In Memory of Vilna
From That Place and Time: A Memoir 1938-1947.
by Lucy S. Dawidowicz.
Norton. 333 pp. $21.95.
Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s memoir is at once a historical account, a story of personal development, an act of memorialization, and a tale of rescue. To her earlier, definitive documentation of the Holocaust in The War Against the Jews 1933-1945 (1975, reissued 1986) and A Holocaust Reader (1976) she here adds a reckoning, as it were, of her motives as a historian.
Mrs. Dawidowicz was born and raised in New York, the daughter of nonreligious, leftist Jews who believed that-the Yiddish language—the common people’s tongue—ought to serve as the foundation for Jewish national existence. At Hunter College in the 1930’s she was active for a time in the Young Communist League, but became disillusioned after the Moscow show trials of 1936. As a graduate student at Columbia she took an interest in Yiddish and modern Jewish history, and won a fellowship to study at the Yiddish Scientific Institute—known as the YIVO—in Vilna.
The year was 1938, a particularly inauspicious time for a twenty-three-year-old Jewish woman to travel alone to Europe. Hitler had just invaded Austria; anti-Jewish riots were erupting with increasing violence in Vilna and throughout Poland. But this vivacious, adventuresome girl was not to be deterred from her dream of studying in the city Napoleon had once called “the Jerusalem of Lithuania.”
Jewish Vilna on the eve of its destruction was a place of ancient echoes. Records show Jews to have lived there in pre-Christian times, with increasing numbers migrating to the city beginning in the 15th century. Through hundreds of years of recurrent anti-Semitic violence, interspersed with brief periods of tolerance, Jewish culture survived, and even flourished. In the 18th century the city was the residence of the Vilna Gaon, the great rabbinical scholar and spiritual authority; in the early 1900’s it was the birthplace of the Jewish labor movement and a center of Zionism. A great synagogue, erected in 1633, was still active when Mrs. Dawidowicz arrived in 1938, holding 5,000 worshippers at its Rosh Hashanah services.
By 1938 Vilna’s Jews numbered 60,000—nearly 30 percent of the city’s total population. Yiddish was heard everywhere: “You could live a full life in Vilna,” writes Mrs. Dawidowicz, “as many Vilna Jews did, speaking only Yiddish, without knowing much Polish or knowing it well.” Schools, synagogues, newspapers, welfare institutions, and cultural events all functioned in a large cooperative network. The YIVO, which welcomed Mrs. Dawidowicz in 1938 as an aspirant, or research fellow, had prospered since its founding as a scholarly institution in 1925 with the aim of encouraging the recognition of Yiddish not as a street tongue but as a language of high culture. Soon Mrs. Dawidowicz became close to her YIVO colleagues and to a group of writers and artists known as yung vilne, Young Vilna, whose members included the Yiddish poets Abraham Sutzkever and Chaim Grade. The group would meet often at Velfkeh’s (“Wolfie’s”) cafe to argue about art and politics. Occasionally they would attend concerts or the theater.
Yet all this was in some sense chimerical. History was moving in wholly other directions. After the collapse of the Russian czarist empire in 1918, Poland had proclaimed itself an independent republic and annexed Vilna; it remained part of Poland until the Bolsheviks recaptured it in 1939. But Polish rule guaranteed no benefits for the Jews of Vilna. Those who had not fled the city during World War I had had to endure a series of nine different military occupations. Poverty, hunger, and anti-Semitic attacks were everyday realities. By the late 1930’s, the campaign to intimidate and suppress the Jews of Poland was in full operation.
Vilna’s Yiddish civilization, Mrs. Dawidowicz realized shortly after her arrival, was “a feverish flowering in the shadow of death.” In fact, she saw, no matter what the fate of Vilna’s Jews was to be, Yiddish was in danger of disappearing. Assimilation, if the government were ever to allow it, would spell an end to an autonomous Yiddish culture, while Poland’s present attitude toward the Jews promised little future for them at all. “I had come to Vilna for its Jewish history and its thickly layered past,” muses Mrs. Dawidowicz, “but each passing day the present became more compelling than the past, bringing new dangers of war and intimations of disaster.” As she at last conceded to herself, “Everything I loved in Vilna rested upon a rotten crumbling foundation.”
By November 1938, the time of Kristallnacht in Germany, the Polish government was more intent than ever on driving the Jews out of public life or, preferably, out of the country altogether. Subsidies for Jewish schools were revoked and plans were made to outlaw the Jewish method of shehitah, the ritual slaughtering of animals. A stunned panic took hold among Vilna’s Jews with the approaching likelihood of a Nazi invasion.
Though guilty and reluctant, Mrs. Dawidowicz knew that she had to return to the United States. In late summer 1939 she fled to Copenhagen via Berlin, where she witnessed the “pageant of Nazi war frenzy.” In Copenhagen, waiting for a Boston-bound ship, she learned of the German invasion of Poland on September 1. On the day she finally sailed, England and France had already declared war.
From 1939 to 1942 Mrs. Dawidowicz worked at the New York branch of the YIVO as assistant to the research director. Along with everybody else, she was forced to watch and wait for trickles of news about the war in Europe, her hatred of the Germans growing with the increasing frequency of reports of the slaughter of Jews. Through the sieges of Moscow and Leningrad, the Warsaw ghetto uprising and its brutal end, Mrs. Dawidowicz spent days and weeks and months that were, she remembers, like a prolonged Yom Kippur, a protracted Tisha b’Av—solemn periods of atonement and mourning.
As for Vilna, by July 1944, when the Russians captured the city from the Nazis, the ghetto into which the Jews were forced had already been liquidated, the YIVO building bombed, the entire city destroyed. Over 100,000 people had been murdered there, most of them Jews, most of them buried in a mass grave site at the nearby village of Ponary. Twenty-five hundred or so had survived by hiding in the forest or—like Chaim Grade—somehow escaping into Russia. Nearly all of the people Mrs. Dawidowicz had counted as friends and colleagues were dead.
The YIVO in New York, in a desperate attempt to redeem the hard work of the massacred scholars, almost immediately conceived a plan to enlist the U.S. government’s help in recovering the Vilna YIVO library. Miraculously, part of the collection was found after the war in a former Nazi stronghold in Frankfurt, a repository maintained with bizarre care by vandals who had decreed the destruction of Jewish civilization even as they stole art works, books, manuscripts, ritual objects, and other priceless artifacts from their victims. Among the recovered YIVO documents would be found a diary belonging to Mrs. Dawidowicz’s erstwhile patron in Vilna, Zelig Kalmanovich, written before he died in the ghetto, and hidden there; in it she would discover this passage: “Heaps of books lie on the floor of the YIVO’s reading room—a graveyard of books, a mass burial plot, casualties of the war of Gog and Magog, just like their owners.”
In 1946 Mrs. Dawidowicz went to occupied Germany to work with Jewish survivors in the displaced-persons camps. As bitterly as she hated the Germans and their country, she wanted to pay homage to the European dead by rendering service to those who remained alive. Refugees from Poland were pouring into the American zone in Munich; they included survivors of a terrible pogrom in Kielce after the war when, having attempted to return to their homes, they had encountered instead, yet again, the unabated storm of Polish anti-Semitism.
Mrs. Dawidowicz worked to provide educational materials, books for libraries, and newsprint for the camp. She managed to obtain Yiddish typefaces for printing machines, thereby continuing her one-woman campaign to keep the doomed language alive. She learned not to sentimentalize the survivors. “Suffering did not always ennoble,” she discovered; but “even so, I never could look at a tattooed forearm without feeling a sense of humility.”
Her last duty was to catalog the restored YIVO books and manuscripts in preparation for their shipment to New York, a task whose fulfillment served as a constant reminder to her of the lives lost in Vilna. She writes: “I had come to see that Vilna had been reduced to fragments of paper and fragments of memory. I knew that whatever I rescued from oblivion was all that could ever be rescued from the ruins of Vilna.”
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Lucy Dawidowicz’s feats of historical objectivity in The War Against the Jews are wholly matched by her subjective accomplishment in From That Place and Time. The dangers in writing such a memoir are clear: self-aggrandizement, empty sentimentality, cliche. Mrs. Dawidowicz avoids all of these difficulties, but her real achievement consists of much more than sidestepping obstacles. Probably no other writer of our time could so adroitly blend the outward-looking range of the historian with the inward-searching passion of the eyewitness, or turn so personal an attempt at explaining the in explicable into an act of public service.
In “Belsen Remembered,” an essay included in her 1977 collection The Jewish Presence, Mrs. Dawidowicz cited an ancient Jewish legend: when God revealed the Torah at Sinai, all Israel, living and dead and not yet born, were recipients of the gift, “so that every Jew in the course of history has had his personal share of the revelation.” Mrs. Dawidowicz went on in that essay to quote from a poem by Jacob Glatstein, Nisht di meysim loybn got (“The Dead Praise Not the Lord”), which carries the legend forward and applies it invertedly to the Nazi era, suggesting that all Jews, living and dead and not yet born, have now been given the burden of the memory of the murdered European Jews. From That Place and Time is Lucy Dawidowicz’s searing personal testimony to the terms of that grave, ongoing obligation.
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