Baltic Countdown: A Nation Vanishes by Peggie Benton

Author:Peggie Benton [Benton, Peggie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Memoir
Publisher: Dan Benton
Published: 2011-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

With the office work-load increasing every day and the situation so uncertain it was only possible to snatch an occasional night at the dacha, so Lotte returned to Riga, with her plants and Vufi crammed into an oilcloth bag.

The moments of escape to the Strand were wonderfully peaceful and restoring. The train service had been severely reduced and the carriages were now crowded and no longer clean, so on arrival at the dacha we plunged into the river. After this, the men would chop wood for the kitchen stove or tackle some project in Dick’s workshop, while Kathleen and I chatted as she watered the rings of pansies round the fruit trees and the bright petunias she had planted in the window boxes of our small house.

Kathleen’s family had lived for generations in St Petersburg and when young, she and her sister were known as the ‘beautiful Misses Gellibrand’. Dick, too, came from an Anglo-Russian family and he would amuse us with stories of his boyhood and how, when he was sent to boarding school in England, the boys insisted on calling him ‘Jomskikoff, and asking why there was no snow on his boots.

After supper, as the light slowly faded, we would watch the rafts of pine logs drifting down the river, tied together to form a snake sometimes as much as half a kilometre long, guided round the bends by men with poles who jumped from one raft to another. Along the arc of the bridge navigation lights flashed as the sun dipped towards midnight, green for the boat channel and a red warning when the centre span swung out to allow the passage of a steamer.

With the escape route to the UK virtually cut, the demand for British visas had eased but now, in spite of the threat of Arab violence, the unfortunate Jews were determined to use any means of getting to Palestine. Though the main immigration quota was full for months to come, there was one visa category still open to a number of people in Riga. Anyone who could prove that he owned £1,000 worth of property in Palestine, or a like sum deposited in a bank there, could have a so-called capitalist visa. This was meant to ensure that such immigrants would not become a charge on the limited resources of the territory then under British mandate.

Most of the people with ‘capitalist’ qualifications had hitherto been comfortably established in Riga and unwilling to abandon their homes and businesses. Now, however, anything seemed better than to fall a victim to Russian anti-semitism, and applications for capitalist visas came flooding in. According to the rules such applications had to be sent to London and then forwarded to Palestine for authentification of the claims. If the reply was favourable, London authorized the visa. Even in peace time this procedure was slow but now, with communications disrupted, it was proving of little practical use. So we hit on a scheme by which we would send a reply-paid

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