The Boxer's Story E-Book

Nathan Shapow

• Herausgeber: The Robson Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 305

Beschreibung

Before 1940, Nathan Shapow, a young Latvian, had nothing more on his mind than enjoying his teenage years and becoming a champion boxer. But the Nazis' systematic extermination of the Jews quickly put paid to his dreams. Soon he was to face a different sort of fight, where the prize for victory would be his life. Escaping certain death time and time again, Shapow saw his youth disappear in the terror of the Ghettos and the horror of the camps. Fighting for his very existence for the simple reason of being Jewish, remarkably, he survived, fell in love and forged a new life in what was then British-controlled Palestine. There, he joined an underground military organisation and quickly became involved in the struggle to create a Jewish state. Extraordinary and powerful, The Boxer's Story is the inspiring true story of one man's enduring fortitude.

Leseprobe

To Dr Mike Shapow

The enthusiasm of Nathan’s son, Dr Mike Shapow, drove The Boxer’s Story from day one, and his dedication since has ensured that the dream, like his father’s story, will never be forgotten. Without Mike, there would not have been a book.

B. H.

Nathan Shapow died in peace on 25 May 2018 aged ninety-six.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Chapter 1: Murder in the Ghetto

Chapter 2: A Brief Childhood

Chapter 3: The Soviet Occupation

Chapter 4: The Riga Ghetto

Chapter 5: Ducking, Bobbing and Weaving

Chapter 6: The Empty Grave

Chapter 7: Changing Weight

Chapter 8: The Freedom Fighters

Chapter 9: The Life and Death of Herr Harr

Chapter 10: Spilve

Chapter 11: The Cruise to Hell (Stutthof)

Chapter 12: Magdeburg and Liberation

Chapter 13: The Path to Palestine

Chapter 14: Hela

Chapter 15: Blood in the Sand

Chapter 16: Leaving the Front

Chapter 17: The New World

Afterword – The Son’s Tale

Plates

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Mike Shapow and Bob Harris would like to remember the unstinting help of Mike’s mother and Nathan’s late wife, Hela, and Mike’s sister Adina, as well as the late Isidor Nussenbaum, Shulan Shulam Sorkin, Annette Segal and Bob’s friends and sounding boards David Pleat and Jonny Dexter. Special thanks also go to Bob’s literary agent, Robert Smith, and to Jeremy Robson and his excellent staff at Robson Press, including designer Namkwan Cho for both the original cover and the exciting paperback cover; painstaking editor Reuben Cohen and now to James Stephens of Biteback for his faith in reviving what we all believe is a special book for the mass markets of the USA and the UK.

FOREWORD

From time to time, even in the life of a professional writer accustomed to tales of heroism and extraordinary stamina, one comes across a story so powerful and emotive that it forces you to question your own values, makes the world seem a very different place. It has been my great fortune, as a veteran sportswriter, to meet many of the world’s outstanding athletes, to recount the tales of lives devoted to competition, struggle and victory – often heroic in their own ways. But Nathan Shapow’s heroism, for all that it stemmed in some part from athletic prowess and great talent as a boxer, was of a different order.

We hear so often of the Holocaust, and the approximately six million Jews slaughtered by the Nazis, that it is easy to forget they were not some homogeneous mass of victims without names, but individuals. Rabbis, lawyers, writers, artists, scientists, children, atheists and the deeply religious: the Jewish victims of the Holocaust were human beings, as were those who survived. The stories of survivors are always moving, inspirational stories of evading the brutal Nazi genocide that the late Pope John Paul II argued proved the existence of Satan. Amongst them is the story of Nathan Shapow – or ‘Nachke’ to his comrades – a Riga-born Jew who fought for his life in the Latvian Ghetto, a series of concentration camps, and went on to fight for the creation of the State of Israel.

It was through my friendship with his son Mike that I was introduced to Nathan, and to the idea of writing his book. I travelled to Los Angeles for an initial discussion and, as politely and discreetly as I could, asked about his experiences in the war. ‘You don’t want to know,’ he would answer. I learned that this had often been his answer, too, to Mike and Adina, his daughter. But slowly, over time, he began to speak of what he’d been through, in Latvia, Germany, France and the battle for Israel’s independence. It is a story of such strength and defiance in the face of overwhelming force and evil that at times, I found it difficult to believe. Nathan faced death time and time again – as a prisoner, a warrior, and for the simple reason of his being Jewish – and his story was, as the reader will see, one of such fortitude and a stubborn will to live that my journalistic instincts led me to check some of his claims. To my amazement, it transpired that if anything, he had understated the extent of what he’d been through and the bravery with which he fought, not just for his own survival, but to protect and save as many of his fellow Jews as he could. No wonder he was known as ‘The Strong One’ – or, in Yiddish, Shtarker. The latter strikes me as by far the better word, as it echoes the English word ‘stark’: and Nathan’s strength, deployed in battle amidst the starkest times of modern history, manifested in stark, dark terms indeed.

I am a sportswriter, not a historian – and this is not a work of academic history. It is one man’s story, which touched on many other lives, and a story that must not end simply because Nathan finally passed in 2018, aged ninety-six, in his adopted home of California, in the proximity of the Hollywood producers and directors who, as I write, are looking to transfer this story to the silver screen.

However, this is not fiction, but one man’s extraordinary story, told from memory, not an attempt to record the whole history of the Holocaust in Latvia and beyond, nor the creation of the State of Israel. It is the story of a family man who lost his mother and two brothers to the cruelties of Nazism and communism, a man who fought back, embodying the famous words of Winston Churchill: ‘Never give up. Never give up. Never, never, never give up.’ His persistence and courage were the traits of a true hero, but, for all the tragedy he lived through, not a tragic one: his marriage, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren attest to his triumph, and it is my great privilege to have been granted access to his life story, with all its twists and turns.

Nathan Shapow said nothing of the story in these pages till late in a long, ongoing life: although I did not, for a long time, think myself to be the appropriate author of such a work, it has been an honour and a life-changing experience to hear and help him tell his story. It is an epic of survival, and gentile that I am, an epic that has helped me understand why Israel fights, continually, to preserve the achievements of Nathan and his comrades, the men and women who walked from the gates of Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz, traumatised and wounded, and went on to fight, securing their own nation-state.

There will, no doubt, be errors and mistakes, most of them mine, within this book, but I have no doubt that the story of Nathan Shapow, The Strong One, is a true – and truly remarkable – odyssey.

Bob Harris, 2019

CHAPTER ONE

MURDER IN THE GHETTO

For more than sixty years I kept the secret, telling no one. Not Hela, my beloved wife, a survivor of Auschwitz and Belsen, nor our children Mike and Adina. I never breathed a word of it, not to those I loved most, or those who would have surely understood, my fellow concentration camp survivors, amongst them many of my closest friends in our adopted country, the United States.

I have always been open about the fact I killed as a soldier in Israel’s War of Independence and the young state’s battles with her neighbours, fighting the British, the Arabs of Palestine and their allies. Such is the collateral damage of any war. What I kept to myself until now was the day, long before I had seen Israel or America, when I committed murder; cold-blooded and premeditated murder.

Obersturmführer Hoffman was a self-important SS officer who took great delight in beating defenceless Jews in the Riga Ghetto. For some reason, I was amongst his favourite targets. Perhaps he could not stand to see my attitude, for I neither looked nor felt like the Nazi’s stereotype of the ‘racially inferior, degenerate Jew’. I was young, strong as an ox from years of football, swimming and boxing, and carried myself like an athlete. Though imprisoned in the Ghetto, a slave labourer, I was not cowed, despite being incarcerated in my home city by a foreign army which wanted nothing less than world domination and the ‘liquidation’ of the Jews. By October of 1941, just months after the Nazis came to Latvia, over 30,000 Jews had already been murdered. Those of us still alive had been selected to first serve the Nazis as slave labourers, before we joined the dead.

I had survived so far for the very same reason that Obersturmführer Hoffman loathed me with such passion. I was known as ‘Nachke’, a Shtarker, one of the so-called ‘strong ones’ in the Latvian Jewish Ghetto, strong from years of training as a boxer in the Jewish sporting organisation Maccabi and the Zionist Youth Movement Beitar. Before they could ‘eliminate’ all Baltic Jews, the Nazis used those of us they could as disposable slave labour, and my years of sport made me useful when it came to shifting lumber, breaking rubble, loading and unloading supply trains. But staying strong meant staying healthy – which, in the Ghetto, was possible only by way of stealing food.

The camp authorities provided us with bare subsistence rations, a daily quarter slice of bread and a ‘soup’ of lukewarm water flavoured with potatoes. It was hardly enough to live on, let alone to keep the strength required to work twelve-hour shifts of back-breaking physical labour, under the watchful eyes of German guards and Kapos – the lowest of the low, treacherous Jews and Latvians who policed the camps. They were prisoners themselves but, in return for informing on and beating inmates, received better rations than the rest of us, and gifts of alcohol and cigarettes. The Kapos were encouraged to be brutal in administering ‘discipline’ in the camps: many were criminals, rapists, murderers and sadists, released from Riga’s jails by the Gestapo and selected for their violent natures. They often seemed determined to prove themselves more brutal than their SS overseers.

Inmates who grew too weak to work at the speed demanded by our German masters would be shot on the spot: but to steal food could bring punishments ranging from a beating by the guards or Kapos to summary execution. When the Kapos reported me for stealing crusts of bread, it was Hoffman who ordered my punishment, often beating me himself. His weapon of choice was an SS favourite, a rod of iron encased in rubber, but I knew it was only a matter of time before he tired of me and put a gun to my head.

In that environment, with death an ever-present threat, my senses were heightened by my will to survive, sharpened as I watched and listened to the guards and Kapos, a watchfulness that gave me an advantage, as did my natural ear for languages. I spoke not only the native Latvian tongue sometimes known as Lettish, but also Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, a little English, and, like most Latvian Jews, good German. This was my secret weapon and I did not let my oppressors realise that I understood every word they said. Indeed, they thought their language was a mystery to Ghetto inmates, and freely discussed their plans in front of us.

On that fateful day, I knew Hoffman had decided to have done with me when I overheard him tell a fellow guard that I was stealing food from the mouths of German soldiers. That choice of words was telling, especially when he said that he intended to personally search my room in the Ghetto for contraband. I knew he meant to kill me. If he really wanted to have my room searched, he would have sent a guard or Kapo. No self-respecting Obersturmführer, an SS rank equivalent to that of Oberleutnant (‘senior Lieutenant’), would soil his well-manicured hands with such a lowly task, and Hoffman did not lack for self-respect. He was a preening, arrogant man, even for an SS officer, and would have thought it quite below his dignity to search an inmate’s room for food. I knew with perfect clarity that he was going to kill me … or so he thought. But I was not about to die without a fight, even though the odds were stacked heavily against me.

I comforted myself with the thought that Hoffman’s belief that Jews were spineless vermin, unable to resist the ‘Master Race’, prevented him from bringing guards or Kapos with him for security. It was to be one on one, though not exactly a fair fight. Only one of us, after all, was armed: my empty, Jewish hands against an SS Luger.

‘Raus,’ he snapped, ‘Du Juden Schwein.’ (‘Hurry, you Jewish pig.’)

Hoffman was dressed immaculately in his officer’s uniform, the SS insignia affixed to his shoulder, while I wore the paper-thin striped clothes of a prisoner, my light jacket emblazoned with the Star of David on the left breast, and on my back the word ‘Jude’ (Jew), prominently stretched across my shoulders, as was required of all Jews in the Ghetto. The Star of David, universal symbol of the Jews, marked us out as untermenschen, in fact, the very lowest of the ‘races’ in Nazi thought: an irony, as the Hebrew term for the Star, Magen David – The Shield of David – reflects the legend that King David bore the symbol into battle on his Shield. It was a proud emblem, and now adorns Israel’s flag, but the Nazis had perverted its meaning, and the yellow stars of the Ghetto uniform would not shield me from Hoffman’s gun.

‘Schneller, Schneller ihr dreck Juden!’ (‘Faster, faster, you Jewish scum!’)

The miserable weather, overcast and cold as rain fell from a sky the colour of ice, suddenly became a spectacle of beauty. The Rabbis say that those killed in the Holocaust died al kiddush Hashem – ‘for the sanctification of the divine name’ – but I was a fighter and, to me, to die at Hoffman’s hands would have been a terrible dishonour. I wanted more, more sky, more rain, more sun, more life: a life beyond the Ghetto, freedom and a family of my own in the Promised Land.

As Hoffman marched me down the narrow streets at double-time, towards the tiny cell that had become my home, pushing me with his gloved hand whenever my pace slowed, I mentally prepared myself to throw what would be the most important punch of my life. There would be no second in my corner, no referee or bell, no victory on points or by a technical knockout. I had to put him down fast and quietly or it was over.

We arrived at the house and he hustled me to my door, closing it behind him and sliding the bolt shut. I could smell his strong cologne in the tight, enclosed space as his lips curled back in a feral snarl and he began to unbutton his holster. This was the moment. Die like a coward or die as a warrior. I took a step towards him, moving slowly, almost imperceptibly, and as his hand closed round the handle of his pistol, I let my training take hold. With all my strength and skill, I threw a fast, round-arm left hook, the punch that made a legend of Joe Frazier.

Boxers learn early on that the round-arm left hook can be both a devastating blow when used correctly and an excellent ‘softener’, setting up a knockout punch. Thrown at close range, it comes outside the opponent’s field of vision and is difficult to defend against, even from a practised fighting stance. Reaching for his gun, Hoffman’s guard was down, both literally and figuratively. The SS were accustomed to us Jews being subservient and fearful, obeying their orders and never fighting back. He was not prepared for my assault. Though a strong man and trained soldier, Hoffman was softened by rich meals the likes of which I could only dream of, not to mention the officer’s reserve supply of vodka, schnapps and brandy. He was certainly no boxer, and my left hook was enough to stun him. I followed with a classic straight right, connecting with his chin, which had veered to the side from the force of my first punch, his mouth hanging open in shock and pain. I heard the crack of bone as Hoffman’s Aryan jaw broke.

Down he went, his gun sliding from his holster as he slumped to the stone floor. Where was the arrogant SS officer now? His ‘racial superiority’ must have deserted him, as he lay helpless, struck down by a Jew. This time he was the one to take a beating.

In another world, another time, I would have stepped back to my own corner, confident the referee would count him out. But this was no tournament, and the Marquis of Queensbury rules did not apply. There was no turning back. Had a Kapo or a German soldier passed by and stopped to investigate the noise, I would have been a dead man. If he recovered from my knockout blow I would not even live long enough to walk to the gallows in the infamous Blechplatz – ‘Tin Square’ – where many Jews had perished at the end of a hangman’s rope. Indeed, had he been able to fight me off long enough to reach his weapon or call for help, Hoffman might well have ordered not just my execution, but the death of all my friends. That was the usual Nazi response to resistance.

I could not use his weapon to finish him off, as the pistol’s report would have been loud enough to bring guards and Kapos running. In a frenzy, I looked around and grabbed a heavy wooden stool, hoisted it above my shoulders and steadied myself. I brought it down on his skull with all the power I could muster and heard, again, the cracking of bone. He died in an instant, his skull crushing inwards. It was a quicker death than he deserved, but a lucky one from my perspective, as very little blood was spilled.

I stood there for a second, regaining my breath and trying to accept what had just happened. I had killed my nemesis. He had come to murder me and I had turned the tables on him. But there was no time to take satisfaction in this victory; with every passing second the threat to my life grew. I forced myself to stay calm and think the situation through. It was early evening and everyone, Latvians, Germans, Jews alike, was out of the Ghetto on work detail. But they would soon be back. I had to dispose of the evidence.

I slipped quietly out through the door and looked up and down the damp cobbled streets: there was no one in sight. Short, stocky and strong as I was, I had no trouble lifting his inert body, hooking my arms under his shoulders and dragging him out of the house. Hoffman left a fitting monument to himself: a wet stain where he had voided his bowels as his brain caved in. I hauled him deep into the darkening streets, my ears alert for the slightest sound. I knew if I heard anyone approaching there would be no time to see if it was friend or foe. I would have to just drop the corpse where it was and disappear.

The further I took him away from my room the calmer I felt. At last, without ceremony or sympathy, I dumped him in a doorway several streets away.

Except for the distant rumble of an old tram car, it was silent as twilight spread through the Ghetto streets. The beating of my heart gradually returned to normal as a cooling rain washed sweat from my brow. Then I froze. His cap. His bloody cap. What had happened to his bloody peaked cap?

Forcing myself to keep a normal, walking pace – prisoners did not run in the Ghetto – I turned back towards the house. I was almost shaking when I burst into my room and began a frantic search for the grey cap with its death’s head insignia. At that moment, it was every bit as much a lethal threat to me as Hoffman’s gun had been when he reached for it. And I could not see the wretched thing at first.

There. When he crashed to the ground, the hat had, naturally, fallen and rolled, coming to rest behind the cupboard. I grabbed it, stuffed it inside my shirt, and hastily checked that the coast was still clear. Off I went, and as soon as I reached a deserted corner I tossed it out into the night, like a kid skimming stones on the surface of the Baltic.

Once again, I drew a deep breath and set off for home, my mind racing at the enormity of what I’d done. But there were no regrets. It had been the starkest and most straightforward of choices: his life or mine. I had killed for the first time.

It would not be the last.

Back in my room, I cleaned away all remnants of the Obersturmführer. The little blood he’d lost was quickly wiped away with an old rag, which I then stuffed onto the smouldering fire in the grate, watching it flame and vanish. I hadn’t realised just how much we’d bounced around in that small room. The few sticks of furniture were scattered across the floor and, on close examination, my three-legged stool, which had served so ably as a bludgeon, bore blood, skin and even hair on the edge that had struck Hoffman. I wiped the stool and rubbed it in the dirt to cover the traces of Hoffman’s remains. I straightened everything else up as best I could, but a small bloodstain remained on the floor. It was noticeable to me, but the floor was old, filthy and covered in stains. I hoped and prayed that no one else would recognise it.

I kept the gun that he had planned to kill me with, and hid it, along with the ammunition, in our secret cellar. The door was concealed beneath a heavy cupboard, which normally required two pairs of hands to shift. In the past, I had been able to move it by myself, with effort. That day, it was easier than usual. The adrenalin was still flowing.

The gun joined our secret cache of contraband – stolen food, vodka, and other luxury items that we ‘strong ones’ had stolen, scavenged or bartered for in the Ghetto’s black market. With our puny official rations, everything had its value, and the gun could be useful in our ongoing struggle. At first I thought that hiding it alongside the bottles and cans presented no extra risk – if the Germans came this close to discovering who had murdered Hoffman, they would have killed me in an instant. There would be no trial. The Ghetto did not enjoy the rule of law.

I was about to leave the dark, damp cellar when I realised that the gun would stick out like a sore thumb amongst our other treasures, prompting questions from the handful of people in my group who knew of our store. As much as I trusted them, who could tell what they might reveal under interrogation, or even torture? Why take the chance? The fewer people who knew, the less danger I faced, and if I kept both the gun and Hoffman’s death to myself, then, I thought, there would be no risk at all. Time would show how wrong I was in this respect.

At that moment, all I could do was to hide the gun inside my private ‘safe’ – no bank vault, but a narrow space in the floor, beneath a couple of loose bricks. I lifted them out and, after studying the weapon closely, stroking and caressing it like a pet dog, I slid it into the hole, replaced the bricks and scattered dirt around their edges.

I had made two serious mistakes, and realised them just in time. A third could kill me. With Hoffman’s body and hat disposed of and his gun hidden from Jews and guards alike, I made my way out into the night. It was fully dark now, and freezing. I shivered from both the cold and the terrifying thoughts of what might easily have happened if my first punch had not caught Hoffman cold, had a Kapo happened by and heard the struggle, had my luck not held as I got rid of the body.

It could – and by all laws of probability, it should – have been me lying dead with a bullet in my brain. Instead, it was that Nazi bastard. He would kill no more Jews. I began to relax a little as I joined up with a group of my fellow Jewish workers heading home, my head down, my collar high around my neck. If anyone noticed my sudden, strange appearance from the shadows, they gave no sign. This was a group from another block, but we were all fighting the same war.

Early the next morning, Hoffman’s body was found and the Ghetto was thrown into chaos. The SS could not believe that someone had dared to kill one of their officers. After all, they were the Master Race, and we were under their jackboots, living in fear. They never thought that we would even contemplate fighting back.

We were rounded up before dawn and lined up in rows of four in Blechplatz, in sight of the gallows. Hoffman’s superior officer, SS-Sturmbannführer (a rank equivalent to that of Major) Kurt Krause, came out to question us. Had Krause himself been murdered, we were told in no uncertain terms, all the Jews in the Ghetto would have died that morning. I believed them.

Krause commanded the guards to find the guilty party. They pushed us, kicked us and screamed in our faces, demanding to know who had done this terrible deed. Their violent interrogation brought them nothing, simply because no one but me knew who had put an end to the life of that despicable man. The guards grew more and more irate as the prisoners’ silence became sullen, with even the usually reliable informants having nothing to contribute. Eventually, Krause snapped. He bellowed out orders, turned on his heel and left with a flamboyant ‘Heil Hitler’ salute.

His response to our silence was to have two of my fellow Jews pulled from the line and marched over to the gallows. Their hands were tied behind their backs and both were promptly hanged in front of us. I thought that I had long since forgotten how to cry, but tears ran down my cheeks as I watched these innocent men scream and struggle while the guards wrestled them up onto the gallows, tied nooses round their necks and released the trapdoors.

The screams died in their throats as they jerked and flapped about, their hands clutching and clawing at the air behind their backs in spasms, their blackening tongues lolling out obscenely. Gradually, their movements ceased. The guards, flustered and furious at the loss of their officer, herded us off to our days’ duties as dawn broke overhead.

The two hanged men were left dangling for the next three days as a warning of the consequences of resistance. To me, they were a constant reminder that I had caused their deaths. I was devastated by the murder of my comrades, and had to fight my conscience to stop myself from running and confessing everything to the Sturmbannführer. I would have done so when they questioned us, had I thought it would save lives, but there was little or no chance of that amidst the fury of the SS at the murder of their Lieutenant. Proportionate responses were not the SS way and others would have died, even had I offered myself up to the gallows.

I felt nothing for Hoffman, my torturer and would-be killer, but the guilt over the two men who died owing to my actions has tormented me ever since. I still see their lifeless bodies swinging in the wind as I walked past Tin Square on my way to work, my guilty secret bottled up inside me. I knew I was right to have killed Hoffman … but at such a cost? The first time I passed those dangling bodies I gave them the briefest of glances and came close to vomiting, the bile rising in my throat. They were dead because of me.

I wasn’t brave enough to look at them again, and kept my head down and my eyes averted every time I walked through Blechplatz until they were cut down, making way for other victims. Their images were imprinted on my mind in terrible and vivid detail, and have remained with me for more than half a century.

This is the first time I have ever told this story, and although the memory brings fresh tears to my eyes, I feel great relief at having spat it out, like the poison it is. Maybe the nightmare of seeing my innocent comrades executed will fade a little now … or is that hoping for too much? I feel better for having at last got this off my chest, but still, I lack the courage to name the men who died in my place because their families, if any relatives of either man survive, would never forgive me. How could they?

It is easy, in retrospect, to condemn me, to brand me a coward, but before you judge me too harshly, let me remind you of the circumstances, not as an excuse, but an explanation. Tens of thousands of Latvian Jews had been murdered by the SS and their Latvian allies by the time I was moved into the Kleine, or small, Riga Ghetto, which held a few thousand Latvian Jews: while the houses of the Grosse (large) Ghetto were filled with German Jews, after their original inhabitants were gunned down in the forests. Imagine a dozen streets in your home town being suddenly cordoned off, people driven out and others moved in. No families, no husbands and wives living with their children as we take for granted now, just men and women herded together and left to wonder what had happened to their relatives, their homes and possessions.

When the German Jews were shipped in, they were given preferential treatment and allowed to remain together as families, moving into houses in the Big Ghetto, finding half-eaten meals on kitchen tables abandoned by the Latvian Jews as they were marched out to the woods of Bikernieki or Rumbula to die terrible deaths.

A few survived the initial slaughter, hiding when the Germans and Kapos swept through the streets, clearing them before raising the barbed wire fences, but the incoming German Jews quickly discovered them. Most were turned over, but a few were secreted away, looked after by their fellow Jews and smuggled back into our Ghetto. Prisoners were shot and hanged each day. I was still a young man, with so much to do, and when it came to the question of kill or be killed, I acted from instinct.

It was him or me, and I have lived with the consequences, the guilt, the nightmares, ever since. I was not born into the Ghetto, and my refusal to die there allowed me, in time, to bring children into the world, to fight for Israel, to live a full and varied life, a life denied to most Jews in the Baltics. But there had been life, too, before the Nazis came, life with a family – my family – that had been happy, once, in Latvia, until the war tore us apart.

CHAPTER TWO

A BRIEF CHILDHOOD

I was born on 6 November 1921, to my father Mordechai and my mother Chaye, the first of their three sons. My brother Boris was a year younger than me and I was a full thirteen years older than the baby of the family, Ephraim, or ‘Fima’, as we called him. We lived in a simple house on two floors, with a kitchen and two bedrooms. We boys slept in one and my parents took the other. It was all we knew and more than enough for us; more by far than Jews in Latvia had traditionally known.

Modern Latvia was created after the First World War, following centuries of foreign rule and a long battle for independence. First, the region was occupied by the German Knightly Orders, who founded Riga in 1201 and forcibly converted the native Pagan population to Christianity, with the support of both the German King and Vatican. The German Knights prohibited all Jewish settlement in the area in 1306, a ban that lasted until 1561, when the country was divided into Lithuanian, German and Russian-dominated regions. A Jewish colony was founded in Piltene in the sixteenth century, and Jews played an important part in Latvia’s development. But only prominent and wealthy Jews were allowed to live in Riga, and they could not be buried in the Riga City Limits until 1725, with bodies sent to Polish territory.

Thousands of Jews died in the terrible Great Northern War of 1700-1721, which ended with all of Latvia under Tsarist control. Those Jews outside the Russian Pale of settlement could only live in certain areas, and were forced to pay higher tax rates than the gentiles. In 1724, Jews were expelled from the Russian Empire by Empress Katherine. Only in 1785 did Catherine the Great lift the ban on Jewish settlement along the Baltic Coast, and it was not until 1841 that the Russian Senate granted Jews living in Riga an official right of residence. The Russian Empire was a century behind the rest of Europe, when it came to the emancipation of the Jews, and even the foundation of a free Latvian Republic did not bring true equality. Latvia’s nationalist government kept a firm hand on the economy through a Tsarist-style civil service, and Jews were not permitted to attain high office or professional status.

Still, the inter-war years were a time of freedom and excitement, compared to what had gone before and Jewish life in Riga thrived. A once ‘backwards’ Jewish community, as in Russia, became cosmopolitan, internationalist and freed from religious orthodoxy. Latvian Jews made an important contribution to the growing Zionist movement, which sought to establish a Jewish State in Biblical Palestine. At that time, the British were still in control of Palestine, with some 100,000 troops stationed there. The British Mandate had been created by the League of Nations in 1920, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Under the Mandate, Jewish habitation was restricted to a relatively small area, the lion’s share (more than double) being used by the British to create a new Arab Protectorate which they called Transjordan (later the Arab Kingdom of Jordan). The Golan Heights, in the North, were ceded to the French Mandate of Syria, and the Southern part of the Mandate – the Negev desert – was also closed to Jewish settlement

Riga was the birthplace of Beitar, the right-wing youth movement devoted to the militant Zionist ideals of Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky. His school of revisionist Zionism, hated by the socialist-Zionist majority, maintained that a Jewish State could only be won and kept by force. Beitar, founded in 1923 in Riga, promoted boxing, the study of Hebrew, urging its members to move to then-British mandate Palestine and join the fight for independence, teaching the use of small arms and techniques of guerrilla warfare. The Likud Party and the militias many of its members fought in – the Irgun and Stern Gang – were all born of Jabotinsky and Beitar.

My father was an early admirer of Jabotinsky and the Revisionist party, encouraging me to join Beitar as a young boy. They would prove crucial influences throughout my life in Latvia and later Israel. My father was originally a hat-maker, hence the name ‘Shapov’, Russian for ‘hat’, pronounced like the French chapeau