It is known that Hermann Kallenbach was a close friend of Mohandas Gandhi, future Mahatma, during his South Africa years. It is less known that Kallenbach was from Lithuania. In most sources he is still referred to as German because of his German passport. But he was born in Žemaičių Naumiestis, then under the Russian empire, as most of today’s Lithuania was in the 19th century, and grew up in a small border town of Rusnė, then part of German empire. Kallenbach’s father had a sawmill in Rusnė, a transit point for Lithuanian timber exported through the Baltic sea.
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Kallenbach belonged to a Jewish community called Litvaks (meaning ‘from Lithuania’ in the Yidish language). In the late 19th century, Litvaks started migrating to South Africa, which was what Kallenbach did too after completing architecture studies in Germany.
Gandhi with Sonia Schlesin and Kallenbach. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
In Johannesburg, Kallenbach soon started earning well and was about to become yet another well-to-do European settler. Meeting young Gandhi around 1904 changed his life. He became Gandhi‘s follower and companion in his fight and his spiritual and social experiments. He bought a farm for Gandhi’s ideas to acquire shape, known as Tolstoy Farm. It is impossible to underestimate Gandhi’s impact on Kallenbach: the Litvak renounced all pleasures and comforts, became a vegetarian (almost unheard of in his native land and in his community). But he too had influenced Gandhi who at that time was actively experimenting with ideas of simplicity and self-reliance.
Trusted friend
Gandhi was fascinated by Kallenbach’s “golden hands” as we say in Lithuania about a person who can make things himself. It may have well been due to his childhood experience at his father‘s sawmill or due to the general ‘DIY’ culture prevalent in Eastern Europe and Lithuania till today, but indeed he could make all things by himself: from a chair to a house. Gandhi often called Kallenbach a carpenter; it is also how Kallenbach is introduced by Gandhi in the movie Gandhi by Richard Attenborough.
Gandhi wrote that Kallenbach taught him to make his iconic sandals. This was the technique of the Trappist monks based near Durban: Kallenbach was sent there by Gandhi to learn from them. Kallenbach was also Gandhi‘s trusted friend and consoler in his arguments with his family members. There were other Litvaks around Gandhi in his formative years, like his personal secretary Sonia Schlesin who too was a Jewish girl from Lithuania. In fact many Eastern European Jews, despite being privileged ‘whites’ openly sympathised with the oppressed communities of Indians and Africans, like Pauline Podlashuk from the Lithuanian town of Šiauliai.
Gandhi’s sandals. | Photo Credit: AP
In 1914, Kallenbach accompanied Gandhi to India, but as WWI broke out, he being a German passport holder, was interned by Britain as enemy. The friends were separated, but Gandhi continued to write to him frequently, telling him about his trials and tribulations, both on India’s freedom struggle that he came to lead and his personal challenges. Later, Kallenbach went back to South Africa where he worked as an architect. The friends only met more than two decades later. As Nazism started raging in Germany he immersed himself in the Zionist movement and came to India in 1937 and 1939 to ask for the Mahatma’s blessing for the Jewish state in-the-making. When Kallenbach died in 1940, Mahatma Gandhi lamented that he had lost a close friend. It is only recently that Lithuanians discovered this incredible story.
A monument to friends
In 2015, a beautiful monument by a Lithuanian sculptor, Romualdas Kvintas, to both friends was unveiled in Rusnė, Kallenbach’s childhood town. It was co-funded by the Goodwill Foundation of the Lithuanian Government and by Yusuf Hamied, Indian entrepreneur, philanthropist and CEO of Cipla. Hamied surprisingly, was born in Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, to the patriarch of Indian pharma K.A. Hamied and his Litvak mother, Luba Derchanska, to whose memory the monument is dedicated. The monument depicts the two friends in their mature years: a smiling Mahatma in his dhoti and sandals, Kallenbach staring dreamily into the sky, hands in his pockets. Rusnė is a charming small town on the island, surrounded by waters and floodplains, on the route of seasonal bird migration. People lead simple lives there and still make things with their own hands, just like Kallenbach.
The sculpture became a hit, a place of pilgrimage for Lithuanian and Indian tourists alike, with the obligatory stroll along the riverside to lay flowers at the monument. It is more than a piece of art but also a living monument to the Mahatma’s ideas, a testimony to their global appeal. It also changed the town, injected it with vitality and inspiration; one can teach world history through the story of the two soulmates. Gandhi Jayanti is regularly celebrated in Rusnė. Kallenbach too deserves to be remembered in his own turn: as an architect who left an imprint in the architectural heritage of South Africa, including the famous Satyagraha House.
We celebrate Kallenbach’s birthday this month, and as a Lithuanian I feel proud that our people have crossed borders, physical and spiritual, reached out to the greatest ideas and personalities of our planet, were marked by them and even influenced them in their small way. Like Kallenbach who taught Gandhi to make sandals.
The writer is Ambassador of Lithuania in India with a background in Indology.
