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Michael Zimmermann How I Survived the Wars and
Peace:
Chapter II. Moscow 1915-1919
The
most exciting period of time in the chronicles of Moscow since Napoleon
fled the burning city, set on fire by its inhabitants themselves. And
I was there and witnessed it all. In fact, I took part in all the excitement
joining the crowd or procession of demonstrators marching in some protest
and clamouring some political slogans. I did not understand much of
what it was about, and cared less, the general commotion and excitement
was my interest. Within this short time, I saw the fall of the three-hundred-years
old Tsardom, the short-lived revolutionary regime of Kerensky and the
Great Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. But, let us start from the beginning. In
1915, Moscow was packed with refugees from the parts of Russia occupied
by the German army. It was very hard to find a suitable apartment for
the family, and father made an appropriate arrangement for our arrival.
The three girls: Lola, Genia and Rola were sent to an exclusive boarding-school
run by a French lady by name Mme. Abreille (the spelling is an invention
of mine, in Russian it was spelled the way it was pronounced) for daughters
of prominent citizens. It was a total immersion in French, including
the classes. A remark is in order. For the last two, three centuries,
the Russian aristocracy considered the French language to be the proper
way of communication in the civilized world. The Russian language was
too crude and was spoken by lower classes and peasants. Hence, respect
to everything associated with France. But back to my sisters. After
a short initial period, the girls loved the environment, the life style,
the discipline. Whenever mother accompanied by me visited them, they
showed their enthusiasm to their new place and their impatience of wasting
their time with us, while the other girls had some organized occupation
elsewhere. So much for the girls. Mother,
father and myself lived in a suite in Hotel Europa. There were two rooms,
one was a combination of living-dining-den, the other - bedroom of my
parents. The hotel was a residential type, in other words, the guests
lived there for a prolonged time. It had four floors and many rooms
for social meetings. The reason I am describing the building with such
details is that the hotel became my new world to explore. After a while,
I became known to all the residents and the hotel staff, and I had access
to places forbidden to outsiders, like: telephone-exchange, boiler-room,
warehouse, etc. There was another boy of my age belonging to a Polish
family residing in the hotel, and we two played all day pretending to
be world explorers. No,
I did not go to school yet and father engaged a university student to
come to the hotel for two hours every week-day to prepare me for entering
a regular school the next year. My tutor’s name was Mondryzhack
and I don’t know what he was doing during the night. Many times,
when I monotonously was reading a certain text from the book in front
of me, his eyes started closing and after a while the guy fell asleep.
I immediately stopped reading, found something different to amuse myself
with after I turned about ten pages further. After a certain time, Mondryzhack
awoke embarrassed, pretending to clean his nose and at that moment I
started reading the text as if all the time I was diligently doing my
business while he was sleeping. I had also other problems with the fellow.
He used to give some homework which I did not do being too busy playing
around in the building (Do I have to remind you about the four floors
to explore?). Sometimes, Mondryzhack lost his patience with me, took
the telephone standing on the desk at which we were working and looking
viciously at me called my father at his office complaining that I again
did not do my homework. This situation promised either a beating or
some severe reprimand. However, I was prepared and used my strategy.
In collusion with mother, I simply disappeared. When father came home
in the evening, I was not there. When asked, mother said that I was
somewhere around and she did not know where. I was safe in the building
and there was no worry that I might be lost. Late in the night, father
went to his bedroom to read some paper or book. Mother opened slightly
the door leading to the corridor and it was a signal for me that all
was clear. I slept on the sofa in the living room. Next morning, while
father had breakfast in the room, I pretended that I was still asleep
and waited until he left. This way, the immediate confrontation was
avoided and, after a while, it petered out. We
stayed in hotel Europa for a full year. It was situated in the heart
of the city, five minutes away from the Bolshoi Theater, almost across
the street from the world-famous "Metropole" hotel. With the
girls off her hands, mother spent a lot of time with me. We visited
picture galleries, museums, did a lot of sight-seeing, went shopping
and browsing. At that time, Moscow had two shopping malls that would
impress even the contemporary tourist. One was in a gigantic building
in the Red Square, parallel to the Kremlin. It consisted of three parallel
longish alleys with two floors of elegant stores brimming with merchandise.
Many foreign famous companies had their outlets there, the general atmosphere
was grandiose. At time of the Soviet Union, the mall was called G.U.M.
("Glavnyi Universalnyi Magazin") and I had a chance to visit
it repeatedly sixty years later. A urine-stinking place, with row upon
row of depressing looking stores, open but with bare shelves or displaying
some extremely shoddy shoes or apparel, maybe some souvenirs made of
wood (the well-known "matrioshka"s), a pitiful picture. I
brought home some pictures to prove my impression. But, back to me at
the age of eight. Quite often, mother took me to a place where they
were serving Jewish dinners (every Jew in Moscow knew about the "Lurie’s"
place. Otherwise, mother would prepare full course dinners right in
the hotel room using a petroleum fed stove called "Primus,"
a conspiratorial procedure the hotel would not tolerate. The Metropole
hotel housed two cinemas, and mother took me often to see a movie, sometimes
both theatres one after the other. In
fall 1916, we finally found a suitable apartment. The building was in
the same street as Mme Abraille’s boarding school, three minutes
away from it, and the street itself extended to the historically noted
Arbat street. The idea was that my sisters could live at home and attend
classes as before. I also started attending school which was about 30
minutes away from our place. I mentioned before that Moscow was full
of refugees, and to accommodate their children in existing schools it
was necessary to start afternoon sessions in the available facilities.
I was attending the afternoon classes, 2 PM to 6 PM, which I did not
like at all. Our apartment was actually the lower part of a duplex and
the latter was one of the five arranged in a letter "L" with
a huge courtyard. There were other boys of my age living in the project
and we became friends, however, they attended the regular school in
the mornings when I was all alone and idle, and vice versa in the afternoon.
At first, somebody (mostly our domestic) took me to the school and waited
for me in the evening when I was through with classes, but after a time,
I rebelled embarrassed by the arrangement, and was allowed to march
the distance by myself. Father’s
business in Moscow was just a small version of what he left in Warsaw.
First of all, he was cut off from the source of supply in Western Europe,
second his clientele, the retail stores, lost their customers too. These
were bad times, news from the war front were not good, womens’
hats somehow mirrored the depressed mood of the population. The business
situation became even gloomier when the revolution and the total social
upheaval made everybody wish to look proletarian as a form of self-protection.
I
am not going to describe the political events that took place one after
another; the fall of the Tsar’s reign, the new regime by Kerensky
with its many new regulations, and finally the Bolshevik revolution
that turned everything upside down. Hundreds and hundreds of books were
written on the subject, my business is to describe the impressions of
a boy of ten and eleven. Our house was only a few minutes away from
the Arbat street which was on the route of passing demonstrators of
various political factions. When I heard the noise of the approaching
procession, it was my business to run to the corner and join in the
excitement whatever was their grievance. Let me give an example of a
boy’s reaction to the changed circumstances. Back in the times
of Tsar (1916), the population was allowed access to the Kremlin, a
huge area surrounded by a heavy wall built, I think, in the 16th century.
It contained government buildings, cathedrals and monuments. To enter
the Kremlin, we had to pass a gigantic tunnel-like gate, one of several
leading to the fortress. One day, mother announced that she was going
to take me to visit the Kremlin. Father warned us that the gate we chose
was called the "Blessed Gate" and all males were expected
to bare their heads. Thus, before I entered the said gate I duly removed
my cap from my head and looked around if everybody noticed my appropriate
behaviour. Later on, after the revolutionary regime abolished the influence
of the church, I was marching through the same Kremlin gate with my
cap solidly on my head and checking if everybody around was aware of
my revolutionary spirit. The
change of the regime did not come overnight. There was a civil war right
in city of Moscow and right in the district we lived in. Not far from
the street we lived in there was a Military Academy. The cadets and
their big brass, having sworn allegiance to the Tsar, did not accept
the new situation without a fight. Their cannon hit the roof of one
of our five duplexes. Our entire family, as well as other tenants from
our complex moved across the street to a four-floor building with a
big basement. A close friend of mine lived in that building, and his
mother, a widow with a much older daughter and another son invited me
and one of my sisters to stay with them. The rest of the family, and
our domestics found place in the basement sleeping on the floor. The
fact that people left their apartments hiding in cellars encouraged
robbers to break in and steal valuables. For protection, tenants of
the building where we were hiding as well as some from the neighbouring
house arranged a patrol service at both outlets of our short street
blocking access to unknown individuals. Father had in his possession
two hand-guns, just as collector items, so he was a valuable addition
to the protective group. The fight was shortlived, after a few days
we were able to return to our homes and I found quite a collection of
shards of cannon shells which had exploded around our house. Among
many other changes, the revolution brought a new phenomenon - hunger.
Food products, so abundant before, simply disappeared. Bread was rationed,
at some time it was being issued only for children. The, so called,
"black market" was severely persecuted. The "speculators"
were arrested and shot. A tenant in one of our duplexes, a man by name
Bezsmertnyi (I mention his name because in Russian it means "Immortal")
was denounced by somebody, he was visited by the revolutionary committee
and they found two sacks of flour, probably for the use of his own family.
He was arrested as a speculator and, as the rumour circulated among
the neighbours, executed the same day. Father,
somehow, was able to get food because the family did not go desperately
hungry. Once he got somewhere a supply of lump-sugar. We kept it in
the old-fashioned tiled heating stoves hidden under the ashes. When
I was very hungry, I took a lump of sugar and climbed on the roof of
our house. An iron ladder was attached to the house leading to a garret
which served for hanging the washing. A few steps further led to the
roof. The latter was steeply tilted and when I placed my feet in the
rain gutter I was comfortably leaning back having a full view of the
Arbat street and its traffic. This was my favourite escape place, and,
moreover, no one saw me sucking my lump of sugar. There were cases that
a passer-by noticed a kid sitting in this precarious position and started
shouting at me to get down. Of coarse, he was right. If the rickety
gutter gave way under the weight of my body I would slip down three
floors and break my neck. As you correctly guessed, it did not happen. I
have to give father full credit for providing food for the family in
those times. We children did not ask questions, at meal times we gathered
around the table and ate whatever was being served by mother. My closest
friend, the one from across the street (his name was Lew Abelman) who
used to come to our courtyard to play with the boys, was frequently
invited to have dinner with us and he readily complied. We happened
to know that his mother, the widow, had problem with feeding children.
Lew was one year my senior, an intellectual type. He was the first one
to take me to the lending library and indicated the books to read. He
and myself visited picture galleries, museums or were just roaming around
in more remote districts of the city for fun. Let me mention a curious
thing that happened to me in 1972. I was 65 and this was my last year
of work with C.N.R. before my retirement. At that time Canada and the
Soviet Union had signed an agreement on mutual cooperation in science
and technology. The Soviet railways invited a Canadian delegation of
experts to visit their country. Within C.N.R. I was known as an expert
on languages and the high brass invited me to come along as an interpreter.
In Moscow, we stayed in the Intourist hotel, a short distance from the
Bolshoi Theatre. One day, when we had some time free from conferences
and official gatherings, the C.N.R. chief engineer who was an avid photographer
asked me to accompany him in a short walk to Bolshoi to take some snapshots
of this landmark. In front of the theatre there is a small park and
in this park I used to play as a boy of eight when we lived in hotel
Europa. I was visibly excited with memories of those times and told
my companion about my feelings. Then I looked at the people sitting
on the benches. I was not drunk, I had no hallucinations, but I will
swear that on one of the benches was sitting Lew Abelman, an elderly
man now, with a woman, presumably his wife . At this moment, three Soviet
soldiers came in front of the Bolshoi posing for their comrade. My companion
saw an opportunity to bring home a picture of himself with representatives
of the Red Army. He pushed his camera into my hands and asked me to
click. When I was through with this task and turned around, the pair
was gone. I desperately looked around in all directions, meaning to
chase the man, to stop him and ask: "Lew, don’t you know who
I am?" I am a level-headed man, and I refuse to believe that at
that moment I was a victim of a mirage. Within the next 8 years I visited
Moscow maybe 30 times, saw places familiar to me from the times of my
early childhood, but never again was I subject to such deep sentiments.
Back
to the 1916-1919 period. When I was 9, a doctor established that my
adenoids should be removed. In those times it was apparently considered
a serious procedure. Anyway, I found myself in a hospital and, although
I do not remember the pre-operation situation, I do remember lying in
a bed all alone in a big room bare of other furnishing except one or
two chairs. After the operation, mother was sitting beside my bed and
a nurse was present too. Suddenly, a hemorrhage happened, a wave of
blood spilling out of my mouth. The nurse explained to my panicked mother
that it was a normal event, nothing to worry about. Next morning, mother
being busy elsewhere, father came to sit with me. This time there was
no nurse in the room, when a hemorrhage happened again and I jumped
in the bed. Father panicked pressing the buzzer for nurse and not knowing
what to do. With my mouth full of blood I managed to utter a few words:
"This is nothing, it was like this before." Then the nurse
appeared and took care of the situation. However, father was so impressed
by my cold-blooded (what an appropriate expression!) behaviour that
it became a subject of a legend. Moreover, when I came home from the
hospital a wristwatch was waiting for me, the first watch in my life.
As
I mentioned before, the period following the October revolution brought
a lot of misery and general animosity towards everything that reminded
the proletarian population of former aristocracy and the wealthier part
of the population. Under the pretense of fighting the counter-revolutionaries,
houses, businesses and other private properties were confiscated, people
were deprived of their basic necessities, thrown out in the street.
Father was lucky, his business remained open though little income could
be expected in the prevailing atmosphere of proletarization. The Bolshevik
regime signed a separate peace agreement with Germany, the war in Europe
continued. Father decided that the family did not belong in these circumstances
and it was time to get back to Warsaw which was still under German occupation.
In our five duplexes, only a few neighbours were still living, the rest
moved to the provinces where life was easier. Of my many friends, only
Lew was there, and I reluctantly said good-bye to him. The plan was that father would take us to a point where he would be sure that we are close to our destination, and then he would return to Moscow to liquidate his business and the apartment with its furnishing. Whatever was planned to come along was packed and we travelled to the rail station. Trains were running haphazardly, and we spend two days in the station waiting for our train. The train took us west to a small town on the border of no-man’s land between Russia and the German-occupied territory. From there, we were on our own. We arrived at a private house which served as a guest-house and where we met other travellers in a similar situation. We spent there a week or two until father somehow found a solution. An officer of the closest border unit of the Red Army agreed to take us through the no-man’s territory as close to the German border as possible. I don’t know what was the negotiated amount of money father was paying, what I do know was that father’s gold pocket watch with its heavy chain changed hands too. Late in the night, two horse-drawn wagons, each driven by a soldier arrived at our place, our belongings were loaded, and we were seated: parents and Rola on one, Lola, Genia and myself as well as the officer on the second one. We were travelling the whole night, mostly in a dense forest. I can only assume that both parents were realizing the risk they were taking. The three army-men could rob us of all our belongings and money, and abandon us in the forest or kill the entire family. I know for a fact that mother carried on herself hidden a substantial amount of money for upkeep of herself and the children in Warsaw while father was in Moscow. Well, it did not happen, in the morning we arrived at a small village already in the German-occupied part of Russia. Here we said good-bye to our after all honest escort, and the local peasants took us with our luggage a short distance to the rail station of the town called Konotop. Both parents were fluent in German and the officer of the occupation unit was very gallant and outgoing. We were given a comfortable place in the station and prepared for a long wait for the train to take us directly to Warsaw. Father stayed with us until we were seated in the compartment of the train and we said good-bye to him little knowing that it will take one year or so until we would see him again.
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