The House of Twenty Thousand Books (19 page)

Over coffee once, when I visited the house from university, Chimen mentioned that after the war his family had found out that his own grandmother – Raizl’s mother Leah, daughter of Rabbi David Willowski – who was very elderly by then, had been shot dead during the
Einsatzgruppen
actions in Byelorussia, either in one of the ghettos or in the killing fields in the forests outside of town; or, perhaps gassed in one of the early mobile gas units which were so lethally experimented with in Byelorussia. Chimen, from a distance of sixty years, could not tell me how my
great-great
-grandmother had died; but he knew that she had been murdered by the Nazis. It was the only time I ever heard him discuss the personal losses he had endured during the Holocaust; and he mentioned it quickly, reluctantly, with a minimum of additional details. It was as if the event, for Chimen, was too vast – and the people lost within it were too small to be mourned individually, their deaths too easily swamped by other, bigger, horrors: by destructions of entire populations, by industrial, methodical killings that numbered in the millions, by the complete
loss of communities that had survived in Eastern Europe for centuries. Never a social historian – unlike his nephew Raph Samuel, who specialised in telling the stories of individuals and bringing their lives out of anonymity – Chimen was always more comfortable in exploring the impact of historical events on countries and economic systems than he was in detailing the lives of individuals trapped within that historical web.

And yet, those individual stories did, at some deeply personal level affect him enormously. Not until after he died did I find out that Chimen had been instrumental in bringing to London more than fifteen hundred Torah scrolls from the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. They had been collected both by Jews, hoping to salvage at least some artefacts from their world before it was consumed by the genocide, and also, bizarrely, by Nazi ethnographers, eager to add loot to the macabre museum they hoped to create in Prague as an epilogue to the story of an extinct race. During the war, the scrolls and thousands of other fragments from vanished Jewish homes and communities were put on display in Prague’s Jewish museum and a handful of local synagogues, the exhibits curated by Jewish librarians and scholars, catalogued and tagged by Nazi clerks, and viewable only by a select few SS officers. During those years, the Jewish populations of Bohemia and Moravia were systematically destroyed, most of their members shipped first to the ‘model’ camp of Terezin (known in German as Theresienstadt), and then onwards to Auschwitz and the other extermination centres. A population of nearly one hundred thousand was reduced to barely seven thousand. After the war, the scrolls lay unused and forgotten, stored in a tiny synagogue out in the suburbs of Prague, wrapped in polythene, many of them covered with a fine veneer of mould.

There they stayed for more than eighteen years, until 1963, when a London art gallery owner named Eric Estorick who specialised in Eastern European art, heard about them from a
Czech government official and arranged for Chimen to journey to Prague to evaluate them. Chimen’s initial task was to determine which were kosher – undamaged, and thus fit for use in a synagogue; which were
pasul
– desecrated or torn, mouldy or water-damaged, and thus unfit for religious usage; and which fell somewhere in between – damaged yet, in the hands of skilled scribes and scholars, salvageable. Chimen, normally so meticulous about writing down even the most mundane of appointments in the tiny cloth-covered diaries that he carried around with him in his jacket pocket, left no record of this trip; no aeroplane number jotted down in his little maroon-coloured year planner, no note saying something to the effect of ‘leaving for Prague’. He was, by then, fearful to the point of paranoia of any written connections to the Eastern bloc. The trip must, however, have taken place in late October, as there is a little more than a week of empty space in his diary for that period.

He spent that time in a dreary Prague, being followed by KGB agents, he told those connected with the venture subsequently, continually terrified that he would be arrested and shipped back to Moscow. There was nothing to do but work; the shops were so empty that he could not even find a present to bring back to London for Mimi. He returned, shattered by his discovery of the massive Torah collection, with tales of how some of the scrolls had had SOS messages tucked into their folds, with notes such as ‘Please God help us in these troubled times’. He then proceeded to help Estorick, along with a wealthy businessman named Ralph Yablon and the liberal rabbi Harold Reinhart, founder of the Westminster Synagogue, to negotiate the purchase of the entire collection. In late 1963, a few cryptic notes appear to that effect in his diary: ‘5pm Rabbi Reinhart’, says one such notation, on 10 December, the first evening of Hanukkah. Nothing else. No details. No mention of the project at hand.

What he had found haunted him. ‘The agony of the work
remains with Chimen Abramsky to this day’, wrote Philippa Bernard in 2005, in her book
Out of the Midst of the Fire
. ‘Some of the Torahs were burned when the synagogues were torched, and he recalled the Rabbinical tradition that if a Torah is burned the words are sent up to Heaven. Some were blood-stained, many lacking binders to hold the two rolls together, were tied with
tallisim
[prayer shawls], or even in one case with a child’s mackintosh belt. Two were held together with pieces of a woman’s corset. The human misery embodied in that tragic collection was a palpable reminder of what had befallen the Jewish race’. By February 1964, when the scrolls arrived in a chilly central London, delivered by a fleet of lorries, Chimen had been a fervent anti-Communist for six years. He stood in the crowd and wept: for the horrors of the Holocaust and for the sheer callous neglect that the scrolls, these extraordinary
memento mori
, had experienced under Communist rule in the decades afterwards.

As I root around my childhood memories of the books in that front room, it seems to me that the texts on the Holocaust also provide hints as to why Chimen remained so ferociously pro-Soviet during the war years and their immediate aftermath. For, despite their many other crimes, before and during the Second World War the Soviets were not actively anti-Semitic: their imprisonment of religious proselytisers such as Yehezkel in the 1920s and 1930s had been anti-religious, not anti-Semitic per se. They did not tar all Jews as enemies, nor declare, as had the Nazis, that the Jewish race as a whole was inherently foreign, inherently apart from the broader society. Wholesale, across the board hostility to Jews was not part of Stalin’s calculus until the
post-war
period, when opposition to the State of Israel (which had been welcomed initially by the Soviets, who were eager to take pot-shots at the crumbling British empire) morphed into a more explicit anti-Jewish rhetoric and then a series of lethal actions against the Jewish intelligentsia in the Soviet Union.

During the war itself, the British Communist Party, with Chimen’s Jewish Affairs Committee playing a vital role, compiled a huge dossier of evidence on the unfolding Holocaust, with testimony from those few who had managed to escape the death camps and join up with partisans in the surrounding forests, and providing information on the mass shootings and then on the gas chambers. As early as June 1942, they had gathered a body of material, provided to them by the Polish National Council, on the makeshift extermination campaign that had begun in the land still known as Eastern Galicia in the summer of 1941, on the use of mobile gas chamber trucks in Chelmno, on the shootings carried out by the
SS Einsatzgruppen
death squads, as well as the systematic slaughter inside the death camps. The British Communists helped to organise some of the earliest public events to discuss and denounce the unprecedented massacres. And it was at least in part as a result of their actions that, years before the defeat of Nazism, British parliamentarians, including the foreign secretary Anthony Eden, began to talk about war crimes trials for the architects of the Holocaust. By the summer of 1942, the British Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress had passed resolutions condemning these unprecedented atrocities. The Communist Party was publishing pamphlets documenting the destruction of Eastern European Jewry. And at a huge meeting convened at London’s Caxton Hall on 2 September of that year, representatives of governments-in-exile from the countries of occupied Europe, as well as members of socialist groups from around the world, met to speak out against the killings and to urge the allied governments to hold Germany’s leaders accountable for their crimes after the war ended. The dossier on the unfolding genocide, put together by Chimen and others in the Communist Party, sits now, long forgotten, in a filing cabinet in the People’s History Museum in Manchester.

After Hitler unleashed his vast armies against the Soviet
Union in 1941, the fight to defeat Hitler became intertwined with the fight to protect Stalin’s Soviet Union. If the Soviet Union could withstand the German onslaught, in the long run Hitler’s empire was doomed. In 1941, the year Chimen officially joined the organisation, membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain nearly tripled, reaching a peak of just short of 60,000 members. In some so-called ‘little Moscow’ enclaves – in the mining communities of Fife in Scotland and in South Wales, in Chimen and Mimi’s East London neighbourhood of Stepney – the Party came temporarily to dominate the local political scene. Chimen was a close friend of the Scottish Communist MP William Gallacher, even going so far as to help Gallagher write his autobiography. Raph Samuel, who was reputedly quite capable of holding his own in a theoretical conversation about Marxism from around the age of seven onwards, a Communist child prodigy, an
illui
of revolutionary theory, wrote that Party members obsessively followed news about fighting on the Russian front, and busily worked on putting up stickers on lamp posts: ‘Second Front NOW!’ They went to see Soviet films in unbombed cinemas, and busied themselves every May Day by going on demonstrations on behalf of the workers of the world. ‘The Lenin Album was my bible at this time’, Raph continued. ‘A sumptuously produced volume of facsimile reproductions, photographs and pictures. There were only five copies in the country, I was told, and my uncle was the proud possessor of one of them. It introduced me to the idea of clandestinity and persecution, revolution and counter-revolution, barricades and strikes’.

No matter that from the summer of 1939 until Operation Barbarossa sent German soldiers streaming eastward in June 1941 Stalin had been an uneasy ally of the Fuhrer’s, carving up Poland with the Nazis, occupying Finland, devouring the Baltic states; no matter that in 1939 there had been a schism in the British Communist Party over the decision of its leadership to toe the line
on the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact, with Party theoreticians arguing that good Communists should fight against the ‘imperialist’ war and seek to replace the leadership of Chamberlain and then of Churchill with a ‘people’s government’. Now that the fight was joined, now that Soviet Russia was fighting for its very survival, no rhetoric was to be spared in urging the successful prosecution of the war. In the early 1990s, newly opened Soviet archives revealed the extent to which British Communists during those crucial early days of the war chose to follow edicts from Moscow. ‘Direct your fire against capitulationist anti-Soviet elements’, the executive committee of the Comintern had ordered its British comrades,
New Statesman
journalists Paul Anderson and Kevin Davey reported, in an article dated 4 February 1994 on the revelations contained in the archives. Support a ‘united national front around the Churchill government’, the Comintern urged. Opposing that government, the Moscow scribblers wrote, now would ‘bring grist to the mill of pro-Hitlerite elements in England’.

In May 1943, the twenty-six year old Chimen edited a pamphlet on behalf of the Jewish Fund for Soviet Russia. Titled
Calling All Jews to Action!
, it issued a stirring decree: ‘Fellow Jews of Great Britain, America and the other countries, if you want to prevent Hitler from exterminating us, if you want to save your own lives…help the great heroic Red Army’. In February 1944, in a pamphlet also published by the Jewish Fund for Soviet Russia (a rare copy of which is now housed in a special collection in the University of Sheffield’s library) the United Kingdom’s Chief Rabbi, Joseph Hertz, saluted the Soviet Union for saving ‘so many of our brethren from bestial torture and fiendish annihilation’. A year earlier, in another Jewish Fund publication, Hertz had called on all people of faith on Red Army Day to pray for a Soviet victory. The President of the Federation of Synagogues wrote, in a letter published as part of a collection of tributes by the Fund, of ‘the
brilliant victories of the Russian armies against the German sadistic hordes’.

Further cementing Chimen’s belief that the Soviets had the interest of Jewish communities at heart, immediately after the war ended, Russian writers such as Vassily Grossman, nowadays best known as the author of the magnificent, sprawling
Life and Fate
, were instrumental in bringing to light the horrors of the Holocaust and what they termed, with careful precision, the Annihilation Camps. Grossman, and his colleague Ilya Ehrenburg, had toured the liberated camps, detailing the conditions, interviewing the skeletal survivors, documenting Nazi book-keeping figures on the numbers of Jews who had been sent to each camp, calculating how many had been killed and how. They had detailed their findings in
The Black Book: The Ruthless Murder of Jews by German-Fascist Invaders
. It was the earliest comprehensive overview of the slaughter to be published, and it created shock waves around the world. (Not that that did Grossman any good; as Stalin became more anti-Semitic, so Grossman fell into official disfavour, and for many decades his books were rendered unavailable to Soviet readers.)