This article begins with one name: Samuel Gochin.

Lithuania knew that name. It knew him as a Jewish child from Papilė. It knew him as a survivor of deportation. It knew him as a young man taken by armies that did not ask his permission. It knew him as a conscript in the Lithuanian army, as a patient in a Lithuanian military hospital, and as the holder of a Lithuanian internal passport.

Then, when his grandson asked Lithuania to record that same man as Lithuanian again, the state resisted.

That resistance is why citizenship became Kaddish.

My grandfather asked me to remember. In the South African Jewish Report, I later wrote to him as Zayde: you asked me to visit the family cemetery in the old country and recite Kaddish. I did. But when I arrived, I found not memory, but organized forgetting. There was almost nothing Jewish remaining.

So I made Lithuania say his name.

In 1913, the Gochin family of Papilė, in the Šiauliai District, sat for a family photograph. My grandfather Samuel was a boy in that photograph. Lithuanian records show that the Gochin family had lived in Papilė since at least the late 1700s. The photograph survives. The people in that world do not.

That is the first document in this case: not a law, not a judgment, not an archive stamp, but a family photograph.

A photograph can become evidence. It proves presence. It proves belonging. It shows that before Lithuania learned to speak of its Jews as absence, Jewish families were part of the ordinary life of Lithuanian towns. The later crime was not that Jews disappeared. The crime was that Jews were murdered, and then the state learned how to speak as if their absence required no accounting.

Sam was born in February 1902. His bar mitzvah would have been in February 1915. Three months later, on 4 May 1915, the Jews of Papilė were deported during the Russian expulsions of Jews from the war zone. The pretext was the old antisemitic accusation of Jewish disloyalty: Jews were treated as spies, traitors, or a fifth column. In town after town, the accusation was not proved. It was useful.

This is how the dual-loyalty canard works. A state first says the Jew cannot be trusted. Then it demands that the Jew prove loyalty with his body. European armies did this repeatedly. Jews served in the Russian army while being suspected by Russia; Jews served in the German army while later being defamed by Germany; Jews served in armies fighting one another because each state claimed its Jews while doubting them. The Jew was always suspected of serving another master, then pushed forward to bleed for the master who suspected him.

Sam’s childhood made that contradiction literal. He was thirteen when deported. He was fifteen when he was taken into military service in Byelorussia: first by the Whites, then by the Reds, then by the Whites again. No one asked whether a deported Jewish child wished to serve. No one asked whether he was old enough. No one asked whether he was being forced to fight another Jewish boy in another uniform, each proving loyalty to a state that would betray him.

The armies did not give a damn how many Jews were killed or wounded. Jews were expendable cannon fodder. Their loyalty was doubted when rights were at stake, and demanded when death was required.

After returning to Lithuania, Sam was conscripted in 1924 by the Recruitment Commission of Šiauliai District. He served in the 5th Grand Duke Kęstutis Infantry Regiment in Kaunas. Lithuania’s compulsory military service law applied to male citizens. If Sam could be required to serve in the Lithuanian army, Lithuania knew he belonged to the body of the state.

On 6 June 1924, Sam was admitted to the Jonas Basanavičius War Hospital in Kaunas. His military medical file recorded chest pain, spitting blood, bronchial symptoms, and spots on his left lung. Doctors recommended that he be placed in the recruit reserves. The military did not release him then. He served until the end of 1925.

There is no mystery here. Lithuania had enough documentation to conscript him, hospitalize him, keep him in service, issue him documents, and allow him to leave. Decades later, when his descendant asked Lithuania to recognize him as a Lithuanian citizen, the same state acted as if the record were not enough.

Sam’s internal passport record exposes the system. On 5 November 1924, in Papilė, Sam was issued an internal passport of the Lithuanian Republic. His sister Esther was issued one too. The register identified Sam as “Jew” and Esther as “Jewess,” while another person nearby was identified as Lithuanian.

That distinction was not incidental. It was the state’s grammar. Lithuania could issue a Jew a Lithuanian passport while still marking him as outside the Lithuanian national body. Sam was Lithuanian enough to serve, Lithuanian enough to be controlled, Lithuanian enough to be marked, but later not Lithuanian enough to be remembered.

Sam left Lithuania in February 1926 and reached Port Elizabeth, South Africa, in March. He married Dora Rummel in 1929. His mother Chaie and sister Esther later reached South Africa too. Their survival depended on leaving Europe.

South Africa did not erase Lithuania from him. It carried Lithuania forward in memory, trauma, photographs, food habits, thrift, silence, stories, and instructions to grandchildren. In my childhood, Lithuania was not an abstraction. It was the old country. It was part of Jewishness. It was also where almost everyone else remained buried, murdered, or unnamed.

That is why I applied for Lithuanian citizenship. I did not need a passport. I needed Lithuania to record Sam Gochin. I wanted the state that had used him, marked him, and then denied him, to place his name back into the record.

The struggle did not begin neatly in one file. I began enquiring about reclaiming my family’s citizenship in 1989, before Lithuania regained independence. In a later interview, I described applying in 1991, then again in 2004, and then being dragged through repeated denials and lawsuits. In 2019, the South African Jewish Report summarized what Lithuania forced me to do: after five lawsuits, I was finally granted citizenship, proving that my grandfather could be both Jewish and Lithuanian.

That was the legal victory. It was not yet the moral lesson.

The moral lesson came when I recognized the method. Lithuania had used the same strategy against Chaie’s family in 1922 that it later used against me. In 1922, after the Papilė vital records had been destroyed, Lithuanian officials demanded documents the family could not produce, even though the Jewish community and local council supplied testimony. The impossible document became the weapon. While the state obstructed, family members died of exhaustion, disease, and starvation in Melitopol.

In my case, Lithuania again demanded the impossible, ignored the available, and then called the denial legal. The form had changed. The instinct had not. Demand what cannot be produced. Discount what has been produced. Invent a phantom alternative. Delay until the Jew exhausts himself. Then pretend the file, not the prejudice, made the decision.

That recognition was the exact moment I became an activist. I understood that this was not one bureaucratic insult and not one family dispute. It was multi-generational betrayal. The same state logic that had made Chaie powerless in 1922 had returned in modern legal dress against her descendants. She could not fight them. I could.

And I have learned the bitterest lesson of all: over all these many decades, not a single thing has changed. The uniforms change. The letterhead changes. The excuse changes. The method remains.

Lithuania knew how to count Sam when counting created obligation for him. It resisted counting him when recognition created obligation for Lithuania. We were Lithuanian when Lithuania needed soldiers, taxes, documents, heritage tourism, or moral credit. We became Jews when Lithuania wished to exclude, deflect, or deny.

My son later received a Lithuanian conscription notice. That completed the circle. Lithuania had conscripted my grandfather. Lithuania denied my grandfather. Then Lithuania’s system reached forward again to his descendant. The state still knew how to claim Jewish bodies when convenient.

A name is not enough. It does not resurrect the dead. It does not punish murderers. It does not restore stolen homes, synagogues, schools, cemeteries, books, or businesses. It does not reverse starvation in Melitopol or murder in Papilė.

But a name blocks erasure.

Samuel Gochin existed.

He was born in Papilė. He was deported as a Jewish child. He was taken into foreign armies. He returned to Lithuania. He was conscripted into the Lithuanian army. He served in the 5th Grand Duke Kęstutis Infantry Regiment. He was hospitalized in Lithuania’s military system. He was issued a Lithuanian internal passport. He was marked by the state as a Jew. He left for South Africa. He taught his grandson to remember.

Lithuania denied him until Lithuania was forced not to.

That is why I write his name.

Every time his name is recorded, Lithuania’s erasure fails again.

That is citizenship as Kaddish.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)