Leon

The Lithuanian Jews were once a large and diverse group of over one-and-a-half-million men, women and children, linked by the religion they practiced and the small area of land close to the Baltic Sea they lived on. Until 1941, they owned and ran the majority of Lithuania’s photo ateliers, and were responsible for the creation of at least 10 million photographs before almost all of them were murdered during the Holocaust. Camera Obscura is an ever-expanding website that among other things celebrates these people’s mostly forgotten lives and work, and attempts to bring some closure to the horrific mess created by both the Nazi and Soviet regimes in Lithuania during the 20th century. Active for almost four decades, Leon Balk is one of the more interesting Lithuanian Jewish photographers of his generation. Starting his career as a competent albeit unremarkable portrait photographer on the south coast of England before the First World War, the early death of his first wife took him back to Lithuania, where he married for a second time and inadvertently reinvented himself as one of the most important chroniclers of Jewish life in Lithuania in the years immediately before the Holocaust. Currently the subject of an extended period of research, here are the basics so far.

I first came across Leon Balk by accident when I was visiting Eastbourne for something entirely unrelated in 2024. Born in the Lithuanian city of Tauragė in 1878, which at the time was part of the Russian Empire, Leon moved/escaped to the East End of London in about 1900, where he fell under the spell of a fellow Lithuanian Jew called Woolf Kresovsky (see The Invisible Magicians), a studio photographer some 15 years his senior with whom he lived for a while at 87 Leman Street in Whitechapel. Fast forward a couple of years, and by 1903 Leon, a violinist when he arrived in England, was now earning a living as a studio photographer, inhabiting a first-floor flat in Eastbourne with his Lithuanian Jewish wife Mina—or Minnie—and their first child Maurice, and running a photography business downstairs. After a short move east along the coast to larger accommodation and a new studio in Bexhill-on-Sea a couple of years later, over the next decade or so Leon did all the things a father should and shouldn’t do, including having another son and a daughter with Mina, having an illegitimate son with a woman from Streatham called Emma, playing the violin and the occasional game of cricket with a peculiar charitable organisation known as the Bexhill Brotherhood, and finally moving back to London sometime during the First World War, where he was last heard of driving an ambulance with a fellow Ashkenazi Jew called Mr. Roth. 

At around the same time that I was running out of information for my research on the internet, I managed to track down one of Leon’s grandsons, Martin, in Southampton, who was able to provide me with the kind of inside information that turns an interesting story into something special. Martin also introduced me to his cousin, Carol, in London, who had some equally illuminating knowledge—and some beautiful photographs to go with it. It turns out that Leon was widowed in 1923, and under circumstances that have been lost to time moved back to Lithuania as a British subject1 with his teenage daughter, Bessie, where they settled in the small Jewish quarter in the port city of Klaipėda. By 1925, Leon was married again, this time to a woman by the name of Lina Bergmann, who was originally from Königsberg (today the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad), and who lived in Klaipėda with two of her merchant brothers and their families. Lina and Leon had two children together, Judith (1926) and David (1928), who were the parents of Carol and Martin respectively, with whom I’d recently been in contact with in Southampton and London. Leon in the meantime was busy reinventing himself as the foremost photographer of Jewish life in Klaipėda. This second life produced an amazing portfolio of work that had been mostly without a recognised author for almost a century until several of Carol’s family photographs helped make the connection. Meanwhile, Leon passed away unexpectedly of a heart attack on March 17, 1938, just five days before Nazi Germany occupied Klaipėda and the surrounding region in their last land grab before Hitler invaded western Poland on September 1, and the Second World War began.

Leon was always confident that his and Lina’s British passports2 would be enough to protect his family from the Nazis. Lina, a German Jew by birth, was less optimistic, and consequently spent five weeks after her husband’s death preparing to leave. On April 27, Lina, Judith and David arrived at the British Embassy, 1,000 km away in Berlin, where a bureaucrat with an illegible signature added Judith and David’s names to Lina’s passport. After getting the visas they needed to enter the Netherlands, they continued their journey west to the Hook of Holland and a ferry to the safety of England. Bessie, who’d already been in the UK for some time, looked after them when they arrived. The rest of the Bergmann family travelled east as part of the mass exodus of around 9,000 Jews from Klaipėda to the section of Lithuania that was still unoccupied, where they settled in the northern city of Šiauliai.

This still free part of Lithuania ran out of luck when it was dubiously incorporated into the Soviet Union after sham elections were held on August 3, 1940. The Soviets dismantled almost all Jewish institutions and closed most synagogues by the time Nazi Germany launched a massive invasion less than a year later, on June 22, 1941. Whereas the Soviet Union stopped at destroying the actual people, the Nazis made it a priority to kill all the Jews and to steal all of their valuable property. In Šiauliai, the Nazis created a ghetto, which was sealed on August 15, 1941. Unlike rural Jews, who had all been murdered by the autumn, those living in the larger cities were kept alive and used as slave labour. Approximately 6,000 Jews were forced into the Šiauliai Ghetto, including Mirjam and most of the Bergmann family. According to a census taken on May 27, 1941, Mirjam (spelled ‘Miriam’ in Nazi documents) worked in the German Cemetery, a privilege which almost certainly contributed to her survival. In July 1944, with the Soviet advance getting nearer, Šiauliai was completely emptied of its few surviving Jews, with the handful still alive being sent to a number of different concentration camps in Poland and Germany. The survival rate in the camps was no better than in the ghettos, but somehow Mirjam survived (the only member of the family still in Lithuania to do so), and was finally liberated in May 1945. The only other person currently known to have survived was Mirjam’s oldest sister, Ruth, who emigrated to Prague with her fiancé in 1936, and then to Chile a year or so later. Mirjam finally managed to leave Europe in 1949, where she joined her sister in South America.

Research is ongoing.

1  Leon became a British subject in 1906, five years after he settled in England.

2 Lina became a British subject in 1925, when she married Leon in Klaipėda.

Kibbutz Hachshara

Translating from Hebrew as kibbutz preparation, the term kibbutz hachshara can be used to describe a number of different organisations that were operating primarily before the Second World War, whose common goal was the training of young Jewish women and men in a variety of trades in readiness for new lives in what was still known as Mandatory Palestine. During the interwar period until Nazi Germany seized it in March 1939, Klaipėda was an important centre for the kibbutz hachshara movement in Lithuania, not least in the field of agriculture. When they weren’t out in the countryside, students would often spend time in Klaipėda itself, where a Leon Balk photograph to commemorate a special event was more or less compulsory. Today scattered in museums and private homes all over the world, these extraordinary documents are currently in the slow process of being identified and organised as part of the Camera Obscura project.