Sachar Family

This is the Sachar home, which was located on Kupergas gatve (or street) in 1926.  It was a wooden frame structure, like most in Kupiskis, with roofs made of tin or, in some cases, the older ones were made of thatch, a great fire hazard.  The home had an outdoor well and garden.  According to Velve Sachar, he bought the house, which was located near Dvora Gurevic's brick house in a  small lane next to Karesh the Fisherman, from Leib Brozin.  Another Sachar property was at 45 Gediminas gatve, which was a main thoroughfare in Kupiskis.

My Uncle Hirsch Sachar and his son, my cousin Marek Arone

Kenneth Sachar generously shared this interesting article about the fate of Kupishoker Hirsch Sachar.  It was originally written for his synagogue magazine, New North London Synagogue in Finchley, London, UK.  Hirsch Sachar was a brother of Manual Sachar and a son of Velve Sachar and Rocha-Beila Zieper.

My late father, Manual Sachar Z”L, was born in Kupishok/Kupiskis a shtetl in north east Lithuania near Ponavez where the Yeshiva was. He studied at the Hebrew medium Gymnasium there and emigrated to South Africa in 1929, travelling on his own aged 17.

Growing up in Cape Town I heard stories about my father’s childhood, how during the First World War the entire family was relocated by train to the east, of his freezing feet being warmed inside a relative’s jacket.  On the journey they were starving and a farmer caught a cousin trying to steal potatoes in a frozen snow covered field. The farmer raised his sword above his head to kill the cousin but on some whim of compassion he relented and let him go.

My father had an older brother Hirsch who did not come with the family when they joined my father in Cape Town. We were told that Hirsch had “missed the train”. As a child I had an image of a man running frantically, almost comically, suitcases in hand, alongside the train tracks, as the train  recedes into the distance.

In 1966 my father visited the Soviet Union, no mean feat on a South African passport at that time.  He made contact with remnants of the family in Moscow. Because they were fearful of the KGB the meetings had to be clandestine. Their first encounter was on the steps outside the Bolshoi Ballet Theatre where the cousins pretended to be ticket touts, selling tickets for the ballet.

In 1972 Hirsch’s son, my cousin Marek Arone, emigrated to Israel with his family. This was long before the era of Glasnost and Perestroika during which Jews started emigrating from Russia to Israel, Germany and the US. I don’t know how this Aliyah was arranged given that Marek was a successful senior engineer ( of metallurgy ) with twenty or so graduate engineers working under him, living in Moscow in a flat, with a car and a lakeside Dacha.  In 1978 Marek and his wife Dora were at our wedding in Cape Town.

In the 1990s my daughter Cassy and I were in Israel and we went up to Haifa to visit with Marek and Dora. This is my recollection of what Marek told us about his father. Hirsch did not “miss the train”. He was much older than my father, having been born before my zaida went out on his own to Cape Town to work in his in-laws’ business,  returning to Kupishok after ten years when he had three more children. Hirsch chose not to emigrate because he was a committed idealistic Bolshevik. He was highly intelligent and went on to sit on the Ukrainian ruling Soviet Committee. Marek told us how his father was taken during the Stalin purges of the late 1930s. He described his father’s arrest. Marek was doing his homework and his father knew the security police were coming to arrest him and, because he did not want his son to witness his arrest, he stepped out of the flat into the corridor. Later the family were told that he had been sentenced to ten years hard labour “without visiting rights”. This last phrase was known to be a code for a death sentence because you can’t visit people who have been killed.

Stalin also went after the families of those he killed. Hirsch and Marek’s mother had been idealistic utopians. They believed in the wonderful new world order they were going to create and did not want to enter into an “establishment” marriage so they never got married. This saved the lives of Marek and his mother. Marek took his mother’s surname, Arone.  They ran and hid under that name and Stalin never found them.

In the 1950s under Khrushchev they went to court and were able to rehabilitate Hirsch’s name. Marek passed away in 2018. He is survived by his wife Dora and his son, Gregory Arone, a professor of Mathematics.

Kenneth Sachar. January 2021.