I

To me, there is something unfathomable in the following declaration, made by Mendel Berlin in 1946 to his son Isaiah:

I know what he means, of course; there is utter clarity about that. But even though I have read of countless atrocities perpetrated against the Jews in the Holocaust, I still cannot fathom how a father writes these words to his child. How, in what tone, with what explanation, does one say that the murder of one's entire family is confirmed? Something in that long sentence will always remain a deep mystery.

Mendel Berlin's striking sentence is at the start (and at the heart) of a long, fulsome account of the history of the Berlin family, or the Berlin–Volshonok– Schneerson–Zuckerman–Apter family, with all its interrelationships, marriages (good and bad), schooling, religious behaviour, travels, business deals, loves and quarrels, dating back to 1750. The narrative moves around the Pale of Settlement to Riga, Petrograd, Moscow, and back to Riga, and ends in the safe haven of Britain. One surviving remnant of the large family – Mendel, his wife Marie, their son Isaiah – had been refugees in that safe haven since 1921. For the father, it was imperative after the devastation of the war that the son know his heritage.

Isaiah knew that his relatives had died, even if he didn't know exactly how many or in what manner. He has to have been aware that, had his own family remained in Riga rather than emigrating to the UK in 1921, he himself would probably have been murdered along with his parents and the entire Jewish community of Riga.

His death, like that of his relatives, would probably have occurred during one of two ‘actions’ , on 30 November and 8 December 1941, when the Jews incarcerated in the Riga ghetto were marched to the killing fields of Rumbula, outside Riga, and massacred en masse. On those two days alone, about 25,000 Jews were killed.