Terror Has No Diary

Michael Melnick

Description

Of the 7000 Jews living in the Baltic seaport of Libau (Liepaja), Latvia when the Germans invaded on June 21, 1941, only 200 remained alive when the city was liberated May 9,1945. Of these, maybe two dozen were hiding within Libau itself. This story is about 12 of them. Eleven adults were in the care of Robert and Johanna Sedols who hid them in a cellar behind a false wall constructed with the "holy bricks" of the demolished Choral Synagogue; the lone child was cared for by a widow, Otilija Schimelpfenig, in the secure comfort of her home. For their courage and moral stature, the Sedols and Mrs. Schimelpfenig are memorialized as "Righteous Among the Nations" at Yad Vashem. How these 12 Jews arrived at their hiding places, and how they endured until liberation, is a remarkable story, one of miracles. Inscrutable miracles, cast naked upon the ruins by men and women of courage and cunning, not saints.

The narrational vigor of the telling reflects the striking skill of a sagacious diarist, Kalman Linkimer. When the Germans invaded Libau, Kalman was just shy of 30. He was already a veteran of the Latvian Army, a broadly educated teacher and poet who tutored wealthy gymnasium students, and an habitué of cafes where he endlessly played chess, sipped espresso, and smoked cigarettes. And more...he was a gay, religious Jew who was an athlete and an avid leftist. Faced with a defiled social contract, Kalman threw off the mask of the gentle aesthete and exposed his true grit. He conceded to no one the mission of chronicling the terror; he was consumed with the need to transmit the pain of evil to those who were not there. Kalman Linkimer was a moral witness.

Kalman's chronicle begins on Erev Yom Kippur, 26 September 1944: "Just eleven of us now, buttoned up in a cellar beneath the heat of baking ovens...." With this painful metaphor as backdrop, Kalman recounts how they all came to be there; the twists and turns through the endless night of murder, torture and humiliation inflicted by evil actors entirely empty of empathy; the mass murders in the dunes of Skede, the liquidation of the ghetto, the escapes, the events that taught each of them that a drowning man is not troubled by rain.

Two-thirds into the narrative, Kalman returns to the "present." Far from growing familiar with their privileged prison, they behold it every moment with a new horror. The hunger, the illness, the conflicts, and the bombing ever more near. The bipolar illusions, the catatonic routine, and the adulterous entanglement. Their quarantine a panic room bricked in, their world narrows in increments only animals know....Liberation arrives nearly four years after the nightmare began. They emerge from the cellar malnourished, maladroit, and cautiously hopeful. The lone child, wearing a white hat and a flowered dress, stands in the Spring sunshine. Only she is destined to fully heal.

Sujets

• Holocaust
• Histoire
• History

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 23 juin 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456617325
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

TERROR
HAS NO DIARY
 
ANNALS OF A GAY JEW AND HIS COMRADES BEHIND A HOLY WALL IN NAZI EUROPE
 
 
MICHAEL MELNICK
 
 

DEER MOUNTAIN PRESS
"a writers' and artists' co-op"
Los Angeles New York

Copyright © 2013 Michael Melnick
All rights reserved.
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieved systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Direct inquires to [e-mail]
 
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-1732-5
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012952902
 
 
The author extends his grateful acknowledgement to Professor Edward Anders for permission to use without limitation his English translation of the Yiddish-language diary written by Kalman Linkimer (1912-1988) and to Ada Israeli and Aaron Vesterman for their generous gift of invaluable photographs.
 
 
The author presents this work as a Yahrzeit (memorial) for his family members who were murdered by the Nazis in Libau (Liepaja) and Riga, Latvia. In their memory, all proceeds from the sale of this work in any form, including film or theatrical rights, will be donated to MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger.
 
 
DEER MOUNTAIN PRESS
"a writers' and artists' co-op"
[e-mail]
DEDICATION

KALMAN LINKIMER
(1912-1988)
A Moral Witness
AUTHOR’S NOTE
You die twice. First, when your brain turns off and your heart no longer beats; second, when not a soul on earth recalls your life, even your name or face. It is then that you are but a statistic in a government ledger, in a necrology, or on a faded cemetery headstone that receives no visitors. The Shoa sharply focused this almost universal reality. Europe is a vast unmarked Jewish graveyard, from Kiev to Amsterdam, from Hamburg to Salonika. The continuing tragedy is that relatively few can be rescued from a second, and final, death.
This cataclysm intensifies our obligation to those who survived as targets of the Germans and the local gentile populations that collaborated in and profited from the genocide of the Jews. That obligation is to permit survivors their memorial remnants with all the idiosyncratic nuances that cannot be gleaned from administrative documents. To “pierce the smugness of scholarly detachment,” as survivor-historian Saul Friedländer tells us. To bring the story to notice and allow us to infer. To tell it true.
The story you will read is my attempt to vivify a small number of the many Jews who resided in the Baltic seaport of Libau (Liepaja), to provide a forum for them to reveal their hopes, fears, and, most of all, their reactions to the destruction of their community. More than two decades ago, Aharon Appelfeld, survivor and Israeli literary lion, erected the guidepost: “Everything in [the Shoa] seems so thoroughly unreal, as if it no longer belongs to the experience of our generation, but to mythology. Thence comes the need to bring it down to the human realm….to attempt to make the events speak through the individual and in his language, to rescue the suffering from huge numbers, from dreadful anonymity, and to restore the person’s given and family name, to give the tortured person back his human form, which was snatched away from him” 1
The outcome of my effort is solely my responsibility and is not to be construed to represent the views or beliefs of those who may have assisted me in any manner. In attempting to measure up to Appelfeld’s high bar, I have sometimes had to draw inferences from diaries, testimonies, and the like that may be wholly different from those that others might draw. To “give the tortured person back his human form” is neither simple nor without detractors, particularly those bewitched by the myth of objective historiography and/or repulsed by the Jewish tradition of transcendent history. Notwithstanding, I very much hope to have achieved some measure of success in distilling the truth of the matter from the facts of the matter. Still, whatever is contained in these pages, good or otherwise, is my responsibility and only mine.
 
****
 
First and foremost, I want to acknowledge the great generosity of Edward Anders, Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago. Professor Anders (né Alperovich), as a young man, survived the destruction of the Jewish community of Libau. He and his mother immigrated to New York City after Germany’s surrender; his father and brother did not survive. Over the past decade or so Professor Anders has dedicated a considerable portion of his life to documenting and memorializing the destruction of Libau’s Jews. He worked tirelessly to construct a memorial to the thousands who were murdered, a dignified monument prominently placed in the Jewish cemetery of Liepaja (Libau). Professor Anders has written and lectured extensively on Libau’s Jews, notably his memorial book “Jews in Liepaja, Latvia, 1941-1945” and his English translation of Josifs Steimanis’ “History of Latvian Jews.”
Most central to the book in hand, was Professor Anders’ great effort to make “The Diary of Kalman Linkimer” accessible to the English-speaking world. Initially translated from the Yiddish by Rebecca Margolis, Ed Anders edited the diary with care and sensitivity to produce “Nineteen Months in a Cellar: How 11 Jews Eluded Hitler’s Henchmen.” This was a frustrating effort for many reasons. First, Linkimer began the diary on the day of Germany’s invasion, left the diary behind when he escaped from Paplaka, and reconstructed it after he arrived at Sedols’ cellar. Second, the diary abruptly ends more than two months before liberation.Third, it appeared to Ms. Margolis, based on the uniform handwriting of the “original,” that the diary was rewritten, or at least recopied, sometime after liberation. Fourth, the diary is a diary: it is highly subjective and considerably stilted in its prose, with little to no narrative flow. As a consequence of all this, the English translation is an important primary source, but neither complete nor literary.
All this notwithstanding, unfettered use of Professor Anders’ English translation of Kalman Linkimer’s diary was invaluable to me in preparing the book in hand. I was deeply moved six years ago when Ed Anders offered me the opportunity, as he put it, “to prepare a shorter, more dramatic and faster-moving version of the diary that will have wider appeal.” Professor Anders, to be sure, bears no responsibility whatsoever for what appears in the book in hand. The present work is not an edited version of the edited English version. Rather, the diary is an important source among many other sources. Still, I shall always be indebted to Professor Anders for his offer and generous willingness to consign Linkimer’s story to an unknown telling.
I am most grateful to Ada Israeli (née Adinka Zivcon) and her husband, Yosef. They were my hosts in Israel, and made all the arrangements for my visits with Hilde Skutelsky and Aaron Vesterman. Ada and I have had many hours of conversation in person and by email about her mother, Riva Zivcon. In addition, she has provided very many of the photographs in the book. Most importantly, she was kind enough to read an earlier draft of the book and to encourage me over and over to completion. I am also grateful to Hilde and Aaron for hours of conversation that provided important facts and insights to events and personalities in the story. Aaron has also given me three key photographs, including the most moving picture in the book which he snapped clandestinely, that of the matronly women in the marketplace with square Jew patches sown on their dresses.
I am also grateful to my cousin Elias Hirschberg and his twin brother Jacob, the sons of Zelig Hirschberg, one of the eleven in the cellar. Elias spent a week acquainting me with Riga, its environs, and the countryside between Riga and Liepaja. In Liepaja, both Elias and Jacob helped me explore the city in detail, including a stop at 14 Kauf Street (now 22 Tirgonu). Together we made an emotional visit to Zelig’s grave and to those of our great grandparents, Meir and Beila Hirschberg. Elias and Jacob were invaluable in helping me put the events of the book in a physical and geographic context.
I wish to thank the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, and to humbly acknowledge those whose interviews most informed the book in hand: Shoshana Kahn (née Rosa Sachs); Jeffrey Lowenson (né Efraim Levenson); Efraim “Fred” Neuburger; Max Solway (né Soloveichik). I thank my friend and colleague, Professor Abraham Yaari, who provided the initial rough translation of the previously untranslated Yiddish poems of Kalman Linkimer. I mostly wish to thank my scientific collaborator of 35 years, Professor Tina Jaskoll, for her invaluable assistance in preparing a complex manuscript.
To conclude, I thank Anita, my wife of 47 years. She has enthusiastically supported all my peregrinations save one – running with the bulls in Pamplona.
 
Michael Melnick
Professor
University of Southern California
January, 2013
FOREWORD
Zachor …remember. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt, that you stood at Mt. Sinai, that you were attacked from behind by Amalek, that Haman sought to kill you, that you were exiled from your land by the Romans, that you were massacred in the Ukraine; in the Jewish experience there is no end to remembering, it is central to it. Indeed, it was ancient Israel that proposed history as decisive and introduced a world-view that human history provided meaning to Divine revelation and purpose. Still, historiography, a precise chronicle of historical events, an immanent understanding of recorded events, has been largely alien to the way in which Jewish collective memory has been addressed or