CAMERA OBSCURA

Pre-Second World War Lithuanian Jewish Photographs
A Pictorial History Exposed

DOWN BY THE SEA

A STORY IN DEVELOPMENT

A girl and her young brother pose for a picture in a Klaipėda photography studio before the war. Judith Balk is about 12. David is 10. British subjects who were born in Klaipėda and who speak German and Yiddish at home, their photographer father, Leon, a Lithuanian Jew from Tauragė who became a naturalised British subject when he worked as a portrait and studio photographer in southern England before the First World War, is about to die unexpectedly, five days before Klaipėda is occupied by Nazi Germany. His wife, Lina, says goodbye to her two brothers and their families for the last time and catches a train to Berlin with her children, where Judith and David's names are added to her British passport and the family escape to the United Kingdom, where they finally settled in Glasgow. Down by the Sea is a project in development that uses Leon Balk's scattered archive of Klaipėda photographs, including the few photographs Lina and the children took with them when they escaped Nazi Germany, to piece together the previously untold story...

ABOUT THE FEW WHO SURVIVED

Lina Balk

Pictured on the left playing chess with her English stepdaughter, Bessie, Lina Balk was born Lina Bergmann in the East Prussian village of Ellernthal on June 20, 1888. A German Jew who became a British subject when she married the photographer Leon Balk in Klaipėda on October 26, 1925, Lina survived the Holocaust after her British passport was altered at the British Embassy in Berlin on April 27, 1939, enabling her and her two young children to escape Nazi Germany and travel to the United Kingdom. Lina Balk passed away in Glasgow on September 14, 1948, where she lies at rest in the city's Glenduffhill Jewish Cemetery.

Bessie Balk

Born in Bexhill-on-Sea on September 13, 1910 and the youngest of Leon Balk's three children from his first marriage to Mina 'Minnie' Balk née Blumenthal, Bessie Balk lived with her father and his new family in Klaipėda for most of the interwar period before returning to the United Kingdom on a currently unknown date during the 1930s, and marrying for the first time in 1938. The love and devotion she felt towards her stepmother and half-siblings was clearly expressed by the efforts she went to in order to make everyone feel welcome and at home when they arrived in London as refugees at the end of April 1939. Bessie had a successful career in the music industry with her own office on London's Denmark Street. Married twice and the mother of one daughter, she passed away in Camden in 1987.

Judith & David Balk

The two children from Leon Balk's second marriage to Lina Bergmann, Judith (born in Klaipėda on February 15, 1926) and David (born in Klaipėda on June 26, 1928) were able to make new lives for themselves and start their own families in the United Kingdom after escaping Nazi Germany with their mother in April 1939. Judith followed in her father's footsteps and was a keen amateur photographer who worked as a retoucher in at least one photography studio in Glasgow after the war.

Kibbutz Hachshara

Lina, Leon, Bessie, Judith and David Balk all lived together in a house in Klaipėda at Junkerių g. 4. Destroyed during the war, the building also housed Leon's photography studio, where he inadvertently became the city's foremost photographer of Jewish life and culture, providing among other things an unparalleled visual record of young Lithuanian Jews preparing to emigrate to Palestine with the help of the British authorities in Lithuania, including the British Hero of the Holocaust, Thomas Preston. A small selection of these extraordinary photographs can be seen here.

AND THE THOUSANDS WHO MOSTLY DIDN'T

The Bergmanns

Two of Lina Balk's brothers are known to have been living in the Klaipėda region during the interwar period, including her older brother, Gdalija, also known as Isador/Isadore Gdalija, who ran a fishing supplies shop inside a building that still exists in the small town of Kintai about 40 kilometres south of the main city. Gdalija lived with his wife, also called Lina, and their five children, Ruth, Joachim, Ethel, Mirjam and Chana. Of the seven members of the family, most of whom were imprisoned in the Šiauliai Ghetto during the German occupation of Lithuania, only two survived. Ruth married and emigrated to Chile before the war, and Mirjam was liberated from Dachau in May 1945. Joachim was probably murdered during the first pogroms that took place in Šiauliai during June and July 1941, and the final fate of Chana remains a mystery.

From left to right: Lina, Mirjam, Ruth (standing), Joachim, Ethel, Gdalija and Chana (sitting on her father's lap).

The Puhns

Among the small handful of iconic photographs that have become irrevocably associated with the Holocaust is this one. Taken by an anonymous photographer on an unknown day in April 1939, the image shows Aron Puhn (above ↑) with his wife, Jocha, and their two children, Civa and Aviva, hurrying along an unidentified street in Klaipėda to catch a train to an uncertain future in the Lithuanian city of Šiauliai. Born in the Lithuanian town of Salantai on November 24, 1891, Aron Puhn, who owned a large printing house in Klaipėda before the war, was murdered in Šiauliai on an unrecorded date during the first few weeks of the German occupation of the city. Born in Königsberg on June 7, 1895, his wife, Jocha, known by everyone as Ella, is recorded along with the couple's two daughters, 10-year-old Civa and 13-year-old Aviva, as being prisoners in the Šiauliai Ghetto on May 27, 1942. Ella was last recorded as being alive when she entered the Stutthof concentration camp without her children on July 19, 1944. The Balks and the Puhns were neighbours before the war, and Leon Balk is known to have taken several photographs of the family during the 1930s. In a curious coincidence, Ella Kuhn was the head bookkeeper at Israelit & Co, one of the largest companies in interwar Lithuania that was part-owned by the Lithuanian Jewish industrialist and textile magnate, Tobias Israelit. Tobias lived in Klaipėda with his wife and children during the 1930s. His 15-year-old daughter, Dorothea, was sent to a private school in the south of England a few weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War. After studying photography in Manchester and marrying a fellow Jewish refugee from Poland, Dorothea Israelit became Dorothy Bohm, one of the leading female figures in postwar British photography.

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