union. As a rabbi’s daughter, Mina remained very Orthodox in her beliefs. Chaim may well have been less so.
A story is told of my grandfather being out fishing and falling into the lake. He was carried, lifeless, back into his home and there declared dead. My grandmother Mina, refusing to believe it, warmed him by the fire and massaged his limbs and heart for hours until he spluttered back into life. Evidently my grandfather was born as Avraham, but was known in the community from then on as Chaim, the name closest to chai which translates as ‘life’. In later documents I have found his name recorded either as Chaim, Avraham Chaim or Avraham. So changing names may well be a family tradition.
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The family tree my aunt Bruria created shows her parents Chaim and Mina having their firstborn, a daughter Tila, in 1902. A cascade of birth dates follows, each two years apart: their first son Nisan, followed by Daniel and then my mother Gitel. Four more children were born before Bruria, the youngest, was born in 1919 – Yosef in 1910, Shmuel in 1912, Rivka in 1914 and Malka in 1917.
Aunt Bruria’s family tree
In Orthodox families births were not usually registered but only recorded by the Hebrew calendar and written inside the cover of the family Bible. Many birthdays were remembered only by how close they were to major festivals. The Lazovski family was large, but not unusually large for the time.
Vishey was a shtetl, a small Jewish town like so many others, and one of hundreds dotted through Eastern Europe before the war. It was called this because so much of the population was Jewish. In Vishey, it was over half. Of the fifteen shops, twelve were Jewish owned. There were four textile shops, two butchers, two restaurants and one shoe shop. There were even two Jewish doctors.
Memorial to L.L. Zamenhof in Vishey
The most famous doctor of Vishey was an ophthalmologist starting a new practice who may well have seen Chaim’s father as a patient. Dr L.L. Zamenhof from Bialystok worked there in 1886 and 1887 while at the same time creating his universal language, known as Esperanto. Dr Zamenhof was in Vishey for only the two years, having greater ambitions, but he was still the town’s favourite son. He has a street named after him and there is a Zamenhof memorial. The Jews of Vishey have been completely forgotten for there is no formal recognition of the town’s Jewish past in Veisiejai today. The former Jewish cemetery is untended: the fence broken, the grounds overgrown with pieces of broken and scattered headstones underfoot. Being unknown to the locals, it is difficult to find.
The irony is that Zamenhof was Jewish.
Tragedy struck the young Lazovski family when Nisan, their second born, died as a four-week-old infant. It was before my mother Gitel was born. Family history or mythology suggests it was Chaim, coming in from a day’s labour, slinging his heavy fur coat down carelessly on top of the cot that led to Nisan being smothered, a cot close up to the kitchen stove where the warmth was concentrated to soothe an infant, but also near the rear entry to the house. A more generous view may be that it was a cot death, but from then it is said there was tension between my grandparents, Chaim and Mina.
Recently tended Jewish Cemetery, Vishey
My grandfather Chaim was strong-willed, authoritarian, quick to anger and unforgiving, perhaps characteristics shared with his father, the judge. Mina, my grandmother, was loving and generous, as she baked challah for the surrounding homes as well as for herself before every Shabbat. Mina was a community leader who others turned to when in need. The children were fearful of their father, but adored their mother, it is said.
Chaim would expect the children to travel in the back of the dray with him to the farm no matter how cold the weather, with no acknowledgement of their efforts at the end of the day. He expected his sons to follow him and become farmers and for his daughters to work both in the house and on the land and then to marry – hardly realistic, for the land barely allowed his family to survive let alone be sufficient to feed another generation.
Further tragedy occurred when Tila was thirteen years old. Chaim and Mina had gone to celebrate a wedding and were away overnight. The children were left in the care of a servant. Spring ice remained on the lake and Tila went skating and fell through the unstable cracking ice, to be rescued half frozen by her brother Daniel. She was carried into the house and placed in the alcove above the stove. She seemed to recover, but overnight she died of what was called a thrombosis. None of the good fortune that once blessed Chaim could save Tila.
Lake Ancia frozen-over at Vishey
Chaim and Mina had now lost two children, Nisan and Tila. In their grief after that they refused to ever attend any celebrations – no weddings, no birthdays, no brit milah (circumcisions). They would only celebrate the Jewish High Holy Days.
My mother Gitel became the second oldest, her brother Daniel now being the oldest, and, most importantly, she was the oldest girl in the family.
When my mother was born, Lithuania was more of a concept than a country, as it had been under Russian rule for nearly a hundred years. The area of Russia that included Lithuania incorporated much of Eastern Poland as well and was known as the Pale of Settlement, for it allowed Jews to permanently reside there. The Pale was established late in the eighteenth century to restrict Jews from moving to the Russian interior and to cities such as Moscow. Its initial aim was to prevent competition with Russian merchants, which meant the Jews living there remained impoverished, as they were also restricted in their occupations. Its unintended consequence was to concentrate the Jews into communities where they became the majority of the population. In shtetls such as Vishey and in the cities, Jews in the Pale were unified by their common language, religious practices and culture. The Pale was expanded with Russian conquests and ultimately was an area twice the size of France, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea to become a virtual Jewish nation state. Before the Second World War the Pale had a population of four million Jews and was the largest Jewish population centre in the world.
In 1915, during the First World War, as the Russians retreated from Lithuania, the four hundred Jews of Vishey were forced into exile by order of the Russian Army as the Russians were concerned about Jews being potential traitors in the war against Germany. This movement of Jews to the interior had a practical effect. It led to the Russian parliament overturning the regulations of the Pale in 1917.
Vishey fell to the Germans for a brief period until they retreated after the end of the war in 1918. The Germans of the First World War were remembered kindly, often giving sweets to the children and extending courtesies not expected of invading soldiers. The tragedy was that this remembered behaviour so misled the Jews of Europe when the hate-filled murderous Nazis returned in the next war.
Following the Germans leaving in 1918, the neighbouring Poles then tried to forcefully take Lithuania. Finally, an independent state of Lithuania was established and so declared by the League of Nations. Only half of those expelled Jews returned to Vishey following this declaration of the new state, yet by the 1920s there were over five hundred Jews once more.
Twenty years later, in 1939, the Germans attacked Poland and then handed the territory they captured two weeks later to the Russians under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Lithuania was spared the invasion by the Germans in 1939 as the same pact deemed the country to already be under the
