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Warsaw, 1854.
Dawid Berkhoer, Sasha’s great-great-grandfather, was a salesman and in 1854 lived in Warsaw at 1406 Zielna Street in the Szachowicz’s house – we found that in the “Index of the residents of the city of Warsaw”. Other people who lived in the same house were a tailor, a schoolmaster, a cook, a certified shoemaker, a teacher, a mask maker, and a goose trader – a slice of the Jewish middle class urban population.
Zielna (Green) is a short street, one block away from Marszałkowska (Marshall Street), which is one of the major streets of Warsaw’s city center, that runs parallel to the Vistula River. The house was just a few steps from Warsaw’s medieval Old Town, filled with narrow cobblestone alleys. Dawid was the only Berkhoer in the Index of 1854 – there was no one else living there with a similar name. He was in his mid-20s at that time, and in a couple of years his son Isaak was born. Isaak followed his father’s occupation and became a successful salesman as well – he inherited and continued Dawid’s business. We know that he left the sales business to his younger son Moshe, who traded clothes and dresses with the city of Paris.
Moshe’s older brother, David – Sasha’s grandfather, was born in Warsaw in 1884. He grew up as a tall, big, and strong boy, fascinated with knifes, fire, and carving. At 13 David became apprentice in a leather shop and at 18 he opened his own – specializing in women’s bags and shoes.
D
avid was named by Isaak after his father Dawid. When his first son was born, David named him Isaak, after his father. But Isaak’s first child was a girl and the pattern of the first sons’ names in the family was broken: Dawid, Isaak, David, Isaak – Bella!
The end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century were a booming time in Warsaw. Railroads made Warsaw an important connection point between Western Europe and the Russian Empire, and the city grew like never before – water, sewer systems and street lights were built; the first electric tram replaced traditional horse-cars, as new modern buildings totally changed the face of the city. Time to time there were, of course, uprisings and periods of social unrest – Poland was under strict Russian control and the people did not accept this, but nothing compared to the infamous January Uprising in mid-1960.
In Warsaw the tensions between Polish and Jewish people were relatively rare, they lived peacefully together most of the time – maybe because no one there had an obvious majority, or maybe because both peoples’ religions – Catholicism and Judaism – were under suppression from the Russian Orthodoxy, or maybe because the policy of Russification on many levels united them all, or may be the efforts of progressives toward integration, tolerance, and assimilation brought results – the overwhelming majority of Jews, for example, declared themselves Poles in the census of 1881. On the other hand, in December of the same year pogroms in Warsaw put doubts on the hopes of building tolerant secular society.
The situation changed in 1905, when Cossacks opened fire on the people demonstrating in Warsaw – as well as in St. Petersburg, during the “Bloody Sunday”. The Revolution of 1905 had begun, and, as any revolution, brought increased tensions and hardship. The Revolution was short-lived, but peace and trust has never really returned. Political and social clashes became more common; in the 1910s many Jewish shops and companies were boycotted, and those boycotts often became violent.
Moshe was the first of the two brothers who decided to leave Warsaw. He chose Paris, where he had moved all the operations of his trade. He wanted David to come with him, arguing that there is no better place than Paris for a fashion oriented leather-worker and shoemaker.
David wanted to go to Kharkov, which at that time was considered by many the future center of the Jewish community and believed there would be more opportunities for him there. He was also fearful of the French language, and, because he spoke good Russian in addition to Yiddish and Polish, he was sure that Kharkov would be a better fit for him. David stayed. His business prospered and he was in no rush to leave.
He did not move before the spark of War in 1914. At that time, the road to the west was blocked by the French-German front anyway, and Kharkov seemed to be the right choice. What nobody, including David, expected, was that the future Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 would shatter any possible opportunities for private business, be it in Kharkov or anywhere else in Russia. As if the Revolution was not enough, Civil war and destruction followed.
Letters were exchanged regularly between David and Moshe until the beginning of the 1930s. Having relatives across the border became a “crime” and a real danger In Soviet Russia. David declared to the authorities that his brother had died. Yet, they continued to secretly communicate through their friends.
The last time David and Moshe met, was in 1936 in Moscow, when Moshe visited a group of French businessmen. David left Kharkov ahead of Moshe’s visit in secret – he did not take a train to Moscow directly from Kharkov, but from another station; secretly staying in his friend’s apartment when he got there – never leaving that apartment once during his stay; he met with Moshe several times, who came there pretending to visit that same friend. Moshe brought presents to David, and to his wife Rizal and their kids, who he had never met, but David could not even think to show those things in his neighborhood, with unavoidable questions of where it came from. That same friend arranged to sell that stuff. When David secretly returned to Kharkov, no one knew about his trip, not even his sons, who learned about it, much later. Moshe was not happy about all of that, but he understood the fear.
When World War II started in Western Europe, the already rare communications between David and Moshe ceased entirely. When the front was closed to Kharkov, David and his family – all except Lyonya, who served in the Soviet Army – migrated to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. After the Nazis were defeated and Kharkov was liberated, David came back to Kharkov, to the same neighborhood and the same house. Everybody in David’s family survived the War, all three of his sons got doctoral degrees, achieved respectful careers and had lovely families.
In the 1960s David’s sons made several attempts to find any information about their uncle Moshe and his family through international organizations, but were unsuccessful. We never knew if any members of Moshe family had survived…
