my heart skipped a beat as I saw the airport arrival sign light up. Tucuman, Argentina. I remember as a little girl my grandmother telling me we had family in South America. For years, she’d caress much-thumbed letters written in Spanish on faded grey paper. Black-and-white photographs with names and dates on the back would fall from envelopes as strange faces from a faraway land smiled up at me.

This is my first visit to Argentina. I’ve always known I have family living here but until now, I’ve never met any of them. In small physical ways we resemble each other.

“My mother was always sad,” Faigel’s 81-year-old son, Bernardo, tells me in Spanish. “She was always crying. She never got over being left behind.” His veined hand holds mine tightly, and when I look at him, it’s my grandmother’s grey eyes smiling sadly back at me through the generations.

When Ochberg arrived in Brest Litovsk in 1921, it was three years after Russia had signed a treaty in the fortress city ending its participation in World War I. Twelve-year-old Faigel was sick in hospital. She’d been bitten by a snake while looking for mushrooms for her and her siblings to eat. While Ochberg was collecting her sisters and brother and loading them onto a train and then a ship to travel to England and later South Africa, she was lying in a hospital bed. Why didn’t he go and fetch her? Or wait for her? Maybe he planned to return and collect her with more children?

But South Africa was closing its doors to Jewish immigration, and soon the Soviet Union would no longer allow children to be taken out of its borders.

Faigel eventually left the hospital. Can you imagine the terror she must have felt on being told that her entire family had gone to Africa – a continent at the other end of the world? Her son tells me she married at 15, and then set sale for Argentina, a relatively underdeveloped country that was encouraging immigration. Although it seemed improbable, she clung to the hope that one day she’d find her family.

It took years of seeking, but in 1972, after being assisted by the Red Cross, the search was finally over. Fifty years had passed, one sister had died, and the orphans now had grandchildren of their own. My grandmother and her younger sister travelled to Buenos Aires for a reunion. “That was a massive event in our family,” an Argentinian cousin tells me. “I was 10 years old at the time, and I still remember that there was a lot of crying and hugging and laughing.”

The sisters could communicate only in the broken Yiddish of their childhood. The most urgent questions Faigel wanted to ask her sisters was why they left her behind – and the date of her birthday.

I am writing this after visiting Faigel’s grave at the Jewish cemetery in Tucuman. On behalf of three generations of cousins who have never met each other and are today scattered around the world, I recite the mourner’s kaddish. My newly found uncle, Bernardo, and his daughter, Ursula, take my hands. With tears rolling down our cheeks, over Faigel’s grave, he whispers thanks that after all these years, the family is finally reunited.

I place a stone on my great-aunt’s tombstone. She died not long after meeting her siblings. It was as if she’d been waiting for them her whole life.

* Two weeks ago, I set up a WhatsApp group for my cousins – 41 grandchildren of the original five orphans. Many of us have never met each other. One of them, from Argentina, texted me privately. “I am so grateful for knowing that we are no longer alone,” she wrote. I imagine my grandmother and her siblings are looking down at us from heaven and smiling.