After her father was taken, Riva and her family never spent a night at home. Instead they slept out in the potato fields or in the homes of their neighbours, being careful never to spend more than one night in any one place. Nonetheless, they never went far from their house and still visited it during the day. Then, in September 1941, rumours of a change in policy towards the Jews began to spread around the village. It was said that the Germans had ordered the killing of every Jew in Lithuania, including women and children. ‘A woman had even said, “I know that they’ve already dug the pits,”’ says Riva, ‘but we thought that maybe the pit was for pótatoes . . . for the war. She was running round the ghetto saying, “They’re going to shoot us tomorrow, you must flee!” But the people were thinking, “Perhaps they aren’t going to shoot us, perhaps they dug those pits for no particular reason.” That’s how stupid we were. We didn’t imagine that they would come to kill us so fast. The clever Jewish people said that since some kind of holiday was coming, we could relax for a few days.’
As 9 September was a church holiday, many Jews in Butrimonys thought it would be the one day on which their safety was guaranteed. They were wrong. That morning Lithuanian policemen, helped by enthusiastic locals, began rounding up the women, children and old people who constituted the remaining Jewish population of Butrimonys. Riva and her mother were part of a column herded along a road out of the village. Their destination was about 2 kilometres away – a pit that had been dug about 200 metres from the road among grassland and trees. The Jews shuffling to their deaths were weak with hunger, many shaken by living rough in the fields. ‘I was thinking they’d kill everyone and the survivors would be cursed,’ says Riva. ‘But right up until the very last moment, I still had a faint vestige of hope.’ When they were a little over 500 metres from the place of execution, Riva saw a path leading off into the forest on the other side of the road. She dragged her mother towards it and together they hid behind some shrubs. The guards had grown lazy because the rest of the Jews were so compliant and Riva and her mother were not missed. Minutes later they heard gunshots. ‘Dogs were barking, perhaps they were frightened by the sound of the shooting,’ says Riva. ‘My mother said, “They’re already shooting!” I said, “No, no, they’re dogs.” I only said that because I was scared that my mother would go mad.’
That same day Alfonsas Navasinskas was crossing a nearby meadow with a friend, Kosima. ‘We saw people being driven along from Butrimonys,’ he says. ‘Someone on horseback came first and then some policemen and then some ordinary people – a shopkeeper and some clerks who worked in the offices distributing food coupons. They had all gathered together to take the Jews along. They were given sticks and the odd rifle.’ Navasinskas and his friend followed the group and watched as the Jews were ordered to lie down on the grass. ‘Then along came the men who did the shooting. “Everybody get up,” the Jews were told.’ Navasinskas noticed that torn banknotes lay scattered on the ground. The Jews had ripped up their money to prevent the killers profiting from them. ‘I waited a little and then went closer,’ says Navasinskas. ‘I could hear them as they shouted, “Choose your space, you so and so!”’ He watched as a new group of Jews were ordered to strip at the side of the pit. As they did, some threw their clothes to people they knew in the crowd to prevent their killers from stealing their possessions. Navasinskas later heard remarks by a villager, who had been given an overcoat by one of the condemned Jews just before he was shot: ‘Had the Jews survived, I wouldn’t have got it. I’ll wear it to a dance tonight!’ He also heard a Jewish woman tell another local, ‘Here’s a cardigan, give it to your wife.’ The buttons were covered with cloth but they were gold coins from the Tsar’s time. The recipient of the cardigan, unaware of its hidden value chucked it in the farmyard with the chickens. In time, the chickens pecked holes in the cloth and revealed the glittering coins to the farmer. ‘He has since died, but he told me that to have deserved finding the coins he must have been deemed “good in the eyes of God”.’
After he had seen five groups of Jews shot at the pit, Alfonsas Navasinskas went home alone (his friend stayed on to collect the torn-up money). ‘I kept turning round to look behind me, wondering whether anybody was coming after me. It was such a horrible feeling. Nobody spoke up for the Jews, nobody said a word. It was as if it were all quite normal.’
Another villager who came to witness the murders was Juozas Gramauskas, then twenty-one years old. ‘The women, children and old men were shot inside the pit,’ he says. ‘The children were going from person to person, shouting, “Mummy, Daddy, Mummy, Daddy, Mummy!” I think someone was calling for his daughter. And along came a really fat chap with a pistol and . . . bang, bang! All the grief and weeping was just heartbreaking. Even now, I cannot bear the memory of all the lamenting and crying there. To this day I cannot imagine what was going on.’
The shooting was carried out by Lithuanian soldiers acting under German orders. There were German soldiers present but they simply observed the slaughter. The killing went on until evening, when fires were lit in order to see if there was any movement inside the pit. ‘I constantly see it before my eyes, the beasts!’ says Juozas Gramauskas.
All this horror is registered in the report of Einsatzkommando 3 simply as follows: ‘9.9.41 Butrimonys – 67 Jews, 370 Jewesses, 303 Jewish children – (total) 740.’ Some villagers remember the execution day as 8 rather than 9 September and recall seeing as many as 900 Jews killed. In the savage circumstances precise record-keeping was hardly practicable.
It is almost impossible to understand how human beings could do this. An easy route, and one that has been taken by some, is to say that those involved were all ‘mad’, but the evidence scarcely supports this easy conclusion. The diary of a German/Austrian member of an Einsatzkommando, Felix Landau, survives. He was a cabinet-maker by trade, who joined the Nazis in 1931 at the age of twenty-one and became a member of the Gestapo in Vienna in 1938. He reported to the Einsatzkommando in June 1941, initially for duty in Poland. His diary is an exceptional document because it mixes the horror of his days of killing with sentimental longing for his girlfriend. The entry for 3 July 1941 concludes: ‘I have little inclination to shoot defenceless people – even if they are only Jews. I would far rather good honest open combat. Now good night, my dear Hasi [bunny].’9 The entry for two days later records the shooting of members of the Resistance: ‘One of them simply would not die. The first layer of sand had already been thrown on the first group when a hand emerged from out of the sand, waved and pointed to a place, presumably his heart. A couple more shots rang out, then someone shouted – in fact the Pole himself – “Shoot faster!” What is a human being?’ The next paragraph begins: ‘It looks like we’ll be getting our first warm meal today. We’ve all been given 10 Reichmarks to buy ourselves a few necessities. I bought myself a whip costing 2 Reichmarks.’10
On 12 July 1941 he writes: ‘Isn’t it strange, you love battle and then you have to shoot defenceless people. Twenty-three had to be shot . . . The death candidates are organized into three shifts as there are not many shovels. Strange, I am completely unmoved. No pity, nothing. That’s the way it is and then it’s all over.’11
Felix Landau’s diary shows a man to whom remorse is an unknown emotion. He is a selfish and base human being, but not a madman.
There are many advantages to studying such a diary, not least that it represents the moment with a lack of hindsight. But there is no substitute for the additional insight to be gained by meeting the participants, so we set out to find one of the killers who had operated in Lithuania. Eventually we traced a former Lithuanian soldier who had murdered Jews alongside the German Einsatzgruppe and who spent twenty years in Siberia as a result. Petras Zelionka was born in 1917 and came from a peasant background. His family was not badly off for the region, owning a small farm with two cows. Under the Russian occupation he heard rumours that ‘in the security department people were mostly tortured by the Jews. They used to put screws on the he
ad and tighten them, thus torturing the teachers and professors.’ He joined the Lithuanian Army because, as he says, ‘I respected Lithuania and I am a real Lithuanian . . . I was attracted to military things, I liked it very much.’
Petras Zelionka was first involved in the killing of Jews in the Seventh Fort at Kaunas in the early days of the German occupation, during the period when the Einsatzgruppen killed predominantly men. As a guard, he patrolled the ramparts and watched as Jewish men were shot, fifteen at a time, at the edge of a pit which had been dug within the confines of the fort. Earth was thrown on each layer of bodies, then the whole process was repeated until there were no more Jewish men left to kill that day. He recalls that the men went to their deaths with little resistance, ‘totally as lambs’.
From the late summer of 1941 the killing widened to include women and children in outlying villages, and Zelionka became one of the murderers himself. His answer to our question, ‘When was the first time you had to shoot?’ is revealing. ‘Where? Where was I? Maybe I was in Babtai? Or maybe near Joniskis, around there . . . I had to take them somewhere. To take them first from the ghetto and to bring them somewhere.’ As the statement he gave to the Russian authorities after the war confirms, Zelionka participated in many mass killings – so many that today he cannot remember where he first committed murder.
Describing a typical day’s killing, he told us how soldiers from his battalion would leave their barracks after breakfast, not knowing their destination. There would be the simple command, ‘Men, we have to go!’ Then they would clamber aboard their lorries and leave. The mood in the lorry he describes as ‘not very good. Sometimes I thought I would have to shoot an innocent man.’ (His concept of ‘innocence’ is a diabolical one that excludes all Jews, even women and children.)
Once they reached their destination they would harry the Jews from the village out to the pre-prepared execution site. The Germans would strip the Jews of their ‘golden things’, such as jewellery and watches, and then order them to lie down. A certain number would then be counted off and taken to the pit, where they were shot. His battalion was assisted by a German detachment. ‘You could not do it without the Germans. They had machine-guns. We had just to shoot.’
The murderers were allowed to drink vodka during the killing. With vodka ‘everyone becomes braver’ says Zelionka. ‘When you are drunk, it is different.’ Sometimes, after the murders, the Germans would thank the Lithuanians for their help. In his statement to the Russians after the war, Zelionka revealed what he and his comrades did after murdering up to five hundred people in Vikija: ‘When we had finished the shooting, we had lunch at a restaurant in Krakes. Spirits were consumed.’ Murder did not diminish his appetite.
The murderers were all volunteers. There is no record of anyone being shot or imprisoned for refusing to murder. This is a reality that Zelionka finds hard to admit to today. ‘You could refuse,’ we told him.
‘You could shoot and you could not shoot,’ he replied. ‘But you just pressed the trigger and shot. And that was it, it was not a big ceremony.’
‘Did you ever think of refusing to shoot?’
‘Now it is very difficult to explain all that, all those things: to shoot or not to shoot. I do not know. The others did it because of their indignation . . . The Jews are very selfish, how could I say . . .’
We asked him about shooting women and children. ‘Let’s say there is a Jew in front of you, not a man, but a woman or a child. A child has certainly never been a Communist. And you shoot that child. What had he done?’
‘This is a tragedy, a big tragedy, because . . . how can I explain it better? Maybe it is because of a curiosity – you just pull the trigger, the shot is fired and that is it. There is a saying, “Youth is foolishness”.’ Talking later about the murder of children, he remarked, ‘Some people are doomed and that is it.’
We tried in vain to get an emotional response from this mass murderer. ‘Who was the man you shot first? Do you remember him?’ we asked.
‘No, I cannot tell you,’ he replied. ‘There were only the Jews, no one was our countryman. They were all Jews.’
‘But were they men, women or children?’
‘What can I say? It could be a man, a woman or . . . after so many years, how can you remember everything that happened?’
I asked our interpreter to press this convicted killer harder about his apparent lack of guilt. Did he not feel any shame? The result was both illuminating and the end of the interview.
‘My colleague, an Englishman, asks me to translate this question to you: he says that English people, watching this film, will hardly understand how somebody, a soldier, used to shoot other people like this but he does not feel guilty.’
‘They can accuse me, if they want. I was sentenced for twenty years for that. Short and clear. I was guilty and I carried out the sentence of twenty years . . . penal servitude.’
‘But that was an official punishment. What does your conscience say?’
‘I do not know. I am not going to answer such questions . . . I am not going to explain or tell you any more.’
So the interview ended.
It was an extraordinary experience to meet Petras Zelionka. It is rare for someone who has committed war crimes as horrendous as this to admit it openly, even if he has served a long sentence for the offence and does not risk prosecution again. Yet here before us was a man who killed alongside the Einsatzgruppen and who did not try either to hide the fact or to glory in it. He sat and talked about committing mass murder in a reserved and matter-of-fact way.
When reading documents relating to the Einsatzgruppen killings, one is always tempted to think that the men who committed them were not really human. Perhaps they were collectively insane. But Petras Zelionka gave every impression of being a sane man. If you met him in the street and were introduced to him, you would not notice anything out of the ordinary. Yet he murdered in cold blood, standing feet away from his victims. Today, when the mass killers we read about tend to be the crazed murderers featured in the tabloid press, it is important to meet a man like Petras Zelionka who killed more than any tabloid monster and yet sat before us as composed and normal as any grandfather.
Zelionka took part in many murders in Lithuania, but denies having visited Butrimonys. If not him precisely, then it would have been men like him from the Lithuanian Army who killed Riva Losanskaya’s Jewish neighbours and from whose guns she herself had such a narrow escape.
In the weeks after the killings at Butrimonys, Riva became increasingly sickened by the behaviour of her fellow villagers, whom she saw profiting from the disappearance of the Jews. She recalls that as soon as she and the other Jews had been marched along to the pits, many of the remaining villagers rushed to the victims’ houses to plunder them. ‘Even the wives of two priests were fighting with each other,’ she says, ‘arguing over who was to have what.’ Riva learnt that one local woman helped undress the Jews at the execution site and then kept their clothes for herself. ‘She didn’t even leave their knickers on, their clothes were so precious to her,’ says Riva. ‘When the Russians came, her children used to go to the cinema wearing those same clothes, sometimes even wearing the Rabbi’s clothes.’
Throughout the German occupation Riva and her mother lived in constant fear of denunciation. ‘Many people informed the authorities about the ones who had managed to escape,’ she says. ‘Even the kind-hearted ones did this. One Jew went to see a Russian family hoping that he could stay with them. First, he was given some food, then he was taken to the police and shot along with all the others. Everybody was doing it because they wanted the clothes and they believed that the Jews had lots of gold . . . But where would all that gold have come from? People didn’t even have enough food, they didn’t have enough potatoes.’
Riva Losanskaya’s life has been spent searching for an answer to the same question posed by Samuel Willenberg in Treblinka – why? ‘Fifty years have passed and I’m still wondering how people
could do such things. I have always respected intelligence, I love and revere intelligent people. But then I saw them killing . . . Nobody can explain why the Germans did it. They are a cultured nation and have such a fine literature: Goethe, Schiller, Heinrich Heine . . .’ Even though it was Lithuanian soldiers who shot the Jews of Butrimonys, she blames the Germans more. ‘They were the cause of all our unhappiness. The Lithuanians hadn’t killed any of us before the Germans arrived.’
The whirlwind of killings the Nazis organized in the first months of the occupation of Lithuania was documented by them in the so-called ‘Jäger Report’. This shows a huge increase in the number of Jews killed, especially women and children, from about mid-August 1941. Until 15 August there is no mention of any children killed, but from then on they are killed in their thousands (1609 Jewish children murdered between 18 and 22 August in Kreis Rasainiai alone).12
This is a turning point in the killing process. Jewish women and children had, of course, already died in the ghettos of sickness or starvation, but this was different. Now they were being specifically targeted and murdered in cold blood.
Many factors came together to cause this change in policy. There was, for the Nazis, one straightforward ‘practical’ consideration – the need to feed these so-called ‘useless eaters’ once the male adults had been killed. From a Nazi perspective it was inconceivable that these people would be provided for at the expense of the German Army.
Ideological factors entered the decision-making process as well. In July Hitler had announced that he wanted a German ‘Garden of Eden’ in the East and, by implication, there would be no place for the Jews in this new Nazi paradise. (And it can be no accident that Himmler ordered the extension of the killing to include women and children after attending several secret one-to-one meetings with Hitler in July; this move would not have occurred without the Führer wishing it so.)
The Nazis- a Warning From History Page 30