Daddy's Revenge: From Siberia to Kazakhstan, with Love from Berko and Luba
In which Daddy and I eat Bento boxes and talk (family) history
Mom calls. She is upset. She doesn’t like what I wrote about Daddy. She says, “Don’t write about Daddy like that.” She says, “Why did you write about Daddy on the Facebook?” Guilt blooms in my chest like sea grass flowering under the Mediterranean sun. Mom goes on: Some things are personal. I shouldn’t be mean to Daddy. I shouldn’t say that Daddy is slowly dying. I attempt to defend myself — I’m not being mean! Daddy can be a bit of a…handful. Plus he is slowly dying!
After coaching Kid #2’s ultimate frisbee practice (massive tourney coming up) I meet Daddy himself for lunch. According to my mother he is eating so little these days a strong wind could blow him away, so I direct us to a haven of giant-sized Bento boxes. Daddy gnaws his way through shrimp tempura, salmon sushi, California rolls and more while I try to take the temperature of the situation. “So…Mom’s…uh…mad at me?” He shrugs and spears a deep-fried yam. “About what I wrote?” Daddy chews ponderously and surveys his Bento. I can’t tell if he’s thinking about complicated family dynamics or considering which of the neatly arranged little compartments he will plunder next.
Eventually he puts down his chopsticks and glances up at me. “Your mother,” he announces. I wait with bated breath. Yes? My mother? He shrugs and pushes over his miso soup. “Here. You want this? I don’t want this.”
You can’t get blood from the stone. (Only, apparently, soup.) As it turns out, Dad isn’t too fussed about my depictions of him. I think he’s enjoying his time in the spotlight. Having gotten that out of the way I tell him that I’ve been looking into the family’s arrival to Canada. This he’s more interested in.
My father and his parents arrive just after World War II following a stint in a German displaced persons camp run by the Americans. They are part of a final wave of Jewish refugees being allowed into Canada, this group even more shell shocked, impoverished and desperate than their 19th century predecessors. My father is five at the time and doesn’t remember much of the story. But the documents I have tell their own tale. The threesome arrive at Halifax’s famous Pier 21 – Canada’s equivalent of Ellis Island. They come over on the trans-Atlantic transport the USS Sturgis which makes landfall in the middle of winter, January 13, 1948. (My father’s parents would have been well used to the cold, having spent some considerable years in frigid Siberia as guests of the Soviet Union.)
I tell Dad that I’d found a picture of the ship – it is large and menacing, even though it is a transport and never engaged in battles. The various naval history nerds give me a surprisingly detailed rundown of the ship’s long life and many journeys. Built in 1943, the Sturgis eventually entered World War II, plying the waters of the South Pacific, moving primarily between the West Coast of the US and Pearl Harbour. Coincidentally, ship and crew were in Japan as rare witnesses to the moment of the Rising Sun Empire’s surrender.
After the war, the ship began to transport some of the million of refugees who had been left homeless and stateless. I find a picture of the Sturgis in 1947. It is in Bremerhaven, Germany, the port from which my grandparents and father were to depart a year later. The refugees are mostly facing the boat. They are in black coats, the backs of their heads covered by black fedoras, the women in dark knit hats. There is a long tunnel that extends from the boat’s deck down to the shore. The tunnel looks at once flimsy and foreboding, its entrance caught by the camera as a black hole. I read: “These C-4 Maritime Commission ships were built to transport 3,485 GI's, but usually carried fewer than 700 refugees. Onboard the General S. D. Sturgis there were no facilities for quartering families together. The men bunked aft, the women forward, with cabins reserved for the aged and for mothers with small children who slept on bunk beds three levels high, approximately six bunk beds per cabin.”
This tracks with what my Dad remembers. I slurp his miso and he tells me his father and most of the men were put to work on the ship and slept elsewhere. He says he does not remember seeing his father on the boat. But he remembers sleeping in a bunkbed with his mother in a room jammed with bunkbeds and other women and children. Finally, he remembers, as he puts it, “wandering around the boat all day.” Five years old, he spends the two-week journey solo, going hither and tither on the large, imposing Sturgis. He’d already been through so much. Did he wonder where he was going, what was waiting for him when he got there? Or was he unbothered, already well used to lurching from uncertainty to uncertainty?
I tell Dad that in the process of searching for information about the Sturgis, I stumbled upon another family that had been on the boat with them. I had found them on the Halifax-based Canadian Immigration Museum website: A sepia tinged photograph of a family in a semi-rural setting. The father is in an undershirt revealing skinny arms. His hair is pushed back, accentuating a broad forehead sloping down to sunken eyes. The expression on his face is of forbearance, of having seen things a father should never have to see. The woman, in a dress we would think of as formal and old-fashioned nowadays, is sort of trying to smile. She immediately reminds me of my grandmother. There are two children, a small boy and a baby girl. “Reva Kanner Dexter,” the caption reads, “immigrated to Canada from Bremerhaven, Germany on board USS General S.D. Sturgis with her parents, Sarah Schwartzman Kanner and Mechel Kanner, and her brother, Hymie. They arrived at Pier 21 on January 13, 1948, eventually settling in Montreal.”
Well! What do we have here? A family of Jews on the same exact boat trip. For all I knew, they were on the bunk below my five-year-old father and my grandmother. Dad is very interested in this. I tell him that the girl in the picture, Reva Kanner Dexter, wrote an article in 2018. In it she describes her parents’ journey out of Russia and on to Canada. The same picture of the young, grave couple and two little children appears, but this time the photo is placed in Kazakhstan, where this Reva was apparently born in 1944. My father was also born in Kazakhstan, an unbelievable coincidence were it not for the fact that, as Reva’s article goes on to explain, most of the Jews who fled into the Soviet Union from Poland were at first sent to work camps in Siberia where they primarily mined for coal as forced labour.
After the USSR officially went to war against the Axis and became reluctant allies with the Polish, whose government-in-exile had popped up in London, these Siberian forced labourers were freed. They were told to go to Kazakhstan where the Polish army was assembling. But the Polish army didn’t want Jews, so Kazakhstan ended up for many being just another strange exile, a malarial swamp vector of starvation and further antisemitism.
At any rate, here was another family with a history exactly like that of my dad and his parents. Dad tells me that though his parents almost never talked about it, he does know that the journey from Siberia to Kazakhstan was exceedingly dangerous and that at one point he believes his parents were arrested for trying to steal food. He can’t remember the details. In Reva’s article she writes about her parents being part of a group that felled trees and built a raft to sail down a river, stopping to scavenge at farms for food. Occasionally they were forced to dodge bullets. Could my grandparents have been with this group? Maybe Reva Kanner knows more, if she is still around. From the article she wrote, I tell Dad, it seems as if she eventually ended up in Vancouver. “Vancouver!” Dad says excitedly. He tells me that originally his family was slated to go to Vancouver. On the boat over, his dad met another dad who had been assigned Montreal but was unhappy about it because he had family in Vancouver. Knowing nothing of either place, my grandfather Berko agreed to switch cities with the man. “Could this have been the exact family?” my father wonders. Doubtful, but if I ever find Reva, I will ask.
Despite my father’s failing health and my mother’s warnings, he has managed to polish off most of the Bento box. We are both very full now, relaxing in the booth with our green tea. Dad says he wants to tell me one more story about his parents that I’ve never heard before. I know what he’s going to tell me, but I encourage him anyway. After all, these stories are our family’s only connection to a past totally erased, a world rendered nonexistent by acts of unfathomable violence.
My dad tells me that his parents loved each other very much, that theirs was a true love from the start, not some kind of arranged marriage which was still the custom back in those days. His parents were both born in the town of Sokolow Podlaski, which lies some 100 miles East of Warsaw. There were already Jews in the area when the town was officially founded in the 1490s and the town was predominantly Jewish for the next 500 years, with around 6,000 Jewish people living there. My father explains to me that my grandparents met when they were still children. They went to school together. But Berko’s parents had died, and somehow he had ended up abandoned. He became an orphan with nowhere to live.
One day, Luba, my dad’s mother, took him home with her. She asked her father if Berko could move in with them. My grandmother’s father surveyed the tiny house in which he lived with this wife and eight children. Then he smiled and shrugged and said, apparently, “Why not? What’s one more?”
According to my father, that was the genesis of my grandparents undying love. When the NAZIs came in 1939, teenage Berko and Luba fled East, eventually sneaking into the USSR before being caught and sent to Siberia, thus beginning a long odyssey of survival and endurance that would last ten long years. Everyone else in Luba’s family stayed behind. They were all murdered, mostly in the gas chambers of the Treblinka concentration camp, an entire town’s population obliterated, though a mere .17% of the three-and-a-half million Polish Jews who had once made up the population of my grandparents’ lost world.
Now the story is almost done. I offer to drive Dad home, but he says he will take the subway. I watch him wander slowly along the sidewalk. It’s true, I think. Despite the heavy lunch, a strong wind could definitely blow him over.