A LONG ROAD HOME The Life and Times of Grisha Sklovsky 1915-1995 by John Nicholson This book is dedicated to the memory of Chaja, also known as Anna Sklovsky, who placed her trust in justice and the rule of law and was betrayed by justice and the rule of law in a gas-chamber at Auschwitz. 2 CONTENTS Preface Introduction Chapter One Siberia Chapter Two Berlin Chapter Three Lyon Chapter Four The Czech Brigade Chapter Five England Chapter Six Waiting Chapter Seven Invasion Chapter Eight From Greece to Paris to America Chapter Nine Melbourne Chapter Ten Family, Friends and Europe Chapter Eleven Battlegrounds and the Antarctic Chapter Twelve New Directions and Multiculturalism Chapter Thirteen SBS Television Chapter Fourteen Of Camberwell and other battles Chapter Fifteen Moscow Chapter Sixteen Last Days Epilogue Notes Index 3 Introduction In the early years of the twentieth century, when the word pogrom [Russian: devastation] had entered the world‟s vocabulary, many members of a Russian Jewish family named Sklovsky were leaving their long-time homes within the Pale of Settlement.1 They were compelled to leave because, after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, experiments in half-hearted liberalism were abandoned and throughout the regimes of Alexander III [1881-1894] and Nicholas II [1894-1917] the Jews of Russia were subjected to endless persecution. As a result of the partitions of Poland in the eighteenth century more than a million Jews had found themselves within the Russian empire but permitted to live only within the Pale, the boundaries of which were determined in 1812. It covered areas in the Ukraine around Kiev, leading towards ancient provinces of Byelorussia, part of Poland, as well as east and south, towards Kharkov and Odessa. Permits were provided to small numbers to live and work elsewhere, provided baptism took place or they had certain professional qualifications. The census of 1897 revealed that nearly five million were confined within the Pale. On his accession to the throne Alexander III immediately indicated he was not interested in limiting autocratic power and that he intended to save Russia from anarchy and revolution, not by parliamentary institutions or liberalism, but by the principles of Orthodoxy, autocracy and belief in the Russian people: one administration, one nationality, one language, one religion. Russian language and Russian schools would be forced on his Finnish, Polish and German subjects while, in the defence of Orthodoxy, German, Polish and Swedish institutions would be dismantled and the Jews persecuted. One of the Tsar‟s advisers observed: “One third of the Jews will emigrate, one third will be baptised and one third will starve”. He failed to allocate a percentage to those who would be murdered. 4 With the promulgation of a series of statutes, known as the May Laws, pogroms, ritual murder accusations, the publication of fraudulent documents, such as the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion2, were perpetrated under the protection of Government policy, often with Russian Orthodox Church complicity. It was a device, ultimately fruitless, to deflect the rage of the Russian people away from Tsarist autocracy. In 1905 Nicholas II, reaffirming his commitment to those principles embraced by his predecessor, lent Government support to the creation of the League of the Russian People, also known as the Black Hundreds. These notorious anti-Semitic groups, prototypes of the fascist gangs of the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties, were guilty of countless atrocities. Mob violence and official oppression of the Jews were also common in other parts of Europe, especially Galicia in Poland, then part of the Austrian Empire, and Rumania. That country‟s independence had been guaranteed by the Congress of Berlin [1878] which demanded that all citizens should have fair and equal treatment. When Rumania declared that Jews were not citizens persecution and discrimination became matters of policy. Throughout the more than thirty years from 1881 to the outbreak of World War I the Jews of Russia experienced further punitive restrictions: in employment; expulsion from many cities; a reduction in the area of the Pale; many more areas, within the Pale, forbidden them and countless attacks in which Jews were robbed and murdered while their homes were destroyed. A pogrom in Odessa in 1905, that went on for four days, resulted in the deaths of four hundred Jews, while in 1906 the army and police took part in the atrocities at Bialystok. Under these impossible conditions many Jews who had been tending towards assimilation, retreated from that stance and sought hope in strict adherence to the Torah, if they were religious, and for those who had wandered from their faith, salvation would be sought in Jewish nationalism or the socialist labour movement: the General Jewish Workers‟ Union in Russia, Poland and Lithuania, created in 1897, and known as the Bund. But most of the Jews in Russia were in no doubt that it was time for a new Exodus and that exodus would become one of the great migrations of history. From fifty to sixty thousand each year in the early 1880s the departures reached 137,000 in 1892 and more than 200,000 in 1905- 5 1906 when the Black Hundreds began their activities. From Austria‟s Galicia more than 350,000 joined in the search for a better life, for survival. The overwhelming proportion of this mass of people seeking refuge looked towards the West. Small numbers arrived in Palestine, England and other countries, a few in Australia,3 while more than two million arrived in the United States. Yet there remained a number of better educated Jews, many of them more Russianised, more assimilated [they spoke Russian not Yiddish], who were looking elsewhere. They looked to the East. 6 Chapter One Siberia In 1902 Abram Sklovsky was studying Economics and Law at the University of Kiev. He was clever, handsome, a star of the university‟s amateur theatre and was planning his future life. He was one of the privileged Jews. He spoke Russian and had qualified to enrol in the university under Numerus Clausus [Latin: Closed Number], a statute, enacted in 1887, which could result in a total prohibition of Jewish students or limit their number in accordance with a discriminatory rule. These restrictions were removed after the revolution of 1917. Apart from being proficient in Russian, Abram would have had to catch up on matriculation subjects not taught in Jewish schools, become familiar with Russian and other classics and undergo a number of tests, competing among a highly motivated group for a small number of university places. The woman he was to marry would be confronted with the same challenges and, like Abram, she would overcome them. Some three hundred kilometres to the north-east of Kiev, in Abram‟s home town, his family was considering its future. Glukhov, with a population of 140,000 was home to some 5,000 Jews and the numbers were dropping each year. For Abram, for his sister and his three brothers, the future had to be elsewhere. Yet, like many before and after them, they knew that departure from familiar surroundings, however oppressive it may be, is never easy. For many educated Russian Jews, assimilated in part, the West held no appeal. They were not religious and Zionism‟s call for a Jewish homeland went unheard. They were listening to another call. They heard stories of extraordinary developments in the East, far distant eastern Siberia, Vladivostok and Harbin in Manchuria. Harbin owed its development as a city to the construction, by the Russians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of the Chinese Eastern Railway. The former small market town became the administrative and construction centre for the railway which was to link the Trans-Siberian Railroad from just east of Lake Baikal in Siberia with Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan. This saved a thousand kilometres in the journey from Moscow. Another line stretched south, linking Harbin to the Russian-developed city of Port Arthur in southern 7 Manchuria. Harbin and eastern Siberia were the new frontiers offering countless opportunities. For Jews they could also boast the priceless asset of being many thousands of kilometres from the Tsar. However, Samuel Sklovsky, Abram‟s father, was not convinced that emigration was necessary. No longer strictly religious, he spoke Russian as well as Yiddish, encouraged the education of his children and was widely respected throughout the Jewish communities of the Glukhov area. His business was well established and he felt no direct pressure to leave his home. But his daughter, Zippa, had other ideas. A strong-willed young woman, she and her husband, Iakov Basin, were determined to leave and their destination was to be Harbin, a decision that was to decide the future of the family. The eldest brother, Samarij, who had married a renowned singer, was going to join his sister in order “to prepare the ground for the younger brothers once they completed their education”. Samuel did not attempt to hinder his children‟s departure but it was not for him. He would remain in Glukhov. On completion of his studies Abram also departed for Harbin where he joined his brother- in-law in tendering for contracts for the supply of materials for the railway construction and other development projects financed by the Russian government. Samarij had opened other businesses, trading in soft drinks and cigarettes and eventually taking control of the electricity supply station. After a few years, although very successful, Abram was not satisfied. Harbin was too narrow a field for his vision and energy. There were too many relatives in town and it was not the Far East he had imagined.