Gary Nachshen's Letters from Ukraine
Introduction
Ever since my grandfather, Yancel (Jack) Nachshen, started recounting stories to me many decades ago about his experiences during the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War that followed, I have longed to visit the sites that he told me about. Skvira, Pogrebishche, Berdichev - the places in the Ukraine where he and other members of the Nachshen family lived sounded exotic and far away, yet through force of repetition they developed a very familiar ring over time and came to seem like a part of my own life.
Finally, after years of thinking about it, I got myself organized and actually planned a trip to the Ukraine. It was a very short trip - barely a week - but the itinerary was devised so as to maximize the time spent in places of interest in Nachshen family history. In the daily reports and photos that are attached, you can read about and see Skvira, the town where earlier generations of Nachshens lived until World War 1; Pogrebishche, where our immediate ancestors lived until the terrible pogrom of August 1919; Berdichev, where Yancel was unwittingly inducted into the Red Army and where other members of the family lived as refugees in 1919-21; Vinnitsa, where Avrum and other family members also lived for a brief while; and the Dniester River, where Avrum and Yancel crossed to freedom in Romania (now Moldova) in 1920.
My trip took place in May 2009, exactly nine decades after the traumatic historical events which put an end to the Nachshen family presence in the Ukraine. But my experience there was nothing short of wonderful - every single Ukrainian, Russian or Jewish person my buddy and travel mate Mark and I met was friendly, hospitable and welcoming. It was an experience of a lifetime, and I hope that family members, friends, and any others who chance upon this collection will come away with at least some flavour for the magical opportunity I was given to walk briefly in the footsteps of my grandfather Zaida Jack, my great-grandfather Zaida Moishe, and all the other members of our family of blessed memory.
My thanks to my Uncle Brian for taking care of all the technological details associated with the posting of this collection, and most of all to Julie, Thomas and Emma for giving me a "week off" to pursue my adventure in the Ukraine.
Gary Nachshen
June 2009
1. May 20, 2009
Hi everyone. We are now back in our Kiev hotel after a fascinating and profoundly moving day in Skvira and Pogrebishche.
We started the day by driving to Skvira, which I gather now has about 15,000 residents. (We heard a lot of stats today, so I may be a bit confused on some of them.) There are exactly 108 remaining Jewish souls in Skvira. (I am sure about that statistic, as it was repeated many times to us.) Apparently most of the 2000 or so Jews living there in 1941 were evacuated before the Nazi occupation, but there's been much attrition since then.
We spent a couple of hours with Efrim, the head of the Jewish community there. There were formerly seven shuls there. Five are completely gone. The facade of a sixth now graces the front of a factory. The seventh, originally built in the 1860s, has been substantially restored and expanded since 2001. Most of the funds came from the Hasidic Twersky dynasty in New Square, New York, which originated in Skvira. The shul has a very nice dining hall, just in case anyone is planning a simcha.
The shul is protected by a set of high metal gates with a large Magen David, right behind the lane where the (rather sad-looking) town street market is spread across a couple of dozen stalls. We walked through the market and a few main streets. Overall the town gives off a feeling of the very beginnings of prosperity set among many examples of the drabbest Soviet-style architecture.
Our last stop in Skvira was the Jewish cemetery, located in a very large field on the town outskirts. This has been the community cemetery for centuries, so Zaida Israel (Zaida Moishe's father) is definitely buried there. However, the Nazis destroyed all the tombstones, and the fragments that were left were used for building materials. Hence the oldest standing tombstones date from the mid-1940s.
We then left for Pogrebishche. I would hesitate to describe the way between the two places as a road - it is more of a sodden, rock-filled dirt path. We got further and further into the countryside, and saw fewer and fewer people and more and more chickens and geese. But just when we thought we were leaving civilization behind, we hit Pogrebishche. If Skvira is a town, Pogrebishche (population 10,000 tops, including surrounding hamlets and farms) is not much more than a village. It has the same depressing Soviet architecture as Skvira, and we were told in advance that there were no remaining full-time Jewish residents.
But in fact, Pogrebishche turned out to be a magical place. To begin with, there is a very pleasant public square in the centre of town. Second, it is surrounded by ponds, streams and rivers where we saw many folks fishing. And best of all, the people we met all turned out to be incredibly nice and helpful.
Here are some examples. We inquired at the Town Hall for a restaurant recommendation for lunch. The inquiry was passed up several levels, until the mayor himself emerged from his office to give us his choice. He and his staff seemed genuinely pleased to host the grandson of a former resident. Mark took a photo of me shaking the mayor's hand on the building steps.
We ended up eating at a wooden hunting lodge in the forest by the edge of town. The food was delicious and dirt cheap, and the decor was second to none - Mark took another photo of me sipping my borscht directly below the stuffed head of a wild boar mounted on the wall.
After lunch, a local resident named Mikhail offered to show us some of the well-hidden local Jewish sites. First we went to the site of the largest memorial commemorating the Jewish massacres in 1941. (It appears the community here fared much worse than in Skvira - the Jewish population in and around Pogrebishche was almost wiped out in WW2.) Unlike some of the bombastic Soviet memorials, this one is very spare, but it is particularly moving and affecting as a result.
We then proceeded to the Jewish cemetery. It is looked after by a babushka named Katia, whose family has been doing so for three or four generations. To get to the cemetery, you have to climb a steep hill, and most of the graves are strung along the side of a ridge deep in the forest. Near the top is a white hut, in which is buried Rebbe Shalom of Pogrebishche, one of the early leaders of the Hasidic movement in the 1700s. It so happened that we ran into two Hasidim from Israel, who were visiting the Rebbe's place of burial. Continuing to the top of the hill, we reached the highest part of the cemetery, which now doubles as a goat pasture. The cemetery is hundreds of years old, and both Mark and I found it to be a haunting and magical place - the highlight of our day.
This is not to say that Pogrebishche is paradise - far from it. It is a poor town (clearly less prosperous and less vibrant than Skvira), farm animals wander through much of it, and we spotted several horse-drawn carts. We also spotted two swastikas - one painted on a wall, another in the cemetery. And while there are several memorials to the Jews massacred in WW2, i.e. by the Germans, there are no memorials for the 375 Jews slaughtered in the August 1919 pogrom, committed by the Ukrainians themselves and the act which effectively chased the Nachshens out of Pogrebishche.
But all that is to quibble. Mark and I recited Kaddish in both cemeteries, I gathered soil from both towns to sprinkle on Zaida Moishe's and Zaida Jack's graves back in Montreal, and we left Pogrebishche in particular feeling truly touched. All in all, this was one of the most emotion-laden and profoundly moving days of my life. I am honoured to have been able to see both places with my own eyes and thereby renew the Nachshen family's connection with Skvira and Pogrebishche, however briefly.
2. May 21, 2009
It has been another staggering day of family history discovery today. We left this morning for Berdichev, a city of about 80,000 around two hours to the southwest of Kiev. We toured the Jewish cemetery, which is very old, very large and one of the few in the Ukraine which the Nazis didn't destroy. We visited the Polish Carmelite monastery from the 1600s. And we poked our heads into the Berdichev Museum with the intention of glancing at the exhibits for about 10-15 minutes. We were the only visitors, and the curator was so thrilled that she insisted on giving us a free, guided tour in which she personally explained the significance of every single archaeological, historical, religious (mostly Orthodox and Catholic, but to their credit also some Jewish), artistic, and cultural item on display. Once the translations were factored in, that ended up taking close to two hours.
But the absolute highlight of the visit to Berdichev, which just blew me away, was the following. Many years ago, Zaida Jack explained to me that after the pogrom in August 1919 most of the family (including Zaida Moishe, Bubby Sarah, Fera and Tanya) fled from Pogrebishche to Berdichev, where they lived until leaving for Kharkov in 1921. He gave me the street address of the house where they lived in Berdichev for those two years, 12 Muramskaya Street, and for some reason I was perspicacious enough to write it down. Yesterday I passed on that address to our guide Yuri, on the one in a million chance we could find the house.
Well lo and behold, we ask the Jewish cemetery keeper if he can help us find it. Turns out the street name was changed in 1975, but he remembers the original street name. We drive to that street, and start looking up and down the block with the low number addresses. All the houses seem to date from the 1960s or even later. I'm just about to give up, when Yuri lets out a cry just ahead of me. And there it is, the house at No. 12, a large ramshackle affair that Yuri and the cemetery keeper immediately agree dates back at least to the early 20th Century. In other words, I actually found the house where our family lived in the old country 90 years ago!
Even Yuri, who has been doing Jewish heritage tours to the Ukraine for 20 years, was amazed - he says many of his clients arrive with an old address, and he said this was one of the only times in his entire career that the house turned out to still be standing. Anyway, I recorded some video, and then I posed in front of the house for Mark to take a couple of photos of me by the address plate. Well, that turned out to be a bit too much for the house's current occupants, a family of Roma (i.e. Gypsies) who charged out the front door and chased us away. But man oh man, to actually find that very house and see it with my own eyes, I never thought I'd see the day...
We then headed south out of Berdichev, following the approximate route Yancel and Avrum took when they escaped from the Ukraine in January 1920. We are spending this evening in Vinnitsa, a pleasant and prosperous city of about 350,000 and also the city where Avrum and Manya lived when they were first married.
We will be having dinner tonight with a Jewish couple originally from Pogrebishche and now living in Vinnitsa. I will report in my next post on that dinner and our trip tomorrow down to the Dniester River.
3. May 22, 2009
Last night we had dinner in Vinnitsa with Yitzchak and Faina, a Jewish couple in their 70s now living in Vinnitsa. Yitzchak's parents were from Pogrebishche, though he himself has never lived there. Faina was born in Pogrebishche in the 1930s, was evacuated when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, was one of only five Jews from the town who both survived the war and returned to live there in 1945, and lived there until the 1950s when she moved to Vinnitsa.
Faina did most of the talking last night (in Russian - our guide translated), and she has a strength and spirit that I have rarely encountered in anyone younger than her, let alone someone her age who has suffered so much. It turns out that her father participated in a Jewish self-defence group in Pogrebishche just as Yancel did in 1919 and had the same experience as Yancel of turning to the Bolsheviks for weapons only to be unwittingly inducted into the Red Army. And her grandfather and mother escaped across the Dniester River into Romania around the same time as Avrum and Yancel did - the difference is that they could not get visas to settle anywhere else so were deported back to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and ended up returning to Pogrebishche.
In my post a couple of days ago, I mentioned the spare but powerful Holocaust memorial in Pogrebishche. Faina explained to me that it was erected right after the war, and in 1998 she arranged for the memorial to be restored by raising funds from people living abroad with family connections to Pogrebishche. She told me last night that further funds (about U.S.$4000) are now needed to preserve the memorial, a fact that I can certainly vouch for on the basis of my own observations. I will be contributing to this most worthy cause on my return to Canada and I committed to seeing if anyone else would like to participate. Should any of you be minded to do so, please let me know and I would be delighted to coordinate the effort.
Our dinner finished with my videotaping a poignant and powerful message from Faina to the Pogrebishche diaspora. Hopefully Brian and I (by which I really mean Brian and Julie...) will be able to figure out a way to upload that video onto the NFC website.
This morning we left Vinnitsa bright and early for Mogilev-Podilskiy, a town on the banks of the Dniester River. It was about a 90-minute drive through flat, practically uninhabited terrain - the further we got into the countryside, the fewer cars and the more horse-drawn carts we saw. As in most of the rest of the country, we also saw many goats and cattle, numerous ducks and geese, and countless chickens. I took the opportunity to think about Yancel and Avrum, who would have followed more or less the same route 90 years ago on their way to freedom. Finally we reached the Dniester River, which marked the border with Romania at the time in 1920 and now marks the border with Moldova. For various reasons, we were unable to cross the border, but I did mark the occasion by dipping my fingers in the waters of the Dniester.
After that, we took a brief look around Mogilev-Podilskiy, then got back on the road and retraced our steps north. We are now back in Kiev, where we will spend tomorrow sightseeing and souvenir shopping, then return to Canada the day after.
So I have now completed my self-appointed mission to walk in the Nachshen family's long-ago footsteps in the Ukraine. It has been an incredible experience for me, and I hope this and my two prior reports will prove of some interest and value for present and future members and friends of the family who may read these posts.