I owe my life to a bullet that pierced my father’s skull. The time was July 1942, the place, Staraya Russa.
But Staraya Russa is not the way to begin this story; it belongs in the second part of the middle, closer to the end.
The beginning was in Moscow, a few years before the October Revolution, yet I won’t begin this story in Moscow either. I’ll begin it in Riga, Latvia, with my grandfather Stephan taking my seven-year-old father to Old Town Riga. My young father was happy because he knew they would go to a stamp store after his father’s grown-up business appointments. My seven-year-old father loved nothing more than looking at stamps and nudging his father, “Look at this one!” or “This one, from England, is the most beautiful one ever!” There were also stamps from Russia, from the time before the Bolsheviks, and they were not at all old, as you might think, reading these lines in the 21st century, which is the only century in which you can read them. Stephan Kossman, my father’s father, didn’t like the Russian stamps, even though he had lived in the center of Russia’s capital for years, which was quite unusual for a Jew since in Czarist Russia, Jews were not allowed to live in the capital. My grandfather Stephan was a merchant of the First Guild, which was why he and his family could live in Moscow, in the very center of it, on Pervaya Meshchanskaya Street, in a ten-room apartment, which my young father remembered very well, no matter that he was only two and a half years old when, in February 1918, they had fled in a hurry, leaving everything behind, and made their way to Riga in a cattle train, commonly known as teplushka, which was not at all the way his parents used to travel, as his mother was an aristocratic lady who read Heine every night before bedtime; who dressed like a German countess, in beautiful floor-length dresses and elaborate hats, and treated her servants with that special gentleness, a sign of a very well-brought-up lady. They had three live-in servants in their Moscow apartment: his mother’s maid, a governess, and a cook. Sometimes his mother mentioned a fourth one – a maître d—but my father did not remember him, and he told us only of the ones he could remember himself. In London, where Stephan, my grandfather, lived before his marriage, with his father Leontii, his mother Rebeka, and his seven brothers and sisters, the number of servants must have been greater, but, as I said, my father told us only things he had remembered and seen with his own eyes.
“Papa!” my seven-year-old father would say, pointing at Russian stamps from “that time,” as he called the time before the revolution when his family had still lived in Moscow, “Please Papa!” But when Papa said no, he seemed to become hard of hearing and, at the same time, very kind, as though by refusing, he was becoming aware of a debt he owed his son, and then he would buy all the new stamps in the store, the ones that came the week before, since their last visit. But he wouldn’t buy the Russian stamps for his son. “Why not the Russian stamps?” my seven-year-old father whined on their way out of the stamp store. “Because … you know, Lyonia, if Mama sees them, she might become upset. She has memories of …” His voice trailed off.
My seven-year-old father knew why his mother might become upset looking at the Russian stamps.
***
My father’s sister Nora, who was just five years older than him, liked to pretend that he was just a little boy and that she was a grand lady.
“Some grand lady! A grand lady must be a hundred years old,” my father (who was this little boy) would say to her, “Not seven!”
She laughed and told him that he didn’t know a thing. She said almost no one lived to be a hundred. “You can be a grand lady at twenty, fifteen, or seven; all it takes is having enough of the grand-lady material inside yourself.” And she had it, she said, and he didn’t because he was just a little boy. “You’ll never be a grand lady,” she said.
The little boy who someday would be my father countered, “Who wants to be a lady anyway?” He would be a grand lord instead of a lady because lords were in charge of things, and ladies weren’t.
She said again that he was just a silly two-and-a-half-year-old little boy and didn’t even have a governess. “Our governess is just for me,” she said. She went on and on like this, teasing him and saying things she knew he didn’t want to hear like French was only for girls, and that’s why Mademoiselle gave French lessons only to her, not to him.
He wanted to say: Mademoiselle teaches you French not because you’re a girl but because you’re older! But as soon as he opened his mouth to say this, he stopped his tongue and said to himself: don’t say this to your sister, or she will win, and you don’t want her to win, do you? You don’t want her to say that you admit you’re just a little boy, that you’re only two-and-a-half.
So, he bit his tongue and didn’t say anything. Sure, he could say all sorts of things to her, for example, that he may be only two and a half, but someday he would be a journalist! But then she’d say, “No one becomes a journalist at two and a half!” And then he would say, “And what do you know, you’re just a little girl yourself! Uncle Nikolay promised to take me to the scary places he wrote about! And Uncle Nikolay is a real journalist! He says he might go to jail for that! He says in our country, they put only real journalists in jail, not just anyone! Only if you write the truth! He says that going to jail for journalism is like a batch of honor in our country! That’s what Uncle Nikolay says, and he can’t be wrong!”
His sister would laugh at him. “A badge of honor, not a ‘batch,’” she’d say, and that’s why the little boy who someday would be my father didn’t say anything about Uncle Nikolay this time.
***
My father (who was still a child, remember?) admired Uncle Nikolay because he was a journalist and a traveler. Yet, he was not the only one in the family who admired Uncle Nikolay for being a journalist. Uncle Zhenia also admires Uncle Nikolay for being a journalist. Although both Uncle Zhenia and my father looked up to Nikolay for being a journalist, there was a big difference between the two, my father and Uncle Zhenia, simply because Uncle Zhenia was Uncle Nikolay’s brother. Besides, Zhenia was an adult, and my father was a child – a little child, as all members of his loving family loved to repeat. And every time he said, “Don’t call me little! I’m not a child,” they just smiled and touched his head in that caring gesture they called “гладить,” which means “to stroke” in Russian, my father’s third native language. His second native language was Latvian, while his first language was German. He knew German better than Russian or Latvian because he spoke it with his mom. She was from Riga, where the educated class spoke German as their first language, and she wanted her children to know it; therefore, she spoke only German at home, and everyone understood her, even if they replied in Russian. Mademoiselle was the only exception: she was the only one who responded to his mom in French. The little boy (who someday would be my father) didn’t like French. If you asked him why, he’d say only Nora, his older sister, got to learn French at home, that’s why. It’s not that he wanted to learn French, he just didn’t like being left out. He heard so often that he was just a little child and that, as such, he couldn’t understand grown-up things that sometimes he began to believe it, and to stop believing it, he made up stories in his mind about the future, about knowing what will happen someday. And the strange thing is that some of these stories came true, not because he had foreseen them but because they had already been written into the fabric of reality when they had occurred to him! For example, he knew that his Uncle Nikolay would emigrate to Austria and that he would write for a newspaper called Neue Freie Presse. He also knew that Uncle Nikolay’s first book would be titled “Uncle Joe,” the first book ever to tell the naïve Westerners that a monster ruled Russia. He knew this book would become famous in Austria and Germany in the period between the wars. Years later, as an adolescent living in independent Latvia, my father learned that poor Uncle Zhenia called his brother Nikolay from a Moscow phone booth and paid with his life for a few plain words he said to his brother. Like many phones in Moscow in those years, the phone had been bugged. Uncle Nikolay would continue writing for Neue Freie Presse, while poor Uncle Zhenia, who loved him so much, would be shot v zatylok – in the back of his head – at Lubianka prison, where tens of thousands were shot v zatylok in those years. As an adolescent in Riga, my father would think of his Uncle Zhenia, who was not a journalist, a writer, a politician, or an artist––just a regular guy, a bit of a drifter, a bit of a dreamer, and my adolescent father would ask myself why Uncle Zhenia was killed for a simple phone call to his brother Nikolay. Many more years would pass, and, as an adult living, once again, in Moscow, he would be given only silence to answer his old questions. The silence was useless to his intellect and to that deeper part of him which the nineteenth-century Russian poets called “soul,” which had fallen into а strange disuse by the middle of the twentieth century.
***
As I said, my grandparents’ apartment in the center of Moscow had ten rooms, no matter that more than half a century later, my father remembered only three of them: his nursery, the dining room, and the kitchen, which could have accommodated some twenty people and was ruled by the family cook Dasha’s iron hand. That dining room had stained glass windows or, as everyone called them, vitrazhi––a French word with a plural Russian ending. My father (who was still a child, remember?) spent hours looking at them, not only during family meals but whenever he had nothing else to do, and as a very little boy, he had days with nothing to do. Vitrazhi were made of many colorful pieces of glass that formed a picture in which images shifted depending on where in the room he was sitting or standing when looking at them. In the center of the main vitrazh, was a horse which changed into a wolf, but the wolf appeared only when my father was in a bad mood after hearing his parents talk about scary monsters they called “Bolsheviks” who would kill them if they stayed in Moscow. Most of the time, though, it was just a horse with muscular legs that were a different brown shade of than the rest of its body. On top of it sat a man. A horseman. Mother said he was St. George – Georgii Pobedonosets—and Mademoiselle Duzhar said, “Ce n’est pas Georges Pobedonoset. It’s a headless horseman who appears in times of trouble”. Mother said, “S’il vous plaît, Mademoiselle, don’t scare the children! How can he be headless? There, I see his head. It’s where it’s supposed to be. On his shoulders.” Sometimes my father (who, as we pointed out earlier, was a child at the time) could see the horseman’s head, just like his mother did, where it was supposed to be, sometimes he couldn’t, like Mademoiselle Duzhar, who was so scared of the “Bolsheviks” that she acted like a kid herself, or like little Lyonia, my father, who saw scary things instead of beautiful horses and horsemen in the dining room vitrazhi. Poor Mademoiselle was so terrified of my grandparents’ plans to leave Russia that whenever she thought she was alone where no one could hear her, she talked to herself, which was how my father and his sister Nora learned that she would have nowhere to live and nothing to live on if they were to abandon her. She whispered furiously, “Who needs a French governess in this terrifying city now? Who will take me in? I can’t flee anywhere, where can I go? Où, où mon Dieu?” Many years later when my father came back to Moscow after the war, no one knew what happened to Mademoiselle Duzhar. She disappeared like so many others in that time and place.
***
In this part of my story, my father is no longer a small child in his parents’ Moscow apartment on the eve of their escape from Russia in February 1918. He is a young man in Riga, trying to talk his mother into escaping back to Russia before the Germans enter Riga. She said no, she would not leave Riga. He knew she would say no, and she did, but he wanted to try one more time to talk her into escaping. She remembered too well fleeing from Moscow on that teplushka train and had ample reason to believe that the Bolsheviks would be after her, not only for being a “burzhuika” (a lady bourgeois) but, most importantly, for leaving Russia twenty-three years ago. That is why, in the summer of 1941, she opted to stay in Latvia. Like many others who chose to stay, she believed the Germans were a civilized nation, especially compared to the Bolsheviks, and she feared them less than the Soviets. My father thought he was the only one in real danger because his work as a reviewer of Riga’s Jewish Theater productions for Cīņa, a Communist Latvian newspaper, made him a prime target. He thought he had missed the right moment to leave because boarding a train to Russia was getting harder each day. The place was empty when he walked into the editorial offices of Cīņa with an article about a recent production at the Jewish Theater. He thought everyone had already escaped; why else would it be so empty? Yet when he left the building, he saw a car parked in a side street, and there was the whole staff of Cīņa, about to depart. This was his last chance to leave Riga before the German army entered it, but he couldn’t leave without trying, one last time, to talk his mother into leaving. He went back into the building and made one last phone call. As before, he was expecting her to say no and wasn’t surprised when she did. If she could have seen the future, her no would have turned into a yes in a split second. But the terrible future would not reveal itself to her, and even if it did, she would not have believed it. He went back outside. Cīņa editors made room for him in the back seat, and as soon as he got in, they drove off, past buildings set on fire in anticipation of the Nazi takeover. They spent three days in that car, driving past Latvia’s forests and villages, crossing borders – first the Estonian border, then the Russian one. On July 1, 1941, the day the German army occupied Riga, they made it into Russia, abandoned the car, and boarded a train going east.
There was not much to do on the train, and the editor-in-chief of Cīņa entertained his friends with antisemitic jokes. He had spent many years in jail for political activities where the daily fare of antisemitic jokes was simple entertainment. He should have known better, but he didn’t, and neither did his colleagues. My father didn’t miss an opportunity to part from them, and when the train stopped in Nizhny Novgorod, and everyone got a chance to stand on the platform for some ten minutes, he left the station and walked to the city. His Russian wasn’t so good yet, but he hoped it would suffice for simple communication. In Nizhny Novgorod, he developed a terrible headache, and since he didn’t know anyone there and had nowhere to go, he went to a police station. He just walked in and asked for help. A militsioner* promptly took him to a nearby hospital where he spent the next few days. He was discharged with two young men from Riga who, like him, had nowhere to go and nothing to eat. They didn’t have a lot of options, and after weighing what little they had, they decided they had more chances of finding a place to stay in a small town rather than in a big city like Nizhny Novgorod. They each went to a small town of his choosing, and my father went to Chkalovsk, a small town not far from Nizhny. Its small size was helpful: wherever he went, he was still in the center, so he had no trouble finding Ispolnitelnyi Komitet*. He was promptly given coupons for dinner at a local dining place and an address to get a bed for the night. Several families lived there, and an elderly couple took him in. My father ate from a common pot with his hosts. There were no plates; everyone put their spoons in the common pot. That common pot was my father’s first encounter with Russia. He stayed with the couple for two weeks until one fine day when he walked to the pier and boarded a ship to Astrakhan, an old Russian city on the Volga. He was young and wanted to see the world, even if the world was in the middle of the biggest war ever. Onboard the ship, he met a kind lady. They talked, and although he didn’t mention it, the lady understood that he had nowhere to go and nothing to eat. She spoke with a cook, and my father was given free meals in the ship’s dining hall. Another woman on the ship gave my father her address in Astrakhan. When he got off the ship in Astrakhan, he went to her place, hoping to get a place to sleep, but soon enough, he realized that the woman expected him to become her lover. He thanked her for offering him a place to sleep and returned to the pier to wait for a ship back to Nizhny Novgorod.
In Nizhny Novgorod, he met the dean of the law department of the University of Riga, where he had studied before the war. Of course, the dean was no longer the dean but a refugee, like my father. They spoke German with each other, and the former dean showed my father where he lived and invited him to visit. That night my father slept in the park. At about 10 am, he decided to visit the dean. Just as he rang the dean’s bell, he was approached by a militsioner, told he was under arrest, and given a German newspaper. “Read it aloud!” said the militsioner. My father had no time to think this over and decide what to do. If he read the German text aloud, the militsioner would think he was a German spy. Therefore, he said, “I can’t read this because I don’t know the language it is written in.” A couple of minutes later, he was free again.
He spent the rest of the day searching for a place to stay, but he didn’t know the city and found nothing. Finally, he asked two female passersby where he could find a room. They said, “Take streetcar 12 and get off at the last stop.” So he took streetcar #12 and got off at the last stop. It was a good neighborhood, with many new apartment buildings and trees. Nearby he saw a group of boys playing soccer. My father was wearing a Belgian jacket, and it was this Belgian jacket that got him in trouble. A Soviet citizen would not wear a Belgian jacket. A Soviet citizen would not even have a Belgian jacket! A Soviet citizen would denounce a capitalist jacket! Soon, he was surrounded by a crowd of some fifty people shouting, “Take the German spy to the police station!” The crowd made way for a militsioner who told my father to follow them. When they arrived at the police headquarters, the militsioner said,
“You must understand that telling us what brought you here is in your own interest.”
My father said he had nothing to tell except that he was a Latvian refugee looking for a room and had been told to take streetcar #12. But the militsioner didn’t believe him and demanded to see his documents. The only document my father had on him was a letter from the Latvian newspaper he had worked for. It was written in Latvian and had a hammer and sickle on top. To verify my father’s identity, the militsioner called the Evacuation Committee, where all refugees had to be registered on arrival, and gave my father’s name. It took them half an hour to find my father’s registration card. “Next time, be more careful,” the militsioner said. When my father left the police precinct, it was late evening, and he still had nowhere to stay for the night.
Finally, he realized there was nothing for him in the Volga region and that the army was the only place where he would have a place to sleep. It was evening when he arrived at the Latvian division headquarters. He was given a uniform and sent to his unit. Soldiers slept in tents. My father found a tent where he would spend his first night.
***
I owe my life to a bullet that pierced my father’s skull. The time was July 1942; the place, Staraya Russa. My father was taken to a field hospital where a young surgeon from Moscow drilled a hole in his skull, without anesthesia, to extract a bullet that, if it had gone just one-tenth of a millimeter deeper, would have been fatal. After the bullet had been extracted, he was put on a train for wounded soldiers and taken to the Far East.
My father’s only words were, “Am I going to die now, tovarish lieutenant?” “You’ll live, Kossman!” was the response of the lieutenant, who would be killed in battle two days later, together with most men of the Latvian division. (Only six survived).
My father’s inadvertent savior was Gottlieb, a fellow soldier whose tobacco my father had borrowed for a minute. Several things happened simultaneously: Gottlieb was cleaning his gun; my father was returning Gottlieb’s tobacco; Gottlieb leaned on his gun to take back the tobacco from my father; Gottlieb’s gun fired; my father fell, bleeding from the head. That same day, Gottlieb was sent on a reconnaissance mission as punishment for endangering his comrade’s life through negligence. Sending a man on such a mission in Staraya Russa, a town in the Novgorod area, where hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers fell between 1941 and 1943, and where even today, more than eighty years later, kids stumble upon skulls and rusting helmets in local forests, was an equivalent of a death sentence. It goes without saying that Gottlieb never returned from his mission. His name is absent from the Book of Memory, which lists the names of Latvian Jewish soldiers who perished in the war. (I was asked to translate these lists a few years ago here in New York). Perhaps Gottlieb’s body had never been found and is awaiting one of those nostalgic youngsters who join an annual search for soldiers’ remains. If found, the remains are reburied with Soviet-era pomp, usually without a name, because only the lucky few are discovered with their papers, still legible, on them.
Wherever you are now, Private Gottlieb, greetings from the daughter of the man you saved with that stray bullet.
NOTES
*Militsioner – a Soviet policeman
*Ispolnitelnyi Komitet – an executive committee, usually known as “ispolkom.” Every Soviet city and town had one.
Feature Image: Soldiers of the Soviet Red Army in front of the Freedom Monument in Riga in 1944