by Elisa New
Yes, Leibe—Vilius told me—had died.
It had been in . . . hmm . . . 2002, just months after I’d seen him last. His death was a loss for Show-lay and for Vilius personally, for Leibe was the conscience of the city. And between them they served as the most assiduous historians of the region.
Angry? Yes, Leibe had suffered much. First under the Nazis and then for years and years, as they all had, under the Soviets.
But also, Vilius ventured, looking tentative, perhaps it was his nature? For even as Leibe told his story and the world heard his version of events, Leibe was not appeased. I remembered, when I met Leibe, that he claimed he had been rebuffed by memorial organizations, and I had, on returning to America, called the Holocaust Museum to tell them that they ought to get the archive of one Leibe Lifshitz.
Leibe’s ar-heev—Vilius smiled fondly—the archive, which he’d sworn, angrily, bitterly, no one would ever care about—well, here it was. Vilius held up a thick volume, yellow, published by the Vilna Gaon Jewish Museum in the city of Vilnius, in Lithuanian, Russian, and English. Its publication date was 2002 and its acknowledgments included, as well as the Holocaust Museum, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, the Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain. Leibe’s own narrative of the ghetto, in three languages, along with the narrative of a professional historian, was now between covers.
Vilnius suggested that Yael and I take the volume with us, to follow Leibe’s maps and read Leibe’s stories. They had been checked and were, all agreed, invaluable. Vilnius had little to add but to remind me of certain dates, for the calendar told so much of the story.
Then, taking out a magic marker and a piece of paper, Vilnius wrote, slowly and deliberately, two dates: June 14, 1941. June 22, 1941.
Eight days.
June 14, 1941, the day the Soviet Army annexed Lithuania, would remain forever stamped in the minds of Vilnius’s neighbors: 30,000 of their fathers and brothers and sisters were taken away, some 700 to 800 from the center of Siauliai. The suffering relatives, many still alive today, saw their loved ones herded into the jail on Smallprison Street. They heard the screams of those tortured and the rattle of the trucks that took suspected anticommunists to Siberia. Yes, Leibe’s book noted that some two hundred of those taken out of Show-lay by the Soviets were Jews. But this—Vilius shook his head—did not wash with those who felt Jewish communists had betrayed them. Was it not true, many Lithuanians bitterly agreed, that the Jews always curried favor with authorities, whoever they might be? In the 1914 war, the friends had been the Germans, and for this the Russians had deported all the Jews. The Jewish friends of the Germans had operated, it was still believed, just a few miles away at Kuzhai. Then, in the 1940s, when they feared the Germans more, it was the communists they propitiated. Had it not always been the Jewish way, as a certain cartoon Vilius showed me depicted, to don the manners and even the uniforms of those in power, and to sell out others, even when they were your kinsmen?
Vilius wrote a second date, June 21, 1941. One week later.
The Soviets were in retreat, and the Nazis were pushing across the plain from Klaipeda, occupied since 1939. It was a clever ploy. After giving the Soviets, theoretically their allies, a week to remove thousands of troublemakers, the Nazis launched Operation Barbarossa, fanning out across the plains in a matter of hours and killing Jews.
At first many reaching Show-lay thought that in escaping the villages they’d be safe. Jews from villages that lay in the Nazis’ path began to arrive panicked in town, their numbers adding to the hundreds of Klaipeda’s Jews who had already been there for a year after decamping to escape the Germans’ 1939 arrival. Over a few days near the end of June 1941, from the smaller towns west and south where the German line caught up to the Russians, Jews arrived in Shavli, telling terrible tales of the mobile killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen, who rounded up prominent citizens first and then everyone else, drove them into forests, had them dig graves, remove their clothes, and then be mowed down.
And everywhere they had help.
The story coming out of every Jewish town was the same. The Einsatzgruppen found large groups in every town ready to wreak vengeance on Jews who had betrayed their own. Orders went out from Berlin to use the locals whenever possible. Such Lithuanian “volunteers” as wanted to help with the clearing of the Jews from Ostland were most welcome.
Driving today through Max Levy’s town of Raseinai (forty-five minutes from Shavli, where the Germans appeared several days before they reached Shavli on June 26), I understand why he would have chosen to live there—and return there, even after spending World War I in exile. Looking down the lanes and down the alleys of tidy cottages, I glimpse open fields. Every driveway in Raseinai today boasts great pots of flowers, and behind every house there is a greenhouse. (Not excluding the centrally located 28 Mairones, which the Raseinai phone book of 1941 lists as Max Levy’s home, nor the house next door that the phone book lists as his son Adolph’s). Drive past today in late summer and the greenhouse windows are misty with condensation. Long green hoses disappear into the roses. In the summer of 1941, when they took Max Levy with the first group of prominent citizens, the town would have been as green as Yael and I saw it.
Seven years ago I asked Victoris Andrekaitis, standing in his driveway, how Raseinai’s Jewish population got along with their neighbors, and I thought his answer had been unambiguous.
We had no problems with the Jews, Victoris said. We Lithuanians raised the wheat and rye, the cows and the barley. The Jews sold what we raised.
Thin faced, knobby elbowed, his face lively in the deepening dusk, he’d told me a story of how it used to be in Cow Alley before the Jews were “all gone.” One particular story concerned—and I remember he smiled—how his father, no Jew, came to honor the Jewish dietary laws.
Victoris’s father, he related, had begun life as a policeman. But robbers roamed the woods, drunkards and such, and his wife feared for him. Eventually his wife’s appeals to find a more neighborly calling wore him down, and Victoris’s father became a butcher.
In smaller towns without tanneries or fertilizer plants, Jews and Christians divided up not only the labor of processing the cow but the cow itself. Once established in his new trade, Papa Andrekaitis discovered that butchering in a town half populated by Jews had its distinct points. A clever butcher willing to work a bit off the books—help the Jews with the Korobka tax the government levied on kosher meat—could claim with his own cleaver the various toothsome portions forbidden the Jews—the sirloin, the rump, and all the nether quarters proscribed by their laws.
Better still, if by chance the Jews’ rabbinic slaughterer slipped—his knife missing the carotid artery so that the beast choked on his own blood—then the front as well as the whole back quarter, rendered unclean for Jews, could be had at a deep discount.
This is how it happened that Victoris’s father became a real stickler for rabbinic supervision. One couldn’t be too careful. Nothing less than absolutely kosher meat would do for the Jews! Naturally, Victoris recounted, smiling, it was considered bad form to raise a genuine ruckus as the slaughterer made his cut. And in almost all cases, the slaughterer had the concentration of an athlete.
Yet one might occasionally hazard a bit of whistling. Or a sneeze. A father might look indulgently at the sudden romping of little Victoris, tagging along. It would not be neighborly to gloat. But that night the town’s Christian housewives would grind into their cutlets—adding some dill, a little onion, and a bit of diced pork fat for moistness—the saddle of a kosher cow.
Max Levy’s photograph is still, to this day, on the wall of the Museum of Raseinai, and Victoris Andrekaitis remembers him. When I mentioned the name, Victoris pantomimed an old man, somewhat stooped, raking with his fingers his two points of beard, raising his polite bowler. And he tucked a cane under his arm—the cane he carried as real gentlemen did.
The Schomberg transla
tion of Yahadut Lita, the great Hebrew work on Jews of Lithuania, includes in the description of Raseinai, among “prominent citizens of the last generation,” my great-grandfather’s brother Max. An asterisk by his name indicates that he was among those killed by the Nazis. No other descriptions of what happened in Raseinai survive, but Leibe’s book describes the procedure. The men were led through the town’s main street in suits and ties, loaded onto flatbed trucks, and driven into the forest, where they dug large pits, removed their clothes, and were shot dead. Sometimes the “volunteers” were more eager. Jews were set upon by their neighbors in the town square and fell in a melee of clubs and scythes. In Zagare, enthusiastic locals drove the Jews onto the green common lined with Jewish apartments, shops, law offices, and small industries, and dispatched them. Then they moved across the river into the houses of those now gone. A few weeks hence the German authorities chose Zagare to receive the “overflow” of Jews from Shavli, announcing that this overflow would be “resettled” there. The newly formed Jewish council made a convincing case that a second ghetto in Shavli would enable the Jews to help the war effort through the manufacture of shoes and leather goods. Thus the plan for Zagare’s ghetto was abandoned, and some thousand of Shavli’s Jews were taken there and killed.
Yael and I had asked Alexejus, now with us for the whole day, to find the spot. We stood respectfully, awkwardly, and then got back in the car. It was hard to know just how to pursue the grim itinerary. How many hours? How many turns into the forest to place stems on the monuments? To ask locals, “Where did they kill the Jews?” To search each town for its old Jewish graveyard.
Yael was a young woman now. Knowledgeable in the history of the region, speaking one of its languages, she pointed out signs and Alexejus turned off rutted roads. She reached her arm back to me for Leibe’s book, I passed it over to her, and we followed across the dips and rises of the green plain the course of the Einsatzgruppen, the rapid, improvised, alcohol-fueled shootings of July, August, and September 1941: 148 men in the tiny hamlet of Juniskis in the last week of August; 46 at Gruzdzai; 300 women and children at Linkuva, all in August. Twenty minutes’ drive this way, thirty-five that, took one to the copses and glades where the Jews of Kursenai, Pakurojis, Lygumai, Papile, and Saukenai fell; then those of Radviliskis, Bubai, and Seduva. It was August again. Thunderclouds piled up as the afternoon wore on. Leibe’s book—his maps—oriented us, but we stopped to ask questions of locals.
What would they say?
Eight years before, driving back from the mass grave site at Kuzhai outside of Sedova, we had slowed to ask a woman wearing a kerchief if she knew where we could find the burial place of the Jews. Rearing back from the open car door, squeezing her face into a grimace, she let forth a stream of spit. Today nothing like that happened. A man on a tavern porch or on a tractor, or the woman leaning on her hoe, earth-crusted potato in hand; the girl in Capri pants stepping along the dusty road smoking a cigarette—all tried, politely, to point out where “they had killed the Jews.” Turn right, here. Then left, then right. Then one finds the place in the forest where a sign points, and between the trees the next sign, explaining: The earth is “watered with the blood of approximately 1,650 people, children women and men by Nazis and their helpers.”
Max Levy’s old house in Raseinai has a shed behind it that looks seventy or eighty years old. A hiding place, perhaps, for the twenty-five family members captured in the photo of 1928, if they had time to imagine hiding would be wise. The prominent Jews of Raseinai had filed out the main street to the fields in an orderly procession. Victoris Andrekaitis, in his eighties, suggested by an uneasy, wincing smile that he had not forgotten the summer night when they killed the Jews, Max Levy among them, the summer breeze so soft.
In London, Edward Baron (né Levy), director of Carreras cigarettes, announced the firm’s biggest year ever at the annual shareholders meeting of 1941. Few who saw him at that meeting would be surprised when, later that year, he was knighted for meritorious service.
How modestly, at a shareholders meeting of early 1942, he dismissed unseemly talk of record profits. How lightly he passed over the matter of dividends, addressing the attention of the assembled rather to the matter of keeping production up for the valiant troops: “supplies to the Royal Navy and Merchant Service as well as all the other fighting and defense services which it is our privilege and duty to serve.”
How gracefully too Edward announced a Christmas gift of three weeks extra wages to all who had served during the whole twelve months of the last terrible year. And with what equanimity he stated that, despite labor shortages “only natural in time of war,” the company would soldier on.
It had perhaps struck some as odd, hearing his lush Baltimore vowels, when Edward, returning from a visit to America in 1933, announced, “Thank God I am an Englishman!” Asked for his “impressions of the United States” after a call on suppliers and a visit with his sisters, Edward had really poured it on, expanding on the notion that if “ten thousand of our young men could go over to the United States to study and assimilate American methods,” the British “stolidity” could combine with American kick to make the ideal businessman. A decade later it all rang less false, for his whole family now threw itself into the fight against Hitler. His nephews Jerry and Earle, along with his new son-in-law, the air marshal’s son Dickie Longmore, were all in the war—Jerry in the Middle East and Italy, Earle in London. And dear Dickie flying planes, just like his father, for the RAF.
Some Britons, less than enchanted with Edward and his petite adjutant, Bertha, may have raised an eyebrow at the bluff, unapologetic Englishness of the family’s mien, and at how things always came out just as Bertha had devised. For no one who knew them did not see Bertha’s hand, or rather her Italian-slippered feet, scrambling up the rungs of Anglo-Jewish society.
By a stroke of luck, Bertha was a well placed hostess in London at the moment the Prince of Wales fell for a Baltimorean, Wallis Simpson, who was exactly Bertha’s age. Eddie and Bertha’s Belgrave Square house was conveniently near Buckingham Palace, and they were happy to offer hospitality. The Belgrave Square sitting room made an excellent stopping place for a couple wanting privacy. Wallis’s taste in clothes, in entertainments, in certain Paris spots, as well as her memories of finishing school in Baltimore and her comfort with clever American women, had brought her and Bertha together in the days before the war. Whatever latent anti-Semitism Wallis and the Duke of Windsor would eventually show, such Jewish families as the Barons and Sassoons did not regard themselves as inconvenienced by it.
Bertha too had learned much during the 1930s from Rose Henriques and her husband, Basil, who gave her lessons in that noblesse oblige that was natural among Jews to the manor born. The warden and his wife, resident at the Bernhard Baron settlement, helped Bertha understand, or at least act as if she understood, her social duty, the obligation of the fortunate.
While an Oxford undergraduate in 1911, Basil Henriques had visited the Oxford Mission, the first English settlement house, and then in 1913, at 23, he petitioned the heads of the wealthiest synagogues in London for their support. The year 1914, before Basil went off to war, saw the opening of the Oxford and St. George’s Jewish Lads Club and then a Girls’ Club, whose directress, Rose Loewe, he married on his return. Decorated for heroism, Henriques and his bride took up residence in the manager’s flat in the East End Settlement and launched a campaign to provide social services for Jewish youth by winning the support of Bernhard Baron. Baron lived just long enough to lay the foundation stone of the settlement, but then left to his heirs—Eddie and Bertha—London’s most visible and distinguished pet project. As an experiment in communal welfare it had no peer in Europe. But led as it was by Sir Basil Henriques, and supported by the young and handsome Barons, it became something more than merely where modern plutocrats bestowed charity. After the dedication ceremonies in 1930, the Duke of Gloucester presiding, the Bernhard Baron Settlement rehabilitated not only the Je
wish poor but the Jewish rich.
While all around the East End families slept six to a room, twenty persons sharing one stinking overflowing toilet, at the same time all around Mayfair young heirs idled, gambled, squandered time and money. The “Gaffer,” as Henriques was known, subjected poor and rich to the same wholesome regime.
The settlement magazine, Fratres, summed up its earnest creed.
Whether one’s home was a dank tenement hung with diapers or a Belgrave terrace nursery; whether one became a tailor like one’s father or a Baronet, one would never be more at the settlement than an oldest boy. With an atmosphere clever rather than earnest, jolly rather than serious, the Bernhard Baron Settlement House was where the Sassoon, Rothschild, Marks, and Baron children played and sang around a secondhand piano, where a “cottage” donated by the Rothschilds provided a place of retreat not only for the Warden Henriques but also, as the years went by, for “honeymoon couples and tired parents.”
As Bertha and Eddie ascended to the upper echelon of society, their compatriots agreed that it must be Bertha who got Eddie’s handsome face in the paper so much. He was featured as a lion of industry, a regular on the business pages, but also featured in John Clennel’s “Faces of Destiny” series, where Edward S. Baron was described as having a “high head above his ears, indicating firmness . . . nose of the business type . . . nostrils wide and curved showing sensitiveness and pride.”