TATTERED SILK: A EURASIAN ODYSSEY , A SON’S MEMOIR

By:  Michael Skakun 

 Of all the rescue efforts attempted during the Holocaust, few were as daring and as successful as that of the “Children of Tehran” — “Yaldey Tehran” — a caravan of some 800 Polish Jewish orphaned children brought to the yishuv (British Mandate Palestine) via a harrowing journey through Siberia, Soviet Central Asia, Iran, British India and Egypt in 1943.  In “Tattered Silk,” I dramatize this largely untold story orchestrated by Henrietta Szold, the leader of Hadassah, the world’s largest voluntary women’s organization, and her steadfast supporters, as well as diplomats on three continents. These desperate child refugees, fleeing their devastated Polish homes, trekked across the frozen wasteland of northernmost Russia and the desert landscape of Central Asia, sojourned amid the  squalor and splendor of wartime Tehran and the port city of Karachi on the Indian subcontinent. After years on the run, they were finally shepherded across the Arabian Sea, the Suez Canal and the Sinai, to haven in the yishuv, itself already torn by inter-communal strife. My mother, Tsivia (nee Elson) Skakun was one of these children, and “Tattered Silk” is her story.

INTRODUCTION: 

MAPS AND MEMORY 

 

By any measure, children and war ought to be a contradiction in terms. Yet history never fails to yoke the two into the most morally squalid of equations. Our age further hammers home this obscenity. Beaten, beleaguered tiny faces stream at us from every corner of the globe. A migrant army of silhouettes, these minors–by no means minor victims–are the first and last casualties of war, perhaps the cruelest reminder of how fallen our world is.

 

The United Nations reports more refugees are dispersed worldwide today than at any time since World War II. Their haggard and grizzled looks remind me of my own mother, a young girl caught in the coils of war more than 75 years ago. Her ordeal casts a long shadow that continues to shape our own age, the tragedy of the voiceless. Her travails share an unspoken vocabulary with more recent suffering, and offer a greater purchase on the lexicon of the child in the modern world. What I have hoped to do in “Tattered Silk” is to have her emerge from beneath the wheel of history and from behind the veil of mystery.

 

Hers is a wartime odyssey of harrowing flight, deportation, and rescue, ranging across half the globe, the expanse of Eurasia once encompassing the Silk Road, a storied highway joining China with the West. A conduit for both good and ill, the Silk Road, the actual term coined as late as in the nineteenth century, became the route by which Buddhism and Nestorian Christianity arrived in China–and more darkly–disease, the road the Bubonic plague traveled and spread through late medieval Europe, ravaging a third of its population.

 

Marco Polo, the Venetian-born traveler and teller of marvels who had been aptly nicknamed “Il Milione,” had reportedly traversed the Silk Road during the thirteenth century to visit the gilded summer court of Kublai Khan, the Xanadu of later Coleridgian fame.  He went on to spend seventeen years in the Mongol’s service and while his account may have lacked the opium-induced vision of the British Romantic poet, it too could not but glimmer with the refulgence of gold and silk. Marco Polo is said to have declared on his deathbed, “I did not tell half of what I saw, because I knew I would not be believed.”  His tales of the stupendous riches of the East, however extravagantly embroidered, were not in every instance met by incredulity. Two centuries hence, they fired the seafaring imagination of Columbus, who, while carrying an annotated copy of Marco Polo’s work, inadvertently discovered America as a means to achieve these mythic lands by a western route.

 

In 1904, at the turn of the 20th century, British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, a father of modern geopolitics and a founder and First Principal of The London School of Economics, altered the way politicians and military planners would come to view the world. He elevated Eastern Europe and Central Asia, “the wide commons of civilization,” to world historical importance, the geographic pivot on which the fate of empires would turn. In his “Heartland” reading of events, history and geography had shifted the globe decisively eastward, marking the end of regnum Europae.

 

During perhaps the most terrifying chapter of modern times, Tsivia Elson, a child refugee caught between two totalitarianisms–Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia–embarked in the epicenter of Mackinder’s geographical heartland on a riveting journey, a tale perhaps as unbelievable, though wholly different–less replete but far grimmer–than that of Marco Polo, the storied Venetian.

 

At its core lay the voyage by duress of an ardent but death-haunted ten-year-old girl.  Exiled to the sub-Arctic by Stalin, she outmaneuvers fate by chance and design, traveling along parts of what once constituted the ancient Silk route, once the “crossroads of the world,” the sinuous, 4,000-mile-long network of paths that linked the Pacific to the Mediterranean, the ancient capital city of Changan (Xian) to the ports of Europe and the Levant.   In 1942, the darkest year of the war, she becomes part a Kindertransport, “The Children of Tehran,” a caravanserai of orphans, subject to harsh circumstance and diplomatic intrigue. She is shepherded across a vast continental arc, encompassing the splendor and squalor of Central Asia, of the Indian subcontinent and finally of the Middle East. A story hitherto little noted, this voyage transports her to the once legendary Muslim cities of Uzbekistan; the Persian capital Tehran, a wartime “Casablanca of the East”; the far-flung port city of Karachi, then a maritime outpost of British India—each a way station on the road to Palestine.  Hers is a story of loss and longing, desire and desolation and, in the end, of “the open destiny of a life.”

 

 

Mother’s memory, perhaps as prodigious as Father’s, lay bare the heart of a century’s cruelty. Father’s tale, explored in On Burning Ground: A Son’s Memoir, while less geographically expansive than hers, sought to achieve its own order of moral magnitude and psychological implication. A divinity student born in Nowogrodek, Poland (now Belarus), a center of religious and ethical piety, he refashioned himself during World War II into a cloth of many colors, a tapestry of multiple borrowed identities, each part woven out his borderland origin.  This young acolyte of leading Polish rabbinical academies—a sort of East European Oxbridge of pre-war Jewish clerical training and scholarship—created a shadow world, transforming himself into a chameleon, first a Christian and then a Moslem, to flee occupied Poland. Once lodged in Nazi Germany, he excelled in every art of deception, pushing daily at the limits of possibility, until he finally “joined” the end stage of the Waffen-SS to stay alive. Here was a stratagem of last resort, a story to beggar the imagination, a tale of alchemy and anguish, cunning and stamina.

 

Mother’s story, as Father’s, bookends of my childhood, drew me to the farthest frontiers where worlds collide. How could I possibly fathom the truth borne by such a strange terrain and even stranger events? How to square a world in which Martin Heidegger, Germany’s leading twentieth-century philosopher, observed in 1942 about the mass killing of the Jews by his own countrymen: “The highest type and the highest act of politics consists in placing your opponent in a position when he is compelled to participate in his own self-annihilation,” a justification following from his presumption of “Jewry’s unique predisposition toward planetary criminality.”  I intuited then what I have come to know now. The telling of history, and, more especially disaster, remains more often than not a contradiction in terms, widening the gulf it seeks to narrow. Language fails, ultimately falling away in the face of existence bared. Any act of representation always escapes its intention and purpose. Yet with childlike stubbornness, I persisted in laying verbal claim to my family’s past, to those unassimilable regions, to find some utterance for the realms of exile and death.

 

The poet Mark Strand asks in “Dark Harbor”: “How do you turn pain/Into its own memorial/How do you write it down, /Turn it into itself as witnessed….” How, does one wrap the mind around the unnameable?  Perhaps an image, however modest and commonplace, might pave the way, I thought.

 

Yet all that remained were mounds of glowing ash and memory.  But some rough semblance must be found; the lowly multi-colored school map, the visual shorthand of topographic reality, served as my crossing into the straits of history, which I soon discovered to be a practice of mourning.

 

A recent immigrant in the early 1960s—a hyphenated American without the vernacular crackle and syncopations of New York English—I began to live among a scattering of maps. This turned my imagination mobile, throwing mind dizzily into motion, taking me beyond my philatelist’s grasp of geography. Splayed across my childhood desk or stretched on the worn parquet floor of a meager Brooklyn apartment, I discovered a two-fold excitement: maps and migration were forever wedded. Slowly I drew my finger across meandering borders, learning to trace the outlines of my mother’s sojourn beyond the sea.  In the whirligig of New York, I discovered the subject of my search, the dark matter of history, the substratum beneath the magic of meridians.

 

Foreign sounding names encumbered me. Archangelsk, Bokhara, Karachi, Tehran, the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Oman—distant cities and seascapes that Mother repeated in dirge-like lamentation—became my coordinates. In happier days, these places, with their rich polyphony of sound and cadence, many situated along the fabled Silk Road—one of the longest commercial and cultural networks ever known in recorded history—formed the trackless spaces of the sublime, splendid destinations on a globetrotter’s itinerary, redolent of romance and intrigue. During war they became intractable landscapes, cities of bristling consonants and deliquescent vowels invoking exile, suffering, and deportation. In time, these destinations, worn by repetition, set me on a course whose paths I still traverse.

 

“What was the mystery of distance—,” the novelist Hortense Calisher once wrote, “that it was not only geographical but clove through the map, into the heart.”  In childhood I recognized that space coursed through me.  Ing, pored over maps like a pilgrim in search of truth. Their color and texture acquired the aura of place—or more precisely, in Mother’s case—wartime displacement. In the end, they served as much a reckoning of time as a marking of space.  Every map I came to learn was a map of loss.

 

Precisely because it was wedded to exile and loss, geography, I surmised, must somehow possess the mystery of truth, of the human condition in scripted in bold font. With enough pressure and insistence brought to the study of maps, it might reveal and possibly summon forth the depth of experience and the sweep of cosmology–a veritable universe of meanings. Had not Plato carved this exhortation on the façade of the Academy–“No one enter here who is not a surveyor.”

 

Maps were more than mere signs or representations, but the stuff of life, the territory itself. They exhaled a “mysterious afflatus,” the long breath of experience, drawing me across the rutted roads of the past. A yearning for distant places, perilous voyages, and midnight seas turned into an active search for self, the aboriginal source of life, and, in the end, an open invitation to mortality. As a child, I discovered geography to be far more than the simple art of drawing maps to scale; but rather, the ever- tightening latticework of memory, a way of summoning the past, a young boy’s method of conjuring the living and the dead. As an adult, I sought to mold this passion into language, a way of giving suffering a name, of etching a footprint, however faint and fortuitous, in the sands of time.