My Mother was a Tea Smuggler

In 1941, when Hitler invaded Russia, my mother, Clara, was in college in Kyiv studying Liberal Arts. She was nineteen. She had ambitions to be a lawyer, and she had been fortunate enough to be able to go to school in Kyiv, about 100 miles from her home in Korosten, a small rural town in Ukraine close to Chernobyl, where her mother, father, two brothers, and younger sister lived.

Her father, Moshe, worked in a leather factory. Her mother, Zlate ran the household and was a shrewd businesswoman. She was always at the town bazaar, selling things she sewed like blouses and aprons, or vegetables she grew in her prolific garden: cucumbers, beets, squash, leeks, cabbage and yams. “You couldn't find a good pair of shoes or a piece of meat but at least we had vegetables to put on the table and a good soup,”my mother would say.

They lived in a duplex with only two bedrooms so brothers and sisters had to share a room; boys on one side, girls on the other.

“We had a wood burning stove, a kitchen, a dining room, and living room. Seems to me everybody was poor. You couldn't get a chicken or any sort of meat. The only way you could get them was on the black market. You know who was rich? The ones who worked in a place where you can steal and sell it on the black market. If you worked in a grocery store, you could steal sugar. Then you’d have money. The government knew but they didn’t do anything,” she told me.

Their house was close to a lake, nestled in a picturesque valley which was the focal point of social life for the younger people. My mother claimed she could swim across that shimmering lake and at sunset the kids would gather on the beach and roast potatoes.

In elementary school they only spoke Yiddish and all the courses were taught in Yiddish.Then in high school more focus was put on speaking Russian and Ukrainian, and they added English which Clara and her friends, had no patience for or interest in. "All my friends agreed it was like having a potato in the mouth. Because that’s what it sounded like to us, a potato in the mouth. It was an ugly language. What use did we have for it?"

The first class all students were required to attend every day was a propaganda class where they extolled the virtues of Stalin and underscored how lucky they were to live in a country like Russia, at that time called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR). “At first we didn’t know better and went along with the propaganda, but later we stopped believing it," my mother said. "I asked my Dad about it, and he said, ‘daughter, don’t ask me these questions.’ My mother didn’t talk about it either. They were afraid that they were being spied on and my mother always said, the walls had ears. It’s hard to live that way. Everyone was afraid of the government.”

Growing up a Jew under Stalinist Russia meant a life of fear, anxiety and undercover and secretive whispering and worship. These were the years of Stalin’s famous purges and people were terrified. There was renewed persecution of the Jews and growing antisemitism. Synagogues were closed and religious practices were forbidden. My mother’s fear of persecution never left her as she recalled, “Under the Stalin regime you couldn’t sit and talk like this. First of all, you’re afraid of who you’re talking to. And even if you know that person you’re afraid too, because you don’t know who is a spy between the people you’re talking to or in school. And the poor teachers, they really were afraid to talk about anything.”

So it was that my mother endured her early years in Korosten under a dictatorship and a cloud of fear and suspicion and dreamed of getting out of there. She and her friends stayed together in groups. They were afraid to go anywhere alone. Although they were somewhat isolated, almost sheltered from the world at large, there was a movie theatre, a playhouse and books. But everything was regulated by the government including the movies they were allowed to see and the books they were allowed to read.

Even in this limited environment, Clara became an avid reader and continued to love books until she lost a good portion of her vision later in life. It was this love of books and learning that got her to college. She was driven, motivated, bent on a bigger and better life, all too soon disrupted by a rampaging, horrifying war that would change her future forever.

It was during the last exam of her first semester at college in Kyiv that she heard the roar of the planes and the echo of bombs overhead and knew the war had finally reached them. The Russian army mobilized quickly and sent all the young people who were not in the army east to Siberia where they dug trenches for Russian soldiers. Imagine her panic at the sudden upheaval of life as she knew it. Her fellow students all felt the same, not knowing where their families were or if they would ever see them again. Not knowing if and when the Red Army would move them somewhere else, imprison them or continue to use them for hard labor.

So my mother continued to dig and she kept digging for a month. She was restricted from going back home because the Russians needed the strong young adults to work and they didn’t want people on the move within the country. Everyday while digging trenches, she heard the drone of the planes overhead and the bombs in the distance. And everyday she wondered if her family was still alive.

After four months the Russians released the young students and left them on their own to scatter like scavenger rats on a mission, in search of their loved ones, in fear of their lives. It was a chaotic scene as no one really knew where to go or had any news about Hitler’s invasion further east into the country. They just knew he was coming.

Clara took the first train back to Kyiv where her uncle and his family lived. He had no information about her family and soon they too were on the move trying to escape the rapidly advancing Germans. Rather than stick with her uncle and her cousins, my mother decided to go with her college friend, Hanna, and her family to Samarkand, Uzbekistan because she heard that her mother and sister may have fled there. She boarded a crowded train with Hanna's family in the hopes that she might find a morsel of information about her own family or maybe even see one of them.

The walls of every station were draped with messages of people looking for their families. That’s how everyone communicated, through this makeshift post office of desperate messages on walls that cried out for connection and news: “I saw your sister here, I saw your mother and brother there.” The train stations were primary sources of discovery and one of the few ways people could find out if their families were alive and where they might have journeyed.

In Samarkand, my mother learned that her Aunt Luba was sent to a work farm in Aktyubinsk, Kazakhstan(today known as Aktobe). Someone told someone who told someone. That was the way it was. There were no names attached to the sources, no faces to look into. It was all hearsay but you had to follow these messages because that was all you had. Any message, any news or small piece of information was a bastion of hope. Luba was the youngest of my grandmother’s five sisters and my mother was very close to her growing up. Happy and relieved to hear that Luba was still alive, my mother was determined to find her aunt and reunite with her.

Samarkand was a busy city, with an old medieval section that dated back to the 13th century and a new more modern part of the city recently being developed by the Russians. It was filled with many Arabs and Turks, and Clara befriended a couple who were very kind to her. The wife was Tatar, the husband was an Arab policeman. My mother trusted them, for in their kindness, she saw hope.

And they needed her. They told her they could get her to Kazakhstan but she would have to smuggle tea for them on the black market. It was a risky and dangerous proposition because if they got caught, they would go to prison or possibly be killed. They promised her she would reach her destination, but it would be a long, perilous journey and she would have to take two trains. The Arab couple would accompany her for the first part of the journey, but she would have to make the second part of the trip across the vast wilderness of Sibera, alone.

My mother was not deterred by fear or risk, she was only driven by an instinctive resolve to find her aunt Luba and so she agreed to smuggle the tea. She was to be the decoy in their little scheme and deflect attention from the Arab couple. When the day came to make the trip, the policeman- husband packed the precious tea in a small, battered suitcase and handed it to my mother. He told her to place it on her lap and keep it there for the entire train ride “Do not do anything that will draw attention to you,” he said. “Do not look guilty or suspicious. Only make idle small talk and only talk to us.”

The couple bribed everyone, including the conductor to get on the train. After several hours the train stopped at the first destination. They stepped off the train and found a private area on the platform where my mother's shaking hand passed the suitcase of tea to her companions. They told her another train would be coming to take her to Aktyubinsk and she should wait, not to worry, she would be able to board because they bribed the station master to let her on. Then they walked away with their suitcase filled with tea-treasure and she never saw them again.

Little did my mother know what awaited her in Aktyubinsk. But at that moment, as she watched them walk away, she was grateful and relieved that the Arab couple had kept their promise to her.

It was 4 pm and the second train would not come until the morning but my mother was prepared to go without food and sleep in the station. Two older women who had also gotten off the train, took pity on her and invited her to stay the night with them in their small house. She must have seen something in their eyes, something in their mannerisms that gave her faith that she could trust them and so she went.

“It was a little house with two beds and a table. They gave me a hearty borscht, pushed two chairs together, and gave me a blanket, That was my bed,” my mother recalls.

The next morning she caught the train to Aktyubinsk. Again, she had no fear but rather an eerie feeling of a guardian angel on her shoulder, compelling her to keep moving and leading her to safety. She said, “I did what I had to do. We all did.”

Apparently Clara had gotten Luba’s address while she was in Samarkand and written to her to tell her she was coming. Luba told my mother to meet the culinary director in the marketplace when she got off the train. The director would be selling the produce from the work farm there. After a weary search, my mother found him and he took her to Luba’s quarters on the farm. At last, my mother and her Aunt Luba were reunited. Luba told Clara that her mother and youngest brother and sister had been evacuated to safety farther east in Russia and were alive. Her father and oldest brother were in the Army and were also still alive.

In Aktyubinsk, Aunt Luba worked as a kindergarten teacher on the work farm, known as a Sovkhoz, a state-run agricultural and small-industry collective farm. The Sovkhoz and Kolkhoz, which produced agricultural products only, were part of the socialized farm sector movement that began in Russia in 1917. The Sovkhoz was a state-run farm, while the Kolkhoz initially was a cooperative, with all farmers owning a share. This changed after Stalin was in power and it too became state-run and government-ruled, leaving the poor farmers, even poorer with no land of their own.

A few weeks after my mother had arrived, a good-looking, skinny chap from Poland appeared on the Sovkhoz. His name was Jonas, and he had tried to escape from the Russian army twice. His first attempt was unsuccessful and put him in front of a firing squad but he was not shot. Instead the Russians decided to send him to Siberia where it was widely known that the harsh conditions, lack of food and desolate environment amounted to a slow, cold death. On the train to this forsaken, freezing land, Jonas escaped—this time successfully- by jumping out of the window as the train rolled into Aktyubinsk. He knew he had good friends the Fishlers, from his hometown, Olesczyce, who had fled to to Aktyubinsk as Hitler’s fury destroyed their small town and the whole of Poland around them.

He hid in the forest until he found them. They decided to hide him in the Sovkhoz for his own safety and protection. He met Clara in the canteen, where she was in charge of distributing food and cigarettes among other things. Her boss was a crook and the same man she met in the market when she first arrived to find Luba. He made her water down the vodka and soak the cabbage and other vegetables so they would weigh more at the market. She came to like Jonas and would sneak him extra bread and cigarettes. And he came to like her too.

Clara and Jonas’ life on the Sovkhoz was not easy, but they had it much better than they would have had in a Nazi labor or concentration camp. They lived in barracks, and had some forms of entertainment, like movies or a dance occasionally. They worked in the fields harvesting the crops, and my father was also a mechanic on small farm machinery like tractors and plows. My father had a group of Polish buddies, fellow landsmen, that he hung around with and my mother never mentioned that she made any friends. I think she spent a lot of time with Luba and this “gang of skinny Polish boys”, as she called them.

Jonas and Clara fell in love on that Sovkhoz and like many young people during the war years, they got married when the war ended. They had learned not to take life and each day of it, for granted. They had learned not to trust the future because you never knew if you were going to have one. So they tried to create some normality in their lives and continue their young adulthood as if it hadn’t been so cruelly disrupted and misplaced.

They married on May 22, 1945 and celebrated with the Polish guys, some black bread, and schnapps. The following day, Clara and Jonas traveled back to Russia to meet Clara’s family. The war was over and everyone was on the move, searching for their families, looking for answers in the crowded train and bus stations.

They stayed in Korosten for a month but Jonas was anxious to find out what had happened to his family so they returned to Poland by train. When he learned the fate of his family, first sent to the ghetto in Lubaczow and then to Belzec where they perished, he was devastated. He cried for days, he was inconsolable. But he also discovered that his sister Lola had been the only one to escape with the help of a priest who falsified her papers. She had been sent to a farm in East Germany disguised as a non-Jewish Polish worker and, after the war, ended up in Ansbach, Germany, at a displaced persons camp. So they set out to find her. They walked.

I know very little about their life at the displaced persons camp. I don’t know when they got there. I don’t know how long they stayed there. I don’t know what their lives were like on a day to day basis, and I can’t imagine what it was like to have a baby there. I have some recollection that nuns delivered my sister but my parents never filled in the gaps. This was always difficult as I tried to make a whole life out of bits and pieces and obscure responses. My mother’s answers to things like, “how did you live there, what was it like,” was something like, “We lived. What else is there to say?” And she always seemed annoyed that I was asking her these questions so I stopped, I didn’t push, I didn’t probe any further until later in her life when the early stages of dementia were already affecting her memory and ability to make sense of things and I often felt it was too late. Why didn't I ask these things before?

They shared an apartment with Lola and Jonas went to trade school and learned how to sew and make shoes. He also bartered on the black market for extra food and cigarettes, alcohol, whatever people wanted and needed. Lola was in a program that would take her to Israel and she begged my father and mother to join her. My father would have nothing to do with it. He did not want the burden of birthing a new nation; he did not want to start over and continue to be under threat and fear of neighboring countries. He was going to America.

During this time, Clara reached out to her Aunt Celia and Uncle Albert and Uncle Sam, her father’s brothers and sister, who had immigrated to Chicago in the late 1920’s. Uncle Sam filled out the sponsorship papers and began the long process of bringing them over to the United States. He sent them money and the necessary paperwork and in 1950, as the leaves were turning and the summer was fading, Jonas, Clara and my sister, Gita arrived in New York on a military boat after a long journey of sea-sickness.

They took a train to Chicago where the were met by my mother's Aunt Celia. This was the beginning of the American Dream my mother and father always talked about. This was their freedom come to meet them at the train.

My mother's town, Korosten, was destroyed by Putin's army in the early weeks of this terrible war. When I see the people of Ukraine today, fleeing, terrorized, their lives in upheaval and destroyed, I think of my parent's story and all the tragic stories of Hitler's war, and I wonder, "have we learned nothing?"











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