Landscapes of my Fathers

(Author: Joseph Rabie, Vol. 69, No. 1, Pesach 2014)

At the end of September 2013, this writer participated in an arts symposium taking place at the Jewish Culture and Information Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania. Held under the patronage of the European Parliament and titled “A Virtual Memorial Vilnius 2013”, this presented the Shoah Film Collection, a selection of works brought together by the German curator Wilfried Agricola de Cologne. I presented a work of interactive photography called “Dachau: the Prototype”.1

Apart from the opportunity to show my work, this voyage to Vilnius was important to me, as is any voyage, since my ongoing research deals with the notion of place. The overriding significance of the journey, however, came from something much more profound: I have always waited for the moment when I might in some way return to Lithuania, as, with so many Jews born and raised in South Africa, it is the land of my forefathers.

Place is the subject of much of my art; my current doctoral research in urban studies (conducted at the Paris Est Créteil University2) is about “What makes place” (“Ce qui fait lieu”). To this end I have been engaged by the Atelier International du Grand Paris to make a sensitive cartography of the places of Greater Paris made by its inhabitants.

I have always been deeply moved by the beauty of the earth. This may be readily understood by the fact that I grew up in Cape Town, an incomparable city in so many ways and one of the most beautiful places I know. And yet, a beautiful place where terrible things happened – the destiny of so many places, Lithuania itself being such a telling example. What counts in the long ongoing narrative of the places we inhabit is how one acknowledges the past in order to heal the present.

So it is that place is a human construct upon a natural core, where a multiple complexity of factors come together to determine how we dwellupon the earth. For the French geographer Denis Retaillé, who has developed the idea of nomadic space in his study of the Sahel region, a placeis that somewhere where circumstances, the crossing of paths for example, instigate a human presence3. He gives an example of an ephemeral market which will appear and disappear in the desert sands, describing how these places are being devastated as the local population is dislocated by the AQMI4 Al-Qaeda terrorists.

Dachau: the Prototype

In March 1933, Dachau was a small town on the outskirts of Munich. It is probable that the surrounding farmlands supplied the city markets with foodstuffs. Why was Dachau chosen as the place where the Nazi terror machine would be inaugurated? Munich had been one of the strongholds of the rise of the regime and perhaps the decision to build the camp close by was due to the availability of a well-trained and motivated political cadre ready to take on the task of policing the camp. It is noteworthy that Heinrich Himmler, future Reichsfüher of the SS, was at that time Munich Chief of Police and instrumental in the setting up of the camp. Thus did Dachau – the camp, not the town, (although today the town’s identity, if one excepts local inhabitants, is inseparable from that of the camp) – become a place which would be the locus for the engineering of barbarism.

Immediately after Hitler’s accession to power at the end of January 1933, the institutional framework for the Nazi project was put in place, starting with the abrogation of large sections of the constitution. Individual freedoms, and the right to freedom of speech, press and assembly could now be proscribed; communications could be monitored, house searches undertaken, property confiscated; all those who opposed the regime could be incarcerated5.

The creation of the first concentration camp at Dachau followed upon this immediately, with the express purpose of imprisoning all communists as well as left-wing functionaries “…who endanger state security (…) [and] cannot be released because attempts have shown that they persist in their efforts to agitate and organize as soon as they are released”, according to a statement by Chief of Police Himmler. Later that year the SS issued their “Disciplinary and Penal Code for the Prison Camp”, which stated that anyone who “engages in subversive politics, holds provocative speeches, congregates with others for this purpose…”, followed by a whole litany of proscribed actions including smuggling information out of the camp “to be used in our enemies horror propaganda”, or who “in order to incite rebellion climbs onto the roof of the huts or up trees” or in any other way tries to make contact with the outside “will be hanged as a subversive instigator under the terms of the revolutionary law” 6.

This was the planned destruction of the living being, the annihilation of the soul followed by the extinction of the body. Thus it was that Dachau was the first prototypical place, where the methodology of a society founded upon terror would be conceived, experimented upon, refined and perfected, prior to being exported to a network of camps throughout Europe. And outside the camps, in all the cities and towns, fields and forests, the regime would put into practice its ideology of terror in what has undoubtedly been Europe’s darkest age. One visits the camp as a memorial, as a place which commemorates what happened within its barbed wire boundaries, and which as a microcosm commemorates what happened in Europe as a whole, a continentally defined place. When one faces the reconstructed camp as memorial, in its utter bleakness, its curatorial orderliness, with the absence of the clamour of the dead, one asks: How does one give back to those who were annihilated here their proper place, so that though obliterated they might be visible forever?

In “Dachau: the Prototype” I looked at the manufactured artefacts that constituted the environment of the concentration camp. Before people were brought to Dachau to die, engineers and artisans, tradespeople and sub-contractors came there to assemble its component parts – ordinary objects, beds, doors, latrines; and less ordinary ones, iron bars, locks, ovens… The presentation sought to contemplate upon this arrangement/derangement of ordinary things in a functionalism of death. These are the very objects that were seen by the eyes of those who are gone…

The work is made up from three main sequences of images, each representing one of the primordial places of existence and death in the concentration camp. These are the barracks, where the prisoners, who were generally subjected to slave labour, lived; the bunker, a prison in the prison where they were held and tortured by the SS; the crematoria, where the bodies of those either murdered, or dead from disease or exhaustion, were disposed of. Their memory is symbolised by the heartbeat that rhythms the work. Thus the present-time “peaceful”, empty spaces of Dachau as memorial, so desperately bereft of those who were nullified, might in some way resonate with their absence7.

The Land[scapes] of my Fathers

When I was about ten years old, my mother introduced me to our collective memory. I was shown a book of horrifying pictures, documenting the camps at their liberation by the Allied forces. In this way, the Shoah came to be part of my life. In reality, as young Jews growing up in South Africa, we were more preoccupied with the survival of Israel during the period before and after the Six Day and Yom Kippur Wars. We were, after all, the ones who survived, the progeny of European Jews who, in their millions, at the beginning of the 20th Century, looking for a better life, left Europe and founded new communities in the New World. We were proud of the prescience of our forebears, the ones “who had known to get out in time”. It was only after I came to live in Europe (returned to live in Europe?) and became part of a French family that the Shoah became a much more material reality, through the incorporation of their experiences into my own narrative.

Now I was being given the opportunity to visit Lithuania, and being in Lithuania would mean far more than solely presenting “Dachau: the prototype”. An act of return, something that has been a potentiality accosting me throughout my adult life, for this is where my family came from, both my parents’ families having their origins in Lithuania. For some reason, South Africa was a favourite destination for Lithuanian Jews, and a large part of the Jewish population (much reduced now, as many emigrated during the Apartheid years) came from that country. The pioneers had found a land that might nurture them; they sent back letters encouraging their brethren to join them in transplanting an old community in a new place, establishing minyanim in far-flung country dorps, as this wandering people had done on so many previous occasions.

My desire to create some sort of dialogue with my family roots had to face the reality that my family’s collective memory of Lithuania is hopelessly scant. It was generally the men, the generation of my great-grandparents, who left first. It took a good few years of hard work for them to raise enough money to bring out their families. My four grandparents and their siblings arrived as children at the beginning of the 20th Century. My mother tells me that her parents spoke little of the old country. Perhaps their preoccupation with the present and future left them with little inclination to dwell on the past.

As someone who is very sensitive to place and landscape, I have always conjectured upon the dramatic encounter these people will have experienced between the radically different realities of northern Europe and southern Africa. They had left a territory dominated by the Russian Empire to find themselves immersed in the affairs of a vast country divided by Anglo-Afrikaner rivalries coupled with the repression of the indigenous black population. For these generally devout, Yiddish-speaking Jews from their shtetls, the cultural shock must have been considerable. With the resourcefulness born of self-reliance, however, they acclimatised rapidly. I can only speculate upon this by using landscape as both a material and metaphorical measure of that confrontation between two worlds so strange to one another.

Lithuania is a generally flat country; from a low coastal plain it rises gradually to a region of muted hills rising no more than 300 meters in its easternmost part. It is amply watered, covered with forests and with a dense network of rivers and lakes. Much of the land has been transformed for agriculture, mechanised on a large scale. One must imagine that at the end of the 19th Century, the landscape would have been quite different – a finer grain in the layout of the fields, more forest cover. However, despite these differences, one should still be able to recognise the landscapes that met the eyes of my forebears: A mild landscape, an alternation of field and wood, openness and closeness, a constant, slightly undulating horizon, running water and resting water, a plenitude that characterises much of northern Europe all the way across from the Netherlands to Russia. It is a landscape that is more vegetal than mineral, with tonalities of blues and greens that would glow yellow at harvest time. But winters would be dark and cold, deep snow muffling all, wolves and bears on the prowl.

Lithuania has been covered by Google Street View, and this allowed me, before I ever set foot there, to construe an impression of its landscape8. It would appear that most members of my family came from Vilnius or the surrounding area. My paternal grandfather came from Biržai, a rural centre in the northeast of the country. At the end of the 19th Century, the town had a population of over 4000, more than half of whom were Jews9. I have no idea of my family’s profession: our surname was “Rebe” which suggests that at some point there was a rabbi in our ancestry. A customs official in Cape Town changed Rebe to Rabie, a local Afrikaans name, which has always created some confusion. How many relatives stayed behind? According to the partial records available in the LitvakSIG database10, it was a large family.

On my mother’s side, a snippet of clear memory: my uncle recalls their father and his brother reminiscing upon the poverty of their existence in Lithuania. He remembers them “commenting wryly, while hugely enjoying the material pleasures of a South African braaivleis, that it was exactly the same as they had experienced in Kavarsk”11. Kavarskas is a small village north of Vilnius. One can only wonder if some family member walked those village streets… Their family name, originally Koven, might have come from Kovno, the old name of the city of Kaunas12.

One arrived in Cape Town by boat in those days. From a great distance could be seen Table Mountain, a vast mountain mass 1000 meters high rising directly out of the ocean, standing in splendid isolation over the low flats barely above sea-level that separate it and with the city at its feet. One can only wonder about the impression it must have made and the feelings it aroused in the spirits of weary immigrants at the end of a long ocean voyage from their flat, low-lying, well-watered country and now about to disembark into the absolute unknown. Here was a new empire of forms and colours, of textures and materials, a dry, mineral-rich country with riotous, colourful, exotic vegetation and flowers, rising up in successive mountain layers to the arid inland plateaus of southern Africa.

I was born under that ocean-fraught mountain, a concatenation of landscapes that impregnated my consciousness. The settlement of Cape Town had been established by the Dutch, a halfway station and garden to feed the crews making the long journey from Holland to the East Indies. It is interesting that the Dutch, inhabitants of another flat country, chose this mountain and its bay as their base: was it for the protective shelter, real or psychological that it accorded along this desolate coast? Or was it some form of esthetical subjugation that pushed them to take possession of so remarkable a geographical landmark?

My great-grandparents, like so many other Jews arriving from Lithuania and elsewhere in Europe, took the route going deep into the interior, looking for opportunities to eke out a living as pedlars – or smouse, the Afrikaans term. They would take long journeys from one remote farm or settlement to another with their wagons, plying goods brought from the city. They would buy skins from farmers and sell them in the cities, saving up for the fare to bring their families to South Africa.

This period is richer in souvenirs. My maternal great-grandfather went far north, settling with his family near Bulawayo in what was then Southern Rhodesia. It is told that he was returning from work on his bicycle one day and came face to face with a lion. Not a hungry lion, it would appear… according to legend, the following day his hair had gone entirely grey. He lived to the age of 92. My paternal grandfather’s brother, Joseph Rabie (a namesake, though I am not named after him) enrolled as a volunteer in the British army at the age of 17 during the Anglo-Boer War. Captured, he was brought before the Boer general Manie Maritz, who greeted him with “Joodjie, wat maak jy hier?” and shot him in the head at point blank range.

In time, the new immigrants would settle down in some small town, set up shop or buy land and farm. They would also go about constituting Jewish communities – building synagogues and establishing welfare, Zionist and cultural institutions, their East European cultural substructure gradually undergoing a synthesis in its contact with local life. My maternal grandparents, whom I visited as a child, lived in Upington on the Orange (Gariep) River – a narrow belt of fertile farming land on either side of the river, at the edge of the Kalahari Desert. How much further from Lithuania could one get? Ultimately, most of these country Jews gravitated to the larger cities, either inland to Johannesburg or returning to Cape Town, setting up businesses and taking great care to have their children educated in the best schools.

These people did not, however, forget their European roots. On the outbreak of the Second World War, many volunteered to serve in the Allied forces, so much so, that when local antisemites accused the Jews of shirking “from fighting in a war that was, after all, their own”, statistics could showed that a greater proportion of Jews than any other group had volunteered. In this way, through the stories my father told, my early childhood imagination was engaged with European landscapes – though not any landscapes: Tuscany, over the Apennines and the Po Valley – my father, Monty Rabie,13 and his regiment participated in the liberation of Florence. And many of these Jews also honoured their newly adopted African heritage, taking up the fight against Apartheid. One remembers the names of Joe Slovo and Helen Suzman, who with courage accompanied Nelson Mandela in the fight for equal rights.

To finish this geographical reminiscence, I wish to recall a place that has great meaning for me, the sublime Cape of Good Hope, or Cape of Storms, jutting southward into two oceans, being near to where the cold, polar Atlantic meets the warm, equatorial Indian. A narrow split of land rises up before it falls into the sea. One goes up a steep hill, whipped by the windy sea air; a grandiose view spreads out over the sea in all directions, northwards to the back of Table Mountain, eastwards across the vast, luminous bay14 to the first ranges of mountains that hint at the interior. As already observed, a beautiful place where terrible things happened. There is a need to commemorate Dulcie September, born in Cape Town and ANC representative in France. Living in exile, she would say how much she wished to return to this particular, splendid place15, looking out upon the ocean from the Cape of Good Hope. She was assassinated in Paris by South African agents on 29 March 1988.16

Vilnius

Vilnius is a charming, picturesque city which cultivates with assiduity an atmosphere of romantic folklore. Its winding, medieval streets with their lovely shops selling artisanal goods, the speciality being amber and linen, are punctuated with numerous baroque churches whose ornate, colourful ornamentations rise up crescendo to high domes which rhythm the skyline. One might be in Italy, though the Baltic countries have nothing of the Mediterranean. It was Bona Sforza, member of the Sforza family of Milan, who became Queen of Poland and Grand Duchess of Lithuania and thereafter initiated Vilnius to Italian architecture. It was, however, the Jewish presence in Vilnius which contributed much to the city’s brilliance, as a centre of Jewish intellectual and spiritual life renowned internationally for its places of learning and its scholars, of whom the greatest was the Vilnius Gaon Eliyahu. According to the researcher Leizer Ran, there were at one time or another 250 synagogues in the city17, which was known far and wide as the Jerusalem of the North.

Monday, 23 September 2013, was the 70th anniversary of the liquidation of the Vilnius Ghetto, the date chosen for the official national commemoration of the genocide of Lithuanian Jewry. A ceremony, featuring the reading of the Vilnius Ghetto prisoner list, was held in the Vilnius Choral Synagogue on Pylimo Street, the city’s only remaining active synagogue. My wife Sylvie and I were present, having arrived the previous evening. People went up one by one to the lectern in front of the ark and read excerpts from the two volumes of names. I looked through them, found lists of Gordons and Swerskis, the surnames of two of my grandparents. But what was so upsetting, compounding these most distraught of circumstances, was how few people there were – a mere handful scattered through an empty interior, emphasising how so few are left to commemorate the multitude of absentees.

Immediately after the Nazi invasion in June 1941, the mass murder of the Jewish population began at a site in the forest at Paneriai, a suburb of Vilnius. A total of 70 000 Lithuanian and Polish Jews perished there, shot and buried in mass graves. All in all, nearly 95% of a population of approximately 210 000 were murdered, making Lithuania one of the countries where the Final Solution was most effectively implemented.