Alytus to the Internet, part 1
Norman Abramson with his surfboard on the beach at Waikiki, Hawaii in 1969.
When our youngest grandchild was in second grade, a family joke frequently re-told was that she had written a school essay about her grandfather and told her friends that he had invented the Internet.
Her facts were wrong, of course — it took the work of about 20 academics conducting research at universities and institutes all over the United States under grants from the Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop what was then called the ARPAnet — the first computer communication network. But it is true that her grandfather, Norman Abramson, played an important role. He created the first wireless links to the ARPAnet in 1971 by inventing and developing the fundamental digital technology that even today enables all two way wireless communication devices around the world, including our mobile phones, tablet devices and computers.
How did her "Grampi', born to two Jewish immigrants just a few years after they arrived in the United States, find himself at the University of Hawaii, with his wife, Halborn descendant Joan Freulich Abramson, and his two children? How did he find himself spending his spare time on a surfboard looking out at the thousands of miles of ocean that separated the Islands from the continents of America and Asia and devising a fundamental way to facilitate two-way wireless communications over vast distances?
This is a story about immigration and about how vital it has been to American democracy and progress. It is a story that recognizes that all Americans, with the exception of Native Americans, are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. And it is a story that the events of this Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2017, touch a nerve for our own family of immigrant descendants, and particularly for Norm and for me because we both lost family in the Holocaust and because we are both the first generation in our families born in America.
The story has two parts because it involves two parts of the large Matskevitch family. Five of the children in that family immigrated to America, changed the family name to Abramson, married, had children, thrived, multiplied and now have members living all over the United States, including Norm and his children and grandchildren. Three of the Matskevitch children stayed behind, married, had children and were murdered along with their spouses, their children and their mother by Nazi einsatzkommandos in 1941. Only two children survived of the twelve family members who had remained in Eastern Europe.
It is with the family members who stayed behind that we begin.
The Matskevitch Family
The Matskevitch family in Alytus in about 1907. Abram and Chaya Rifka Matskevitch are surrounded by their six youngest children. Standing left to right are Fivel ,Yirml (Harry),Taibe and Motl (Max). Standing to the right of Chaya Rifka is Noach, the youngest son. Sitting between his parents is four year old Osher (Edward), Norman Abramson's father. The two oldest children, Shimsel (Sam) and Minna (Mamie), immigrated to the United States in August, 1907 and are not in this photo, which may have been taken as a memento for them to carry with tremor taken after they left and sent to them in America.
The summer of 1907 marks the beginning of the immigrations that separated the members of the Matskevitch family. The separation took 20 years to complete. It began in August, 1907 when the two oldest of the eight Matskevitch children left Alytus together for America.
The third oldest child, Yirml (Harry), joined his siblings in the United States in 1911. Then World War One interrupted the exodus, as it did for many families. The Armistice and the peace agreements at the end of the war made Lithuania a sovereign nation. By the time the war ended, and travel was once again possible, two of the older children had begun making lives for themselves in Lithuania and the youngest was still too young to travel alone. In 1922, twenty year old Osher (Edward) left Lithuania. His brother Motl (Max) was the last to immigrate, coming to America in 1927, three years after the United States Congress radically tightened immigration laws. Those who left and those who remained behind never saw each other again.
With the exception of the oldest son, the departure of every child was marked by a photograph, taken as a memento both for those who left and those who remained. And for awhile, on both sides of the Atlantic, the family continued to thrive and to grow.
Above, left to right: Taibe and Minna (Mamie) photographed before Minna's departure for America in 1907; Taibe and Yirml (Harry) photographed before Yirml left Alytus in 1911; Motl (Max), Osher (Edward), Taibe, Noach and Taibe's husband Shlomo Basukievich before Osher and Motl left after World War One. Click to see the full image.
Alytus
The Matskevitch family had lived in Alytus, Lithuania at least from the time Abram Selig married Chaya Rifka Yankelevitch. All of their eight children were born in Alytus. The oldest, Shimsel (Samuel), in about 1885 and the next following along every few years until about 1905 when the youngest, Noakh was born.
Alytus had developed on both banks of the Neman River in a country and an area that for much of its history was divided, with Prussian or German rule on one side of the the river and Russian rule on the other. At the turn of the century, when the Matskevitch family was growing, the town was Russian dominated and the total population of both parts of the town was about 12,000, one third of them Jews.
There is an old family story that claims the Matskevitches were poor – so poor that sympathetic neighbors occasionally gave them a herring head and each child would get one lick at dinner to go with his or her potato. But according to Abram's son, Osher, Abram Selig owned a fairly large tailoring business that supplied uniforms to various armies that passed through Alytus, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not. The family was certainly not rich, but it was comfortable. And family photographs, which had to be paid for, especially in the earlier years before amateur cameras were readily available, were taken frequently and were not limited to departures. The photos remaining in our collection show that parents and children were all reasonably well dressed and well fed.
A photograph taken at the wedding ceremony of Taibe Matskevitch and Shlomo Basukievitch in the early 1920s. The ceremony took place before Taibe's brother, Osher (Edward), left for America. Taibe is wearing a white veil and stands next to Shlomo. The young man in the white school cap who stands a few people away, to the left, is her youngest brother, Noach. Her younger brother Osher can be seen second from the right side of the picture wearing a white school cap.
Shimsel Matskevitch, his wife, Rachel Braverman, and his sister, Minna were the first to leave Alytus, in 1907. They were followed by Yirml (Harry) in The Matskevitch family, with three children remaining at home, continued to grow. Taibe Matskevitch was the first of the siblings who remained in Alytus to marry. She and Shlomo Basukievitch wed sometime between 1920 and mid-1922, before Osher (Edward) in 1922 and and Motl (Max) in 1927 .
and Motl (Max) left for America. In January 1923, the next youngest sibling, Faivel married Fania Berlinskaite. The youngest of the siblings, Noach, married Frida Lentes sometime during the 1930s. Taibe and Shlomo Bashukievich had two children, Aysa, born in 1922, and Yudel, born in 1925. Faivl and Fania had two children: Yankel, born in 1923 and Gitele, born in 1927. Noach and Frida had a daughter, Galya, born in 1937.
In 1931, before Noach married, Abram Selig Matskevitch died. The record, one of the few in the sparse Lithuanian databases, says he died on January 7, 1931 of "twisted intestines". He was about 68 years old. As with many family milestones, this too was recorded on film.
The funeral of Abram Selig Matskevitch in Alytus, Lithuania. Chaya Rifka, wearing a light scarf, stands at the head of the coffin. Noach stands behind his mother, with his hand on her arm. To the right are Shlomo and Taibe Basukievitch, standing behind their two children, Yudel and Aysa. Faivel stands next to Taibe. His wife Fruma stands on his other side. Notice the snow on the roof -- Abram died in January, 1931.
Alytus and Siauliai
Some of the photographs that remain to us from this period, when amateur cameras were becoming readily accessible, are informal. The collection we have comes mostly from Shimsel, the oldest of the siblings and the first to come to America. Without them we would know almost nothing about the Lithuanian part of the Matskevitch family. As far as we know, no correspondence has survived from the years between the two wars. But Shimsel saved the photographs and they have come to us through Shimsel's grandson and great grandchildren. We cannot know the details of life for the family during these years, but the photographs that have been preserved provide an outline and some remarkable glimpses of what life was like in Alytus, and later in Siauliai where Taibe and her family and Noach and his wife moved in the early to mid-1930s and where Chaya Rifka moved sometime after Abram's death.
Funeral of Abram Selig Matskevitch, 1931.
With five Matskevitch children settled in America – Mamie, Harry, Edward and Max in Massachusetts and Sam in Pennsylvania – and with both the Lithuanian and United States based family growing rapidly, photographs continued to be sent back and forth with great frequency throughout the 1930s. A few of those sent from Lithuania can be found below.
Influence, Occupation, Invasion, Murder
Lithuania, between the wars, was nominally independent. But in August, 1939, under the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop Agreement, it was assigned to the German sphere of influence. The terms of the agreement were quickly modified and Lithuania was given over to the Soviet Russian sphere to compensate for Germany taking land in other areas that the secret pact had assigned to Russia. The Soviet Union immediately designated Lithuania an "independent state" but occupied the country and began taking action to turn the country into the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, including the arrest and deportation of hundreds of Lithuanians. Then, in the spring of 1941, Germany ended the alliance with Russia and invaded Soviet held territory, including Lithuania.
Aysa Matskevitch, by this time about 18 years old, tried to convince her family to move east, deep into Soviet territory and away from the invading Germans. Given months of Soviet control and abuse, family members were not convinced. Younger members of the family did not view Soviet Russia as a palatable option. Aysa finally gave up the effort just ahead of the arrival of German troops. She left Siauliai, moving east, deeper into Soviet territory. We do not know if Aysa's younger brother, Yudel, accompanied his sister or remained in Saiuliai.
In Lithuania the Nazi forces found it easy to recruit allies. A number of Lithuanian military and police units collaborated with German authorities and willingly participate in imprisoning and eliminating the Jewish community. Because the Jewish population of the country was relatively small, confinement in ghettos until the Nazi extermination machine was fully implemented was not the only option. Nazi occupiers depended heavily upon Einsatzgruppen -- squadrons of German and Lithuanian soldiers whose job it was to round up masses of "undesirables", march them to the edges of ditches that had been prepared beforehand (dug by slave laborers -- gypsies, Jews, other "undesirables"), and simply gun them down so that their bodies conveniently fell into the ditches. Much of the slaughter conducted by the Einsatsgruppen took place in the summer and fall of 1941 and was recorded in a coldly bureaucratic document since called The Jager Report.
But the slaughter did not end in 1941 and the timing of the murder of Jews in Saiuliai, where seven, or possibly, eight Matskevitch family members had been living when German soldiers took over the town, is not clear. Most of the small towns of Lithuania where Jewish communities had existed, including Alytus, were cleared of Jews by the use of Nazi Einsatsgruppen in 1941. But Saiuliai was one of three larger towns, along with Vilnius and Kovno, where Nazi officials created ghettos. The lives of about 35,000 Lithuanian Jews were extended for a time in those ghettos as slave laborers. Whether Saiuliai family members died earlier or later, separately or together, is not known.
We know that Aysa survived the war in Russia, where she managed to complete her education and even to get a medical degree. And we know that one child who had lived in Saiuliai, Noach and Frida's young daughter Galya, appears to have survived, though we have so far not found out where or how.
Years after the war, and after several difficult decades in Lithuania, Aysa was able to make her way to Israel. Her descendants survive there to this day. Aysa placed testimony in Yad Vashem stating that ten members of the family were murdered in Alytus and Saiuliai, but it is not possible to place an accurate year on the Saiuliai deaths. Some family members may have been murdered immediately while some were used for a time as slave laborers.
Testimony from Saiuliai Jewish survivors spoke of the use of Einsatzkommando tactics and of mass graves in the outskirts of the town at various times during the war. And over the years construction workers have occasionally uncovered mass graves. Most recently, in July 2015, a road building crew working near Saiuliai uncovered a number of grave pits. The Lithuanian government set off a contentious dispute by deciding to excavate the remains and perform forensic investigations to see if the bodies came from the post war period of Russian domination, when the area was the site of an enclosed Russian military post or from German occupation during the war. The dispute was resolved after the Chief Rabbi of Lithuania and Jewish leaders from around the world asked the government to respect Jewish custom, leave the remains in place, re-route the road, and mark the burial pits.
The timing of the destruction of the Jews of Alytus, among whom Fivel, his wife and his two children lived, is not in doubt. Indeed, it was efficiently and coldly recorded by SS-Standartenfuhrer Karl Jager, who was "Commander of the security police and the SD Einsatzkommando 3". The Jager Report was his record on a day to day basis of the total number of men, women and children murdered by his group as he handled "the Jewish problem” in Lithuania.
Jager was a methodical man and an obedient Nazi. His report covers July 2 through December 1, 1941. It consists of neatly organized columns recording the dates, towns and total numbers of persons shot by his einsatzkommando group. His report of SD Einsatzkommando 3 activities is precise and chilling. Among his many daily listings from July to December, 1941 the following can be found:
8/13/1941 Alytus • 617 Jews, 100 Jewesses, 1 criminal • 718
8/13-31/1941 • Alytus and environs • 233 Jews • 233
9/9/1941 • Alytus • 287 Jews, 640 Jewesses, 352 Jewish children • 1,279
Jager was very proud of his work. He notes that, before his EK-3 detachment took over the Kaunus region, only 4,000 Jews had been killed. Between July 29 he efficiently murdered another 133,346. He concludes his report:
Today I can confirm that our objective, to solve the Jewish problem for Lithuania, has been achieved by EK 3. In Lithuania there are no more Jews, apart from Jewish workers and their families…
The distance between from the assembly point to the graves was on average 4 to 5 Km…
I consider the Jewish action more or less terminated as far as Einsatzkommando 3 is concerned. Those working Jews and Jewesses still available are needed urgently and I can envisage that after the winter this workforce will be required even more urgently. I am of the view that the sterilization programme of the male worker Jews should be started immediately so that reproduction is prevented. If despite sterlization a Jewess becomes pregnant she will be liquidated.
(signed) Jager, SS-Standartenfuhrer
A broken Star of David which stands as a the memorial in the woods on the outskirts of Alytus where the Matskevitch family often gathered. The memorial is near the pits that served as mass graves during the slaughter of Jews by Einsatszgurppen 3 between June and December, 1941.
