From Russia with Lunch

by David Smiedt

  The most barbaric of these slaughters took place on 29 October 1941. The previous evening, the Gestapo had toured the ghetto cherry-picking victims. The criteria? Families with many children, the physically weak, the old and the sick. By the time the last bodies fell at the Ninth Fort, the death toll was 9200 – of which 4273 were children. The same grim scene was being played out in Vilnius, where the Jewish population stood at 58,000 – a quarter of the city’s inhabitants – before the war. With their properties looted and their dignity assailed, Jews were forced to wear yellow stars to signify their religious status and crammed into two ghettoes. Comprising no more than a few ramshackle blocks, these areas accommodated some forty thousand. The only reason they were able to accommodate the city’s Jewish population was that it had already been culled by 10,000–20,000 in the killing fields of Paneriai, seven kilometres out of town. On 2 September 1941 alone, 3700 Jews drew their final breath there.

  And so it went, larger populations were corralled into ghettoes then liquidated – with just enough left for expendable labour – while more modest Jewish communities were simply divided by gender then dispensed with in shady glades. Between June and December 1941, it is estimated that 164,000-167,000 Lithuanian Jews – 80 per cent of the Semitic population – were murdered by the Nazis or their agents. Many of those who remained were killed when the ghettoes were liquidated in 1943 while those deemed fit to work were sent to concentration camps such as Auschwitz. Which raises a grim distinction. In contrast to the millions of European Jews – as well as homosexuals, gypsies, communists and Poles – who were gassed in the Nazi death factories, the overwhelming majority of Lithuanian victims were dispensed with by firing squads. This mode of execution lends a morose intimacy to the act that requires a special degree of detached inhumanity. At least that’s what eyewitness accounts of the killings suggest.

  In the Green House, an annexe of the Lithuanian Jewish State Museum in Vilnius, were several such recollections. Arriving in Paneriai in early July 1941, an unnamed driver from a motorised column of the German army recalled seeing a group of 400 Jewish men being led into what he described as two large sandpits separated by a strip of land. Lined with gravel, each was roughly 1.5 metres deep and the same wide. He wrote, ‘As the Jews were being led in groups into the pit, an elderly man stopped in front of the entrance for a moment and said in good German, “What do you want from me? I am only a poor composer.” The two civilians standing at the entrance started pummelling him with blows so that he literally flew into the pit.’

  Moving closer to the ditch, the driver noted that the Jews were being clubbed by guards if they tried to climb out and that several had been stripped to the waist. Groups of ten were then dragged from the pits and the driver commented that many ‘covered their heads with their clothes’. This was most likely an attempt on the part of the more pious to fulfil the commandment of covering one’s head when in the Lord’s presence. Which is always. It was at this point that they were led to the designated slaughter spot, holding on to the upper body of the man in front of them. Lined up before another trench, which the driver estimated to have a diameter of 15–20 metres and a depth of six, these men then faced a firing squad of ten:

  The shots were fired simultaneously so that the Jews fell into the pit behind them at exactly the same time. The 400 Jews were shot in exactly the same way over a period of about an hour. If any of the men in the pit were still moving a few more single shots were fired on them.

  The (approximately) 400 Jews who had been shot the previous day were also in there. They were covered with a thin sprinkling of sand. Right on top, on this layer of sand, there were a further three men and a woman who had been shot on the morning of the day in question. Parts of their bodies protruded out of the sand. After about 100 Jews had been shot, other Jews had to sprinkle sand over their bodies.

  During a break in the proceedings, the driver asked one of the executioners how he could bring himself to carry out the killings so dispassionately. The man replied, ‘After what we’ve gone through under the domination of Russian Jewish commissars, we no longer find it difficult.’ Although few Jews ever attained such posts or were actually active at this level in the communist hierarchy, the shooter told the driver of a Jewish commissar who had apparently broken into a man’s flat and raped his wife before his eyes. Afterwards the commissar had butchered the wife, cut her heart out, fried it in a pan and eaten it. In the three days the driver spent in Paneriai, he estimated 1200 Jews were shot to death, although he could not bring himself to attend the executions again. Describing the events he witnessed as ‘quite horrific’, he added, ‘May God grant us victory, because if they get their revenge, we’re in for a hard time.’ And then some.

  Half an hour in this arena of carnage had knotted my guts and transmogrified intellectual outrage into a personal resentment. Chances of history and circumstance ensured I have not been subject to the purging anti-Semitism that my relatives in Naishtot endured. In fact my closest experience is so comparatively mild that it’s practically irrelevant. Several years ago at work, I told a Jewish joke which went down a treat. A few minutes later, my boss cornered me in the kitchen and asked why Jews were ‘so in people’s faces’ about their identity and culture. To which I replied with more vehemence than I might have liked, ‘It’s a “fuck you” to the world, a “we’re still here”. ’ There was no raise that year.

  Amateur cartographer Ralph Goldberg put it far better with the Yiskor (Remembrance) saying he added to the Naishtot schematic: ‘My intention in making this map is perhaps in future generations a grandchild or a great-grandchild will out of curiosity unfold it. He may accidentally recognise a familiar name that he heard years ago in his parents’ or grandparents’ home. He will also read about how and when this terrible Holocaust happened. It is my hope that it will remind him NOT TO FORGET AND NOT TO FORGIVE.’

  Despite the fact that Ralph would have been 106 when this book was being written, I wanted to let him know that he had succeeded on all counts with his map. However, a laborious cyber-search proved fruitless in the months after my return to Sydney so, Ralph, wherever you are: mission accomplished.

  The task of neither forgetting nor forgiving has been taken up by the Lithuanian government with some gusto. Aside from mass burial sites around the country being signposted and maintained, it has displayed a determination to recognise both those who saved lives and those who extinguished them. On the latter score, it is like one of those feisty terriers that don’t give a thought to their own size or power as they take on errant Dobermans. In fact, this is a trait which can be applied to Lithuanians in general. Proof lies in the strange case of Yitzhak Arad.

  At eighty-one, the Israeli citizen is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s pre-eminent Holocaust historians. He served as director of the Yad Vashem (Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Authority) for twenty-one years and is also a member of the International Commission for Evaluation of Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regime Crimes in Lithuania.

  On 20 September 2007, however, the Baltic Times newspaper revealed that Lithuanian authorities believed Arad was guilty of committing the crimes he had spent a lifetime condemning. Which is tantamount to accusing Mother Teresa of child abuse. According to the Lithuanian Prosecutor General’s Department, Arad is suspected of murdering civilians, prisoners of war and guerrillas while serving in the NKVD, Lithuania’s equivalent of the KGB. Apparently, indications as to his involvement were sourced from Arad’s autobiography as well as testimony he gave during the trial of Nazi war criminals.

  As is often the case with such matters, the local press was filled with op-ed pieces either justifying or decrying the public monies being spent on prosecuting an octogenarian who may or may not have committed atrocities over half a century ago. Which raises the question, is there ever a point where enough solemn remembrance has been paid to the lost? According to Rachel Kostanian, director of the Jewish Museum in Vilnius, the answer is a resounding no. After I arrive
d on her doorstep unannounced and unarranged, she graciously invited me into her modest office for a chat. Petite of stature but fiery of eye, Kostanian reminded me of my paternal grandmother, a short and bolshy woman who smelt of Estée Lauder’s Youth Dew, presented herself immaculately and tore those who crossed her to shreds.

  In the heady days of newly minted independence, Kostanian joined the museum with the fervent belief that Lithuania’s Holocaust would at last be given its due acknowledgment by the government. ‘I will never forget it,’ she says, her nostrils flaring ever so slightly. ‘At a meeting with the director of the national museum of ethnographic sciences, I put forward the idea that the killing of Jews should be taught as part of the Lithuanian history syllabus. He replied, “These children barely know their own history, why should we teach them yours?” ’

  As is often the case, catastrophic en masse inhumanity elicited its opposite in rare individuals. While certain Lithuanians were undoubtedly complicit in the country’s genocide, others risked their lives for the sake of anonymous Jews. Ona Simaite, for example, used her position as a librarian at Vilnius University to enter the city’s ghetto on the pretext of retrieving books from Jewish students. What she actually retrieved were historical and literary documents while providing residents with food and medical supplies. In 1944, she was arrested and tortured by the Nazis before being sent to the Dachau concentration camp.

  Then there was Elena Kutorgiene, who by virtue of being both gentile and a doctor, could have avoided much Nazi persecution had she fallen into line with the Third Reich’s protocols. Through her work with a Jewish welfare organisation for children in Kaunas, she established close ties with the community and would not stand by to see them slaughtered. Kutorgiene literally brought her stand home by hiding Jews in her house, disseminating anti-Nazi literature and, perhaps most dangerously, obtaining firearms for the underground resistance.

  Following the city’s liberation in August 1944, Kutor-giene worked on the Special Government Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes. Among her many accolades, including the Order of Lenin for her extensive social and medical activity, Kutorgiene was also recognised by Israel’s Yad Vashem Museum, which is dedicated to the Holocaust. Its ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ honour has been awarded to over six hundred Lithuanians, often posthumously, who helped save Jewish lives.

  In 1992, the Lithuanian government decided that it too should acknowledge the valour of the citizens who risked their lives – and often paid with them – to aid Jews during the Holocaust. To date, almost one thousand Life Saviour’s Crosses have been awarded in this respect. The best known of these heroes was not Lithuanian but Japanese. Chuine Sugihara was a New Year’s Day gift to his middle- and samurai-class father in 1900. As wilful as he was intelligent, he defied his doctor father’s expectations of following in his footsteps by writing only his name, ‘Chuine Sugihara’, on his entrance exam papers and thus deliberately failing. His passion was for language and after majoring in English literature, German and Russian, he was recruited by the Japanese Foreign Ministry. Sugihara’s first posting was to Harbin in China. Charged with negotiating with the Soviet Union over the Northern Manchurian Railroad, his tenure was brief. Unable to stomach Japanese mistreatment of the Manchurian Chinese, he quit his post as Deputy Foreign Minister.

  Returning home with a new faith, Orthodox Christianity, and a White Russian wife – the first endured, the second did not – Sugihara was seconded to the Information Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. After a stint as a translator for the Japanese delegation in Helsinki, his superiors decided that Sugihara was unlikely to again make the mistake of putting his conscience above his diplomatic missions. In 1939, he became a vice-consul of the Japanese Consulate in Kaunas, where one of his chief duties was to report on Soviet and German troop movements.

  The Soviet takeover of Lithuania in 1940 presented Sugihara with a dilemma he could never have anticipated. Bearing in mind the Soviets’ ideological disdain for religion and those who defined themselves by it, thousands of Jewish refugees from Poland and Lithuania besieged embassies, including the one-man Japanese consul, for exit visas. The key to securing one of these precious passport stamps was a so-called ‘third destination’. In other words, the country issuing the visa wanted proof that the refugee would merely pass through on their way to somewhere else. Dutch consul Jan Zwartendijk had exploited this loophole by providing some fleeing Jews with an official third destination to Curaçao, a Caribbean island and Dutch colony that required no entry visa, or Dutch Guiana (later to be known as Suriname). In order to get there, or simply out, however, a transit visa was required. Enter the slightly built Sugihara, above whose quizzical eyes rested a civil servant’s jet side parting bisected by a single grey streak.

  The Japanese government’s policy on the matter was a strictly enforced neutrality. If visas were to be issued, the recipients not only had to go through appropriate immigration procedures, they also had to prove they had enough funds to make the journey to Japan then on to another destination. Realising these criteria bordered on the realms of fantasy for the beseeching Jews who daily thronged the consulate, Sugihara dutifully asked his superiors back home whether the conditions for issuing visas could be relaxed given that these refugees, in his opinion, genuinely feared for their lives. Three times he made his case. Three times he was told that anybody granted a transit visa had to provide a further one to prove they were not seeking refuge in the land of the rising sun.

  The rebellious streak that saw him deliberately fail his medical entrance exams in Japan and quit his Chinese post in protest once more came to the fore. Putting principles over protocol, Sugihara began issuing visas of his own accord. Often ignoring the official requirements for this documentation, he furnished Jews with a ten-day visa to transit through Japan. Such gross violation of direct orders was so extraordinary given the culture of the Japanese Foreign Service as to be without precedent. What’s more, the distance between Tokyo and Kaunas – not to mention the sociopolitical atmosphere – meant there was little that Sugihara’s bosses could do to stop him. Sugihara went one step further by personally negotiating black-market travel arrangements with Soviet officials. For five times the standard ticket price, they would allow Polish Jews carrying his visas to travel through the country via the Trans-Siberian railway.

  Unlike the stamped visas of today, those issued by Sugi-hara were painstakingly written by hand. Between 31 July and 28 August 1940, it’s reported that he spent 18–20 hours a day processing these documents. His output was staggering, with a month’s worth of paperwork being completed in a day. Although his consulate was officially closed on 4 September, eyewitnesses recalled him still writing visas at a hotel while in transit en route to Japan then throwing even more out of a carriage window to a crowd of refugees as his train pulled out of Kaunas station.

  The precise number of Jewish lives saved by Sugihara is unclear, with estimates ranging from 5000 to 10,000. The reason for this disparity is that many of the visas he issued were to heads of households, thus allowing for the passage of an entire family. Sugihara’s widow and eldest son put the figure at 6000. It seems there was no end to his cunning. In researching his 1996 book In Search of Sugihara, author Hillel Levine discovered ‘some Jesuits in Vilna were issuing Sugihara visas with seals that he had left behind and did not destroy, long after the Japanese diplomat had departed’.

  Some of those saved by Sugihara ended up in the United States and the then British mandate of Palestine. Most, however, remained in Japan until they were deported to Japanese-held Shanghai, where there was already a large Jewish community. Approximately 20,000 European Jews survived the Holocaust thanks to their internment in the Shanghai ghetto until the Japanese surrender in 1945. German demands to either kill or hand over the refugees were refused by Japan. One hypothesis for this action – posited by Rabbi Marvin Tokayer in his book The Fugu Plan – was that it stemmed from gratitude for a $196 million loan that a Jewis
h banker from New York, Jacob Schiff, had given to Japan, which helped them to victory in the Russo–Japanese War of 1905. Another suggestion was that Japanese leaders had been somewhat impressed by anti-Semitic propaganda which stressed the Jews’ financial prowess, and thought ‘we could use some of that’.

  For his part, Sugihara was reassigned to Romania where in 1946 he and his family were imprisoned in a POW camp for eighteen months. Returning to Japan, a wave of postwar downsizing saw him retire from the diplomatic service. Using his linguistic skills, Sugihara took a series of low-key translating jobs in the Soviet Union and it was not until 1968 that any of the Jews he had rescued were able to track him down. In 1985, forty-five years after the Soviet invasion of Lithuania, Sugihara was honoured with Israel’s ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ award. That same year, a visitor to his Tokyo Bay home asked his reasons for issuing visas to the Jews. Sugihara responded: