(Author: Alison Marshall, Vol. 76 * No. 3 * Spring 2021)
This is the story of Jerry Berman, who was a close friend of my grandparents, Meyer and Sonia Fortes.[1] As fellow students at the University of Cape Town in the 1920s, they used to go climbing together. They continued to keep in touch, even as each went their separate ways in different parts of the world. Jerry spent several years working as a civil engineer in Soviet Russia, from where he wrote wonderful descriptions of his experiences.
Jerry Berman was born in 1903, in Pikeliai, Lithuania, within what was then the Russian Empire. The youngest in a family of four brothers and one sister, he grew up in extreme poverty. His father Zundel initially immigrated to South Africa some years before Jerry was born, leaving the children in the care of their mother, Mina. Zundel went to join his rather more successful younger brother, Jerry’s uncle. Unfortunately for Zundel, it was not easy for him to make his way in South Africa and like many others he had a change of heart and returned home after a few years. However, here he also he struggled to get work, so decided to go back to South Africa. Jerry was born following this brief visit, making him quite a bit younger than his siblings. Mina instilled in her children the importance of study. They were the poorest of the poor, wearing old, patched clothes and often going hungry. Despite this, Mina insisted they study hard and expected them to come top in their classes at the cheder, always reminding them of the many rabbis among their ancestors.
While Jerry was still a child, his older brothers Israel, Aaron Zalman and Leivi emigrated from Lithuania. Two joined their father and uncle in South Africa. Israel eventually ran a general store in Tzaneen, while Aaron Zalman established himself as an accountant and later became a City Councillor and senator. Cape Town’s AZ Berman Drive is named after him. The third brother, Leivi, settled in America. Finally Jerry, his mother and sister Beile joined the rest of the family in Cape Town. Like many others, they travelled via the Poor Jews’ Temporary Shelter in London, and then on a Union Castle mail ship from Southampton, departing on 30 December 1921. He was 17 years old.
In South Africa, Jerry learned fast, taking extra English lessons and school exams before entering the University of Cape Town in 1923. It was here that his friendship with my grandparents developed, as well as his lifelong enjoyment of mountaineering. They would arrange outings to the mountains, sometimes taking a large group and camping.
After graduation with a degree in Civil Engineering, Jerry found work on large construction projects, initially in Orange Free State and then in Zululand building a railway. He had a hard time, working in extremely difficult conditions. Twice he caught malaria, ended up briefly in hospital. He was also uncomfortable with the way his African workers were treated and the weather – 24 days of rains at one point – made engineering progress slow. In April 1929, Jerry’s mother died. In a letter to my grandfather Meyer, who was by then living in London, he described how devastated he was: “[My] mother’s death was undoubtedly the biggest shock I ever got in my whole lifetime.” Mina had been the rock in Jerry’s life, working, saving and scrimping to make sure the family had enough to eat through the most difficult and chaotic of times. Together they had lived through the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War and the Lithuanian War of Independence. Jerry’s grief after Mina’s death added to his awareness of the rather empty life he was leading and growing dissatisfaction with his work. His father, to whom he had never been close, also died in that year.
By 1932, Jerry was finding it hard to get his career off the ground. The Great Depression had hit and there were few large-scale building projects that could offer opportunities to a young civil engineer. He tried his luck in America, travelling by ship to his brother Leivi, but that did not work out either. In America, Britain and throughout Europe, millions were out of work or on the breadline and investment was at rock bottom. Jerry could probably have found work, but it would most likely have been at a lower level or in a different field. His brothers and sister in South Africa were all married and starting their own families. Many of his friends had moved on. Thus did Jerry decide to go back to Russia, which by then was part of the Soviet Union (USSR).
Like many of his peers, including my grandmother Sonia, Jerry had had great hopes at the time of the Russian Revolution, believing that the USSR would be able to provide a better life for its people. Many of his generation who had immigrated to South Africa as children must have thought longingly about returning to this new version of their birth home. For Jerry, there was another reason: Soviet Russia was the only place in the world where they were building at scale and where they needed civil engineers.
In 1932, the USSR was in the final year of its first Five Year Plan, initiated by Stalin in 1928 with the intention of speedily industrialising the country. Economically, some success had been achieved but, as Jerry was to find out, at enormous human costs. He took a job with Mostotrest, a company formed in 1930 to build roads, bridges and railways and which still exists today as Russia’s largest heavy construction company. His first project was in the eastern part of Ukraine, building a bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska. It was then and remains to this day an important strategic crossing of the Severski Donets River.[2]
©Peter Berman 2021.
The engineering challenges for Jerry and his team were significant, exacerbated by the severity of the winter. However, as he soon realised there were more serious problems to deal with. Jerry had arrived in Ukraine at the height of what would now be recognised as a major humanitarian crisis. The ambitious construction targets of the Five Year Plan were accompanied by collectivisation of agriculture. The Bolshevik vision to share land equally, a process begun after the Russian Revolution in 1917, was accelerated from 1930. Land was confiscated not only from the ‘parasitic’ aristocracy, but also from all the peasants. A new form of organisation, the collective farm (or kolkhoz) was decreed. Peasants no longer owned a small portion of land and sold the crops they farmed. Instead, they were part of a much larger unit, run – in theory at least – as a co-operative. A quota of crops had to be met and under the Five Year Plan these rose sharply because of the need to generate foreign currency to pay for the construction programme through exporting grain (the main Ukrainian crop).
In the first year of the Plan, grain output was high, so targets were raised. Unfortunately, due to bad weather the following year saw a poor harvest, so a greater proportion of the grain had to be surrendered by the peasants and harsh penalties were imposed on Ukrainian villages if they did not comply. Grain was confiscated by force, meaning that there was not enough left for the workers to eat. Later the government even took the grain that would have been used for seeds. The result was that the harvest failed again the following year, leading to an artificial famine and millions of deaths. This famine is now known as the Holodomor, from the Ukrainian word for hunger. What Jerry witnessed were the direct consequences of the Holodomor. Many Ukrainians left their villages to find work and hence Jerry’s team was made up of half-starved, unskilled workers from the rural hinterland.
Jerry wrote vivid descriptions of what he saw. To avoid writing the same news in several letters, he would write to his older brother Israel, who ran a general store in Tzaneen in the Northern Transvaal. Israel would laboriously re-type Jerry’s letters onto old-fashioned foolscap paper, making several carbon copies, which he then sent out to Jerry’s other siblings and some of his friends. My grandparents, then living in London, would receive a package of letters, carefully and closely typed onto wafer thin paper, to reduce airmail costs. Each package was generally accompanied by a long cover letter from Israel, sharing his desperate concerns for Jerry’s wellbeing and exhorting them to help persuade him to return – and usually there was a kind note at the end, saying that he was sending a box of grapes. The grapes must have been most welcome in cold, rainy London, where such exotic fruits were then rare and expensive.
Jerry wrote horrifying descriptions of conditions in Ukraine: “At the moment the food shortage in Russia must be very acute, for only very high specialists get bread rations (1 lb) for members of their households. That means that a blacksmith, his wife and three children will get only 800 g a day for the blacksmith only and the whole family will survive on his ration. That that is really physically almost impossible, I need not tell you. So the hardships are enormous. Members of the Kolkhoz had had no flour or bread given to them for two or three months, because they have not carried out their plan of food tax. They live on sour cucumbers, cabbage pickled and a little potatoes. Meat fetches today fabulous prices, perhaps I kg, the ‘money’ wages of ten days earnings for a fairly qualified workman.” Bread had become the most valued currency. Cash was of no use, as there was nowhere to buy food – although Jerry, as a foreigner, was privileged to be able to use the torgsin (foreign currency store). He was able to buy sugar, jam, tea and even white bread there, making him feel bad that he was so much better treated. As he ruefully observed, “On such semi-alive men is being built successfully [?] the Five Years Plan!”
As a manager, Jerry was compelled to spend a fair bit of his time procuring rations for his men. He had to negotiate and argue with the management, controlled by the local cell of the Communist Party. To make a bad situation worse, there was a great deal of bureaucracy surrounding the issue of food. Each man was issued with a bread card or zhiton, which he could exchange for bread: “Oh, dear Israel! I returned back last night, late at midnight, frozen to death, two and a half hours on a wintry road, snow and wind. I have with me today, 40 cards…A great achievement – the right to issue 40 cards i.e. 40 x 400 grams bread to my men daily. On this I left the works for one and a half days, I fought desperately, felt like giving up and returning to you.”
Jerry recognised the futility of treating workers so badly and its negative impact on the building project. As a manager, it was useless to berate his labourers when they were too weak to do their work properly: “I saw (and found) sleeping standing with his cleaning rod in his hand, pale as death, with bones sticking out into eternity! What terrible eyes! The boiler was about to go bust. There was no water in the boiler and a calamity of first magnitude was imminent! What can you do? Can you take anything away from him? Can you fine him? Have you given him and are you giving him anything that you can take away from him when he defaults?”
Having grown up in another part of this vast empire, Jerry understood the culture and the language. However, he chose to keep this quiet, not wanting to lose the privilege of foreign status: “Not a soul knows that I am Russian born and that I left in 1921. They look askance at the stranger in their midst, a South African native freezing in -30C in the Ukraine. A stranger freezing and eating black bread and wearing new clothes, unlike theirs, clean, whole, new and tidy!!!” One thing, though, struck him as a positive change from his childhood, where he had lived under the Tsarist laws that constrained and discriminated against Jews. He wrote to his sister, “Beile, there is no antisemitism in Russia. Absolutely none. I know it, for they take me as an Englishman and I hear how they refer to Jews. Do you know that even if a Jew is weak at his work, they will not throw him out for fear of insulting him – the man that suffered so much from the Czar. And the same about the Gruzins [Georgians], Armenians etc. I am speaking from personal experience. Russia, the mysterious…!”
Jerry lived an unsettled life at Stanitsia Luhanska. He was given short term visas, for four to six months at a time, and never knew if he would be staying longer or returning home. He found the many challenges very difficult to deal with – the bitter cold, the bureaucracy, the lack of materials and skilled labour – but also found his position as manager of starved, mistreated people very hard. His family in South Africa were desperately worried about him, often not hearing from him for several weeks at a time. Israel wrote “Look here, Jerry, let us no more talk in ‘parables’, ‘aphorisms’ and ‘symbols’…I am down at hard facts, at tin tacks of your own health…I repeat in cold print [the contents of my cable]…i.e. THE FAMILY UNANIMOUSLY INSIST ON YOUR RETURNING TO LONDON.”
However, Jerry did not return. Instead, he asked for and was eventually given a transfer to another post in Nizhni-Novgorod, Siberia. Not many people would be pleased to be sent to Siberia. It shows how terrible conditions were during the Ukrainian famine that he should have found life so much easier there.
In Nizhni Novgorod, Jerry was responsible as ‘First Assistant’ to the project chief, engaged on building a huge bridge across the Volga – “the entire bridge is just a little less than one mile in length”. The labour force was made up of prisoners and soldiers, who – as before – were given very poor food. However, the food provided to specialists, many of whom were foreigners, was much better than in Ukraine. For Jerry, there was another big advantage in that he only had to deal with technical matters, with no responsibility for the food supply for his workers. It was clear from his letters that he found the work stimulating and that he was being given excellent opportunities to develop and apply his engineering knowledge.
Jerry returned to South Africa in 1935, having had enough of witnessing systematic, poor treatment of workers in the Soviet Union. He spent the Second World War supervising the building of bridges (including South Africa’s first curved bridge across Kaaiman’s River between George and the Wilderness) and roads. His workers were Italian prisoners of war, with whom he got on very well. Later he was promoted to Chief Engineer in the Roads Department in Bloemfontein, where he stayed until his retirement in the late 1960s. He was married in 1940 and had one son, born in 1947. After his wife, Gwen, died in 1976 he returned to Cape Town, where he later died in 1979, aged 76.
My grandparents Meyer and Sonia Fortes appear to have lost touch with Jerry after the 1930s. Nevertheless, alongside other letters, laundry bills, photographs and other paraphernalia, they kept his letters in a box in their house. These letters were passed on to my mother after Meyer’s death in 1983. Progress has since been made to archive and secure the historical importance of the set of letters, leading to various academic collaborations and plans for an exhibition at the National Museum of the Holodomor in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Jerry Berman’s letters are currently on display at the National Holodomor Museum, Kyiv, Ukraine – see example below. (https://holodomormuseum.org.ua/en/). The Museum is open to the general public and the exhibition will run at least until the end of 2021.
Alison Marshall is a writer and researcher, with interests in migration and travel. Her early career was in product and software development, working at the interface between academia and industry, following a PhD in solid state physics from the University of Cambridge. She currently works at the University of Cumbria as Professor of Innovation and is collaborating with the National Museum of the Holodomor in Ukraine and a number of UK academics. She is the author of Testimonies of Horror: The Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33, Medium, 2020
NOTES
[1] I thank Pete and Mark Berman for generously providing information and photographs about Jerry and his family. Thanks also to Hilary Fortes, Gwynne Robins, Keith Engers and Sam Schrire, who assisted me in finding them.
[2] This bridge was destroyed in the Second World War and thereafter twice rebuilt. It currently provides the main checkpoint between the Donbas conflict zone of Luhansk and the rest of Ukraine.
