MLAWA by Rachel Lichtenstein
The name Mlawa reverberated throughout my childhood as a faint memory trace, an echoing whisper. Until recently the only thing I knew about this place was that my grandmother Malka Lichtenstein (nee Kirsch) had been born there. After she died I retrieved this postcard from her bedside table and in recent weeks during lockdown, after an absence of many years, I have been thinking about Mlawa again. I asked my father if he knew anything further about this place but he said his mother never spoke about her Polish past. ‘There’s so much that I wished I’d talked to her about but I never did because as a child you’re not interested and she has been dead nearly 40 years’ he said.
Looking at this postcard through a magnifying glass I noticed new details. In the foreground of the picture huddled in a doorway there is a group of people poorly dressed who look like Jews in traditional garb: a woman wearing a long skirt with a shawl and head covering, an older man with a full beard and some young boys who could be yeshiva students. A few of them are staring into the camera but most are watching mounted troops in military uniform ride down the narrow unpaved muddy road. Further up the street are others similarly dressed standing outside low ramshackle wooden buildings staring at the soldiers on horseback. A crowd of local men walk beside the procession. It is unclear whether they are welcoming the armed forces or afraid of them. The left hand corner of the postcard is missing and the caption on the back has faded over time. The photograph on the front reminds me of the scene in the film Fiddler on the Roof [1] when Cossacks advanced into the fictional Ukrainian shtetl (Jewish village/town) of Anatevka before inciting a pogrom.
Searching online for further information about Mlawa I learned that today it is a large municipality in north-central Poland but when Malka lived there in the early twentieth century it was a frontier town in the captured Russian territories known as the Pale of Settlement. Close to the Imperial Prussian borderlands and witness to heavy fighting between the opposing German and Russian armies it was a place interrupted by violence and uncertainty. Nearly half the population of the town were Jewish back then. They lived predominately in the poorest district, which had been established originally in 1824 as a restricted Jewish quarter or ‘ghetto.’ For most living there it was a hard poverty-stricken life that mirrored the lives of hundreds of Jewish communities in shtetls across ‘the Pale’ bounded by tradition and the Jewish calendar, with Anti-Semitic attacks being a regular occurrence.
An internet trawl uncovered a memoir written by a Doctor Jonis [2] who had lived in Mlawa during the same period as my grandmother. He described a semi-rural town surrounded by dark forests and damp fields ‘wrapped in thick grey mists’ with large wooden granaries filled with wheat on the outskirts. Most of the Jewish population scratched out a living as tailors, craftsmen and peddlers or in the livestock, grain and wood trades. The streets of the Jewish quarter ran mainly in straight lines and were filled with small wooden houses much like those in the postcard with a smattering of shops, synagogues, a mikveh (ritual bath) everything the community needed. There were a few stone buildings and many narrow alleyways and yards connecting the streets, which were unpaved with ‘dirt and cow dung everywhere.’ [3]
The old market place was the central focus of the town and when the market was operating Mlawa came to life: ‘all the stalls were full of peasant men and women who had come to town to buy goods. One examined a scythe another bought a pair of boots, a suit, a cap. The farmers' wives bought kerosene, salt, herring, flowery kerchiefs, white material, and corals. The hurdy-gurdies played, the magicians showed off their magic tricks, swallowed knives, and ate fire.’ And as the market emptied and the ‘tremendous noise and bustle’ subsided the darkness of the surrounding forest seemed to envelope the town and an eerie silence descended. On Saturdays when the stores were closed ‘the few persons passing through the marketplace were Jews dressed in velvet and silk: the men in black caftans and felt hats, the women in long dresses and Turkish shawls.’ [4]
Google Books alerted me to another first person account written by former resident Baruch Goldstein [5] who describes Mlawa around 1910 as a bustling place with an active and diverse Jewish cultural life. There were various sects of Hasidim, ‘each had its own rebbe or tzaddik and considered him to be the greatest spiritual leader…and each had its own place of worship, known as stibl, usually consisting of not more than two rooms.’ [6] There were numerous associations of Zionists and Bundists (who opposed the Zionists) and many other secular and religious groups besides, with ‘virtually every Jewish religious and political movement represented in Mlawa.’ [7] Many social welfare organisations existed to support the community, providing food, assistance and shelter for the poor. The town had its own weekly Yiddish paper, a Jewish school and many other cultural, religious and social organisations and institutions that supported a community of some seven thousand Jewish people.
I have a copy of a family portrait of the entire Kirsch family taken in a photographic studio in Mlawa around 1912. My grandmother stands third in from the left in the front row. She looks about eight years old. Her parents Esther and Yekheil (known as Chil) sit on chairs in the foreground of the image surrounded by eleven children. I do not know all their names. My father told me two of Malka’s sisters Chava and Chana (we are not sure which ones they are in the picture) emigrated to Buenos Aires in Argentina. He does not know the details but expects the family had managed to arrange a shidduch (arranged marriage) for them. To the far right of the picture is a ghostly impression of her oldest brother Hymie dressed in a sharp suit with a gold chain hanging from his waistcoat. Hymie had already left for New York by then. His portrait was taken in a separate studio in America then added onto the picture at a later date. Another younger brother Benny (back row, far left) was to follow him to Brooklyn soon after. Standing next to him is Joseph (known as Joe). His granddaughter Jacquelyn recently told me via WhatsApp that Joe had come to London after fleeing the Russian army but on his first attempt to escape he had been arrested and sent back to Poland as a deserter.
In the decades leading up to the First World War all able-bodied young men (including those from the Jewish community) in their twentieth year were called up. Joseph Roth describes in The Wandering Jews (1926) a great exodus of émigrés fleeing to Berlin and other Western cities escaping conscription in the Russian army. He also spoke of the self-mutilation inflicted by young Jewish men in the years leading up to the war. ‘Their fear of military life induced them to hack off a finger, sever the tendons in their feet, pour corrosives into their eyes. They became heroic cripples, blind, halt, hunch backed, they subjected themselves to long lasting and painful disfigurements. They did not want to serve. They did not want to go to war and lose their lives.’ [8] And they did not want to fight alongside the Tsar’s Christian peasant soldiers who had committed multiple violent attacks against Jews.
In 1915 Germans forces recaptured Mlawa from the retreating Russian army. The Yizkor Book of Mlawa [9] (a project initiated by Yad Vashem to commemorate the lost Jewish communities destroyed during the Holocaust), which is now freely available online, describes this historic event in an anonymous diary entry, which states the Germans were welcomed initially as liberators. ‘The people, especially the Jews, who suffered more than others under the Russian yoke, are enjoying greater freedom than they experienced under the Czars.’ [10] I expect the image on the postcard shows the moment the German army entered the town as the bewildered Jewish community looked. However soon after the German’s occupied Mlawa Anti-Semitic attacks against the local Jewish community by these soldiers became commonplace and increasingly violent. In 1915 a Russian army unit plundered the town and there was a shortage of food and other basic goods from this point onwards. When a new Polish governor was installed things got even worse, with Jews being beaten and tormented regularly and Jewish shops and businesses damaged and boycotted. ‘At that time the best of the young people left Mlawa in an endless stream’ said Doctor Jonis.
In another family photograph of the Kirsch family in Mlawa taken around 1917 only five of Malka’s siblings remain. By this time Joe had successfully made the journey across Europe to East London where he lived for a while as an illegal immigrant before meeting his wife Rebecca another Polish emigre. In this picture Malka is standing on the left at the back next to her brother Lazar and possibly his wife Fania. The family look diminished in every way. Their clothes are raggedy and unkempt, their boots unpolished. Chil’s beard is shorter and greyer, he is thinner in the face and appears exhausted. Esther seems to have visibly shrunk since the earlier family portrait. God only knows what horrors they had all been through by then.
At some point in the 1920s Malka came to London with her mother Esther. The exact details of when and how are unknown. My father thinks they walked part of the way then took the train to Hamburg before boarding a steamship to Harwich then taking another train into Liverpool Street Station. ‘It was a well-established route because thousands of Jews left Russia and Eastern Europe around that time.’ Tragically Esther could not settle she yearned for the Haim (the old world) so she went back to Mlawa leaving Malka behind with a huge sack of sunflower seeds and a feather duvet from Poland.
Malka lived with Joe, his wife Rebecca and their son Sidney in a few rented rooms in a house shared with two other families in Cleveland Way, Whitechapel. In his final years Sidney (known to me as Uncle Sid) lived in a block of flats overlooking Victoria Park a few streets away from my home in Hackney. Before he died at the age of 90 in 2008 I interviewed him about his early memories of growing up in East London. Listening to these recordings again I learnt that the two sisters Chava and Chana came to London to see Joe before making their way to South America. He also said the bubbe (grandmother) Esther came to London once again to visit them. ‘I wish she would have stayed but she went back again’ he said. His zeyde (grandfather) had died in Poland by then.
Sid was just a decade younger than Malka who he described as being ‘like a sister’ to him, they did everything together. The family were incredibly poor and struggled to pay the rent or put food on the table. In Poland Joe had been a baker but in London he worked as a tailor and the whole family were in the trade including Malka. They worked very long hours. He described a close-knit Jewish community living nearby and remembered his mother going to Hessle Street market to buy a live chicken and have it slaughtered. They kept a traditional kosher household and celebrated all the festivals together and spoke Polish, Yiddish and English at home. In warm evenings they walked up and down the Whitechapel Waste in their best clothes. ‘The whole area was full of Jewish people, we didn't have non Jewish friends.’ They always had Friday night Shabbos meal at home. He remembered Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah as big occasions when the whole family would fast then get together for celebratory meals. He talked of visiting the small synagogues all over Whitechapel, moving from one to another, and of going to the cinema and the Yiddish theatre with Malka, who was very attractive and loved to dance and sing. She had a beautiful voice and was in many choirs.
Photographs of Malka in London in the 1920s show a slim, glamorous young woman who appeared to be embracing her new cosmopolitan life. She clearly loved dressing up in the latest fashions and having her portrait taken at one of the many photographic studios that had sprang up to provide this service to the thousands of Eastern European Jews who were arriving daily in East London at that time, many of them eschewing their restricted religious upbringings. In 1925 she started to learn English at evening classes on the Whitechapel Road where she met her future husband my grandfather, Gedaliah Lichtenstein, another Polish émigré. They married on the 10th April 1932 in the East London Synagogue. The two women in this picture might be her sisters who went to South America but I am not sure.
Malka never spoke about the fate of her family left in Poland but she was forever haunted by their loss. ‘The history of the Jews of Mlawa during WWII was no different than all other shtetls in Poland’ states former resident Ada Holtzman in the Yizkor book of the town. ‘They were subject to the Nazi abuses, robberies, humiliations, tortures... public executions, terror and sadistic horrors.’ As far as I know there was only one survivor of the Kirsch family from Mlawa - Elia Zamek Rosa’s son. According to Uncle Sid, Elia was in the Russian army at the start of the war. He was captured by the Germans then sent to Dachau where he allegedly escaped before being sent to Auschwitz. Somehow he survived. I remember him showing me the tattoo on his arm at a family party.
In 1990 Elia went to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and filled out ‘Pages of Testimony’ with details about the Kirsch family members from Mlawa who perished, which were added to ‘The Central Database of Shoah Victims Names,’ which is now available to search via the website. As I opened the first page my heart stopped not just because of the horror of the details (I knew they had all been murdered) but because my great grandmother known as Esther was actually called Rakhel (Rachel in English) - I have her name. Rakhel Ester Kirsch (age 75) was killed in Majdanek Camp on the outskirts of Lublin along with her daughters Miriam (age 30) and Rosa (Elia’s mother age unknown). Malka’s brother Lazar (age 37) died in Siberia, along with his wife Fania (age 35) and their son Chil (age 8). They had another child Shmul (age 12) who was murdered in Lida in Poland, the details are unknown.
Malka returned to Poland once with Gedaliah in the 1970s. My father thought she had visited Mlawa. I spoke to my cousin James (Malka’s grandson) about this recently on the phone and after looking through some old papers he emailed me a scan of this postcard dated 1973. On the front is a photograph of a block of flats and a shop. ‘Fragment Starego Rynku’ is the caption, ‘fot. M. Raczkowski Mlawa.’ Written on the back of the postcard in my grandmother’s slopping hand are the words ‘Dear Stan, Betty and James, we are in Mlawa all our love mum and dad.’ My father said she regretted the trip to Poland, which she described as ‘a graveyard filled with memories of the dead.’ Mlawa was somewhere she visited but could never return to – the place she once knew had been wiped off the map.
[1] The 1971 musical film Fiddler on the Roof (produced and directed by Norman Jewison) was based on Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish stories Tevye the Dairyman and other tales (1894).Joseph Roth The Wandering Jews (1926) p.94
[2] Dr Ze’ev Jonis wrote his memoir of Jewish Mlawa in Hebrew in 1949, which has since been published in the Yizkor Book of Mlawa housed in Yad Vashem Jerusalem. His memoir is available online at https://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/mlawa/mlawa.html
[3] ibid.
[4] ibid.
[5] Goldstein G. Baruch For Decades I was Silent: A Holocaust Survivor’s Journey Back to Faith (University of Alabama Press, 2015)
[6] Goldstein G. Baruch For Decades I was Silent: A Holocaust Survivor’s Journey Back to Faith (University of Alabama Press, 2015) p.5
[7] Goldstein G. Baruch For Decades I was Silent: A Holocaust Survivor’s Journey Back to Faith (University of Alabama Press, 2015) p.6
[8] Joseph Roth The Wandering Jews (1926) p.94
[9] The Yizkor Memorial Book of Mlawa (a project initiated by Yad Vashem to commemorate the lost Jewish communities destroyed during the Holocaust) available online https://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/mlawa/mla536.html#Page534.
[10] ibid.