by David Smiedt
Even with such enmity, scriptural study flourished among the masses. However, although Lithuanian Jews were acknowledged by world Jewry as being dedicated scholars, their devotion was doubted as not quite kosher. Along with their accumulated knowledge, the Litvak character was shot through with a scepticism that appeared to the unquestioning pious as truculence. Imagine embarking on an analysis of the minutiae of a sacred text then having your every opinion responded to with, ‘But why?’ or ‘Who says?’ and you’ll get some idea of what it was like to discuss theology with a Lithuanian Jew.
Political debate was as intense as that fomented by religion. The Jewish Socialist movement had its genesis in Lithuania. Working first in Hebrew and later in Yiddish, scholars took it upon themselves to set out ideology for thousands of Jews who were virtual serfs and could not read the original Polish and Russian in which socialism’s seminal texts were initially published. At odds with traditional Judaism, socialism had at its core a revolutionary ethos plus a rampant desire for secular independence. Its primary mouthpiece was the Bund, an abbreviation for the General Jewish Labour Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia. Aiming to boost the self-confidence of workers and secure school instruction in Yiddish, the language of the masses, the Bund was all about the here and now. The growing Zionist movemement, however, was all about the there (Israel) and soon (Please G-d).
In addition to the myriad organisations which split then divided on themselves once more like fringing on a prayer shawl, Lithuanian Jewry – especially in the larger urban centres – also spawned a community infrastructure so comprehensive that it would be replicated in almost every nation in which they made new lives. In Vilnius, for example, there were eighty-five Semitic institutions covering commerce, sports and charities. Even musicians and dentists had their own unions. Meanwhile, the cultural bodies engendered by this community twitched with a febrile vitality. Blessed, cursed or both with the ability to articulate fatalistic humour against a backdrop of muted maudlinness, Lithuanian Jewry produced artists, writers and musicians who gained worldwide acclaim.
Although he was born in Russia, artist Marc Chagall is claimed by Lithuanians as one of their own, as are pioneering film director Sergei Eisenstein and LL Zamen-hof, the man who invented Esperanto. In truth, however, it was the creative descendants of Lithuanian Jews whose brooding cultural baggage and brittle cynicism garnered global acclaim. This rollcall includes Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer and Al Jolson. There are also the Three Stooges, talk show host Maury Povich, whose stock-in-trade is the live-to-air paternity test, and pop singer Pink, so there goes the high-culture theory.
Although the intellectual dynamism of cities such as Vilnius and Kaunas has been established, there is still some conjecture about the extent to which it spread to towns like my ancestral stomping ground Naishtot. What is certain is that the Jewish communities in these towns were not as divided as those in the cities as their survival and welfare often depended on cohesion. Towns such as these were known as shtetls, from a diminutive form of the German word for city. Author Leo Rosten described the Jews who lived in such hamlets as ‘poor folk, fundamentalist in faith, earthy, superstitious, stubbornly resisting secularism or change’. Working primarily for themselves as dairymen, cobblers, tailors, butchers, fishmongers and shopkeepers, they were, according to Rosten, convinced they were living in a temporary exile which would pass when the Messiah restored a glorious Israel to the Jews. With movement restricted to the Pale of Settlement, Rosten contends that Jews were forbidden from owning land and barred – with exceptions – from universities and all but the most menial government jobs. So removed was shtetl life from that of the main cities that routine urban amenities were described by the author of The Jews in America, Ruth Gay, as being ‘as legendary as Babylon or Nineveh’.
The shtetls were divided along religious lines with Jews and gentiles living beside one another. Periods of peaceful, if separate, coexistence were interspersed with those in which racism ran rife. Jews who were spat on or beaten counted themselves fortunate to have survived their encounter with vodka-fuelled miscreants or apparently pious Cossacks. All the while, such incidents were written off as ‘minor’ by authorities.
In response Rosten believes the Jews produced ‘an independent style of life and thought, an original gallery of human types, fresh and rueful modes of humour, irony, lyricism, paradox – all unlike anything, I think, in history’. While Rosten could probably be accused of blowing his own shofar to some degree, he makes a valid point. The isolated nature of these settlements and the conditions which bound Jews together in them conspired to create a series of repositories for Semitic culture and worship where these two dimensions of life fused into a singular entity.
Rosten was not alone in romanticising traditional village life with observations such as ‘it was a world isolated from time, medieval in texture, living on the daily edge of fear. And it was a triumph of human endurance, a crucible which flamed and a brilliant and unexpected florescence of scholarship and literature.’ Such schmaltzy remembrances have long been attacked by those seeking to produce a more authentic depiction of shtetl life. Writers such as Maurice Samuel had little time for bittersweet reminiscences. He notes:
On the one hand, it is remembered sentimentally … it sends up a nostalgic glow for its survivors and for those who have received the tradition from parents and grandparents. It is pictured as one of the rare and happy breathing spells of the Exile, the nearest thing to a home that the Jews have ever known. On the other hand it is recalled with a grimace of distaste. Those forlorn little settlements in a vast and hostile wilderness, isolated alike from Jewish and non-Jewish centres of civilization, their tenure precarious, their structure ramshackle, their spirit squalid. Who would want to live in one of them?
The far-flung nature of these communities is often the first furphy targeted as their inhabitants were relatively literate and serviced by a buoyant Yiddish press. Business travel was permitted within the Pale of Settlement and these commercial venturers returned with tales of what they had seen. What’s more, Lucy Dawidowicz, author of The Golden Tradition, notes that by the late 1800s the ‘proletarianisation of the Jewish masses and their accelerated urbanisation began to disrupt segments of traditionalist society where earlier modernist movements had not penetrated’. The most authentic depiction of shtetl existence is most probably a collage of sentiment and cynicism, the first underpinned by fact, the second by the aching hunger which drove those like my great-grandfather to leave Naishtot.
Fittingly, I drove southwest from Kaunas under a gauze pewter sky that flattened the landscape like an old photograph. The town straddles the confluence of the Shirvinta stream – which formed the border with Prussia – and the Sesupe River. First noted in the sixteenth century, it flitted between Polish and Russian ownership and by 1835 some 76 per cent of its 4413 residents were Jewish. Despite enduring several catastrophic fires and a cholera epidemic that ran from 1871 to 1893, Naishtot’s Jews didn’t so much prosper but endure. Before World War I, Jewish families owned four brush-manufacturing plants (employing one hundred workers), two soft drink and beer factories, a silk-spinning workshop and 300 hectares under grain.
Like many such towns, Naishtot’s Jewish community not only boasted a government-subsidised Hebrew school and Zionist fundraising society but also provided a steady trickle of customers to smugglers across the German border, who could get them passage on a boat to Africa or America. Increased life expectancy and medical advances offset this population drain and despite deportation in World War I, the Jewish community that returned to Naishtot in 1919 did so in healthy numbers. Most were traders who sold farm produce such as vegetables, fruit, livestock and eggs to German clients over the river and bought industrial products from them.
Artisans including shoemakers, clockmakers, barbers, bakers and butchers also made enough of a living to stay despite the hardships. As in the larger settlements, a number of community organisa
tions were established. There was a charitable loan fund, a burial society, medical treatment for Jews who could otherwise not afford it, a homeless shelter, ritual bathhouses for men and women and a library run by the marvellously named Lovers of Knowledge Association.
Stepping out onto the 100-metre by 100-metre cobbled square at the centre of the town, I was prepared for everything except my own ambivalence. Bounded by brick and concrete apartment blocks with pitched tiled roofs, the odd brown brick cottage and a wooden museum that seemed to have been closed due to lack of interest, Naishtot’s hub bore the mien of the recently anaesthetised. Thanks once again to the sparkling detective work of my Melburnian cousins, I had a map of Naishtot drawn up in 1971 by Ralph Goldberg, who had left the town in 1922 for Chicago. Aside from laying out the schematics of the settlement, Goldberg had etched the names of the town’s Jewish inhabitants where their homes stood.
One of those was Myrom Epshtein, a cousin of my greatgrandfather. Across oceans and generations, I could now get a bead on my bloodline. A roof under which my ancestors sheltered, a kitchen in which they cooked, a dunny in which they read between exertions. For many Jewish travellers with Lithuanian heritage, this moment is the ne plus ultra of their trip. I had heard tales of being welcomed into musty parlours by long-presumed-dead relatives who showered their lost kin with tears and rock-hard biscuits. I had been told of suspicious eyes retreating behind drawn curtains in a home whose ownership might be contested by the international interloper at the door.
Prepared for both, I got bubkus. Myrom’s home was now the garden of a drab detached cottage with a white wooden fence and green corrugated-iron roof. Hoping against hope, I rapped on the door. Nothing. Outside the grubby fluoro-drenched supermarket which seemed to be Naish-tot’s focal point, a group of men lounged on a scratched white BMW and watched me with a slightly intimidating blend of sneer and suspicion. There was only one thing for me to do. Approach them. Then make a sharp left into the confectionary aisle. Two Kit-Kats, one Coke and several withering glances from a cashier who made Brezhnev look like Christie Brinkley later, I tried my luck once again at Myrom’s place. Still nothing.
I drove around Naishtot out of a lingering sense of obligation. However, neither the journey nor the emotion lasted. It had the unremarkable air of a settlement that had once been much more than it now was. The bungalows were neatly whitewashed, the gardens had obvious indications of maintenance and the thin rim of suburbia bled into pasture half a kilometre from the centre of town. In the marvellous Mel Brooks’ film History of the World Part One, Dom DeLu-ise plays a hideously bloated and avaricious Emperor Nero who is presented with a handcarved alabaster bathing vessel by a returned conquering general. Between saliva-glossed bites of a chicken leg, Nero appraises the objet d’art with, ‘Nice. Not thrilling, but nice.’ This summarised Naishtot for me. As it receded in my rear-view mirror, I had a sense of regret that I had not felt more there.
Five kilometres out of town was a signpost that might as well have read ‘be careful what you wish for’. In actuality, it said ‘Genocide Memorial’ and was accompanied by a faded blue Star of David.
8
Just another town
Hitler and Goering are arguing about the Jews. Goering says that they are very clever people, but Hitler denies it. Finally, Goering tells Hitler that he’ll prove it’s true if Hitler is prepared to disguise himself and come shopping with him. Hitler agrees, so they both disguise themselves and go into Berlin.
Goering takes Hitler into a shop, goes up to the counter, and asks the German clerk: ‘Do you sell left-handed teacups?’
The clerk stares at Goering for a moment, then says, ‘No, mein Herr, we do not.’
They leave and now Goering takes Hitler into a Jewish shop. He goes up to the counter and asks the clerk: ‘Do you sell left-handed teacups?’
The clerk smiles politely, goes into the back room, makes a show of rummaging around, then brings out a saucer and teacup, sets the saucer down and carefully places the cup with the handle pointed so that Goering can pick it up with his left hand. ‘There you are, mein Herr!’ the clerk says.
Goering buys the teacup, thanks the clerk, and leaves the shop with Hitler. Once they’re outside, he turns to Hitler and says: ‘See, I told you the Jews were very clever people!’
‘I don’t see what was so clever about that,’ Hitler snaps. ‘He just happened to have one in stock!’
Peeling off onto a gravel road that wound its way among greying palisades of wooden farmhouses, I missed the track to the Genocide Memorial on several occasions. Obscured by weeds and boggy scrub, a pair of rutted paths ran side by side into oppressive overhanging bushland the tendrils of which pinged against the car’s flanks. Two kilometres and ten bone-shuddering minutes later, the path dissolved into a patch of gravel on the outskirts of a conifer forest. Hacked into it was an expanse of lawn as long as a football field and half as wide, beyond which, through a pine curtain, could be glimpsed a lake of shattered crystal. The sky’s ashes had long since been scattered by an insistent breeze and bright sunshine now threaded its way through the leaf needles.
Were it not what it was, this clearing would have been the perfect backdrop for everything from stolen picnic kisses to marriage proposals and eventual weddings. The memory of those interred beneath its mossy gulches and bible-black fungi rendered it anything but. If gaunt ghosts in striped pyjamas and yellow stars ever haunted this forest, they were now long gone. In their stead was a sterile chasm of nothingness soaked through with a keening melancholy. Like many men, my defence mechanism in the face of overwhelming emotion is irrelevant rationality. Seeking refuge in numbers, I calculated the dimensions of the memorial to be around 100 metres long and 35 wide. At a modest depth of, say, a metre and a half, how many stacked bodies could a ditch of this magnitude accommodate?
Mapmaker Ralph Goldberg of Chicago provided the gruesome answer. Assuming that the male and female Jewish population of Naishtot was roughly equal, the number of Nazi victims beneath my feet was around 375. According to his map, I had found the mass grave of Parazhneve Forest, where all of Naishtot’s Jewish women and children had been slain on 16 September 1941. They had been told they were being taken to join their menfolk who were working in Germany. The truth of the matter was that all of Naishtot’s Jewish males aged fourteen and over had been rounded up some three months earlier by Lithuanian fascists, transported to a barn on wagons and executed in groups of fifty. Their corpses were then dumped in a prepared mass grave at what is now the Besoylem Jewish Cemetery. Likewise, the women’s wagons creaked into this clearing where they were ordered to dig the pits in which they would die.
I’d been to the gas chambers of Dachau and asked myself how human beings could do this to one another. I had examined the blurry camp liberation images of bewildered inmates with parchment skin and void eyes, then swallowed the lump in my throat. The figure of six million had been rendered abstract by its atrociousness. Now that number could be reduced to a place and personal pronouns. Punched in the chest by the probability that my own flesh and blood were interred beneath me, I had my first visceral reaction to the Holocaust.
Lest you believe I am a religious man, let me dissuade you of that notion right now. As far as Judaism goes, I am as lapsed as lapsed can be. I don’t fast on the high holy day of atonement. I eat pork, shellfish and, where possible, both. Yet in the middle of a Lithuanian forest, I found myself wrenching the traditional mourner’s prayer from deep within my most sorrowful memories. The first lines came easily: Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba (May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified). As did the final couplet: Oseh shalom bim’romav hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu v’al kol Yis’ra’eil (He who makes peace in His heights, may He make peace, upon us and upon all Israel). The body of the prayer, however, was a rambling mess of linguistic fragments interspersed by diphthongs of embarrassment in which I felt I should have been more coherent given the circumstances. What I did recall, however, was that
this prayer never once mentioned the word ‘death’. Rather, it was a plea for the Almighty to grant a life of peace. What befell Lithuanian Jewry under Nazi rule was anything but.
From the get-go contemporary Lithuanian authorities are commendably quick to acknowledge that their Holocaust was not perpetrated by Hitler’s henchmen alone. Locals also gleefully took part in the slaughter. According to the Genocide Research and Resistance Centre of Lithuania, ‘Although almost every type of Lithuanian police force took part in the persecution and murder of the Jews, their role in the Holocaust was not so important as that of the police battalions. Ten out of 28 Lithuanian police battalions took part in the Holocaust in various ways (direct shooting, guarding the shooting sites during the murders, transporting victims to the killing sites, ghetto security).’ One of the reasons for this was a Nazi propaganda campaign which posited that Bolshevism was essentially a front for Jewish power. It was therefore the Jews who were primarily responsible for the horrors endured by Lithuanians during the Soviet occupation.
Regardless of who was pulling the trigger, the massacres began during the earliest skirmishes of the Soviet–Nazi war. Another factor was the legitimisation of old-fashioned anti-Semitism which had little to do with Bolshevism. Long before the Germans confined urban Jews to ghettoes in August 1941, those in the countryside were being butchered. On the first day of the conflict, 22 June 1941, orders were given to begin the murder of Semites and communists in a 25-kilometre band around the Sovetsk region. Within two days, the Sovetsk Gestapo group had shot 201 victims in Gargzdai. They became more efficient with practice and by the end of the summer, this single unit had taken 5502 lives.
When Kaunas fell on 25 June, the Gestapo warmed further to their grim task. After several random butcherings, such as the one at the Lietukis garage where dozens of corpses were put on display as a show of Teutonic might, they began transporting Jews en masse to the nine forts on the city’s outskirts, where they would be put to death. On 15 August, Kaunas’ 37,000-strong Jewish population was confined to a cramped ghetto in the city centre – which in effect acted as a holding pen for cattle awaiting slaughter. Once thus contained, in the words of overseeing Commandant Jaeger, ‘the cleansing of the ghetto of unnecessary Jews’ could transpire. One of the most insidious of these exercises took place when Commandant Fritz Jordan ordered the ghetto’s Council of Elders to gather a group of intellectuals to work in the city archives. Believing their mental capacities would prolong their lives and secure them better living conditions, 534 volunteered. All were executed at the Fourth Fort. In a single afternoon, an entire community’s leading writers, artists, doctors, engineers, attorneys and teachers were obliterated.