From Papilė to Zurich, l’dor v’dor

Nearly fifty years ago, on November 13, 1976, my grandfather Samuel Gochin was called to the Torah at my bar mitzvah in South Africa. He was 75 years old.

Next weekend, in Zurich, I will be called to the Torah at the bar mitzvah of Liam, the great-grandson of my cousin Sarah Gochin. I am 62.

I will not stand at the same bimah at which my grandfather stood. I will occupy the place in our family that he once occupied: an older generation rising before the Torah to welcome the next.

Sam carried Papilė with him when he made his aliyah at my bar mitzvah. He carried the memories of the Lithuanian Jewish world into which he had been born, the hunger and displacement of his childhood, the family he had lost and the life he had rebuilt in South Africa.

When I rise in Zurich, I will carry Sam with me. I will also carry Mones, Sarah, her murdered sister Tsile and every branch of our family that history attempted to sever.

I will stand there because Lithuania failed to destroy us.

We are the tattered remnants.

We are also the victory.

My grandfather was born into a Jewish family rooted in Papilė, where generations of our ancestors had lived, prayed, married, raised children and buried their dead.

His childhood was torn apart by the First World War. In 1915, his family was deported eastward into Ukraine. Sam later told me of searching through garbage for scraps of food. His father, a brother and a sister died during those years of hunger and displacement.

He returned to Lithuania with what remained of his family. He and his mother registered as Lithuanian citizens. Sam served in the Lithuanian military. Photographs showed him in uniform and later in a military hospital, where he told me he had learned to play musical instruments.

In 1926, shortly after completing his military service, he left for South Africa. There he built a new life and became the gentle, deeply loved patriarch of our family.

As a child, I sat at his feet while he told me stories of the “Old Country.” I adored him. I did not yet understand that I was listening to fragments of a Jewish civilization that existed only in memory.

At my bar mitzvah, Sam’s aliyah appeared to be an ordinary family honor: a grandfather called to the Torah beside his grandson.

The Jewish child who had searched for food during deportation was standing before the Torah at his grandson’s bar mitzvah in South Africa. The boy from Papilė had lived to see his family take root on another continent.

I was 13. I could not yet comprehend the full weight of what I was witnessing.

The branches that ended in 1941

After Sam’s death, I began reconstructing the family history he had carried within him.

The archives revealed the destruction of the branch that had remained in Papilė. Mones lived there with his family, including........

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