(Author: Gwynne Schrire, Vol. 79, #2, Summer 2024)
A picture of a metal box had been sent for identification to Cape Town Holocaust Centre director Richard Freedman. What was it? Prof Arie Alexander Galles and his wife Sara were to be guests of the centre, where Arie would be displaying his art. For ten years he had been working on a series of 15 large drawings of aerial views of death camps, called Fourteen Stations / a Kaddish for Shoah victims. He had covered the drawings with ash and carbon so that the images were no longer visible, representing the disappearance of the Jews in the camps. Himself a Polish Jew born in Uzbekistan, most of his family were killed in Belzec. His family had previously been transported to a Siberian work camp and had landed up in the Landsberg DP camp.
Since they would be visiting South Africa, Sara wanted to know the origin of an orange metal box marked in Yiddish” A GIFT FROM YOUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS IN SOUTH AFRICA” above a map of Southern Africa identifying RHODESIA, UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA, with Salisbury, Bulawayo, Pretoria, Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, Durban, East London, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town. The label inside said in English and Yiddish, “South African Jewish War Appeal, PO Box 5991 Johannesburg, South Africa” with the Yiddish message “If you want to write to us, we will answer with pleasure”. The donor was Mrs. G Leavis, c/o 67 Duncan Road, Bulawayo.
Sara had found the box in her late father’s cupboard when she was clearing out his apartment. How had he got it? What would it have contained? What had been its significance to his father that he had kept it for all these years?
I recognised the box because the SA Jewish Board of Deputies had an identical one in its collection. The United SA Jewish War Appeal had been established in Johannesburg in 1941 by the SAJBD and the SA Zionist Federation. Money was sent via the American Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint) to Jewish refugees in Greece, Switzerland and Spain, to the Teheran child refugees, to Jewish communities in Algiers, Tunis and Casablanca, to the Association of Lithuanian Jews in Palestine who sent parcels to Jews who had escaped into Russia and for relief in Palestine itself and, while allowed, to Stockholm, for food parcels to Bergen-Belsen and Birkenau.
After the war the SA Jewish War Appeal sent money and parcels of food, clothing and medicine through the Joint to the survivors and refugees living behind barbed wire in displaced persons (DP) camps. Jewish women’s organisations launched mammoth clothing drives – 20 000 garments, 3000 pairs of shoes and 1000 blankets were transported free to the Polish port of Gdynia for distribution to the DP camps by a Scandinavian shipping line. They sent 1645 packages of jam, marmalade and raisins to Hungary and 4000 cases of food, 10 000 articles of clothing and 1000 pairs of shoes to Italy. And Mrs. Leavis’s box reached the Nuss family in the Bergen-Belsen DP camp.
You would have to have been a starved refugee to understand what this gift would have meant – A treasure beyond compare. Cape Town survivor Freda Glezer, who escaped from Poland to Uzbekistan, remembered getting two parcels via Teheran through the Joint, which contained soap, clothes and other things. She was advised to sell everything and buy two more bread ration cards. “If you use the soap it will last for one or two weeks; you will still have no bread. If you sell it, you will always have bread, you would not be so hungry, and you could sell the surplus.”
Sara’s parents Hirschel Tzvi and Prywa Nuss, from Piaseczno near Warsaw had fled East with her brothers Gershon and Avram. As they refused to accept Russian citizenship they were sent on a six-week train journey to Siberia – 90% of the passengers perished on the way. There they survived two years in a work camp chopping trees in the Siberian forests. When the Polish government in exile protested at the treatment of its citizens, the family was sent to the Dzalalabad area of Kyrgyzstan where sister Eve was born. Starvation was still rampant – they picked grass for soup – but at least the weather was warmer. In 1946, when Sara was ten days old, they were repatriated to Poland. Her father returned to his grandparents’ home in Gora-Kalwaria. Hostile strangers were living in their home, still furnished as it had been the day they had been deported. He stopped at a coffee shop and the owner, who recognised him, gave him food and warned him to leave the area immediately. The Holocaust was over, but the Jewish remnant was not welcome back and Jews were being thrown off trains.
Leaving Poland, they were smuggled across the border to the Bergen-Belsen DP camp. There they lived for five years before leaving in 1951 for Chicago where many Polish Jews from Bergen-Belsen had settled and where the Joint helped them and her brothers receive training from ORT.
Now that Sara knew what the box had symbolised to her father, she wanted to thank Mrs Leavis for the precious gift. I contacted County Communities rabbi, Rabbi Moshe Silberhaft and the Bulawayo Jewish community. Neither had heard of Mrs. Leavis. A note on a Bulawayo website resulted in a response from England, from someone who had lived around the corner from Mrs. Leavis and would play with her son. They were not Jewish and had moved to Rhodesia from England for the duration of the war to escape from the bombs. Mrs. Leavis had by then passed away. However, he was still in touch with her son, who was amazed. He had had no idea that his mother had donated the box to Jewish survivors. As for the Nuss-Galles, they arranged to meet with him on their visit to England to express their thanks.
- Gwynne Schrire, a veteran contributor to Jewish Affairs and a long-serving member of its editorial board, is a former Deputy Director of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies – Cape Council. She has authored, co-written and edited over twenty books on aspects of South African Jewish and Western Cape history.
