by Mark Kurzem
“I was almost as terrified as the boy. I was trapped. There was no way out.
The only thing that came into my head was to aim badly at the boy’s feet, so that’s what I did. The bullet struck halfway up the tree instead.
The soldiers let out a groan of disappointment, and one of them demonstrated how I should aim the pistol. I nodded my head confidently, as if I’d now grasped what I should do.
“I took aim again—mind you, I was already an excellent shot from target practice with the soldiers—and this time I deliberately fired just over the head of one of the soldiers standing on the opposite side of the tree.
“He ducked, but I knew I wouldn’t have hit him anyway. A few of the soldiers began to hurl abuse at me, but I believe that Sergeant Kulis realized that I’d misaimed deliberately. He gave me a furtive warning glance and then strode quickly over to me and gave me a clip around the ear. ‘He’s a fool,’ he called to the other soldiers. ‘He needs more pistol training.’ With that, he began to push me toward the barracks and out of harm’s way.
“He’d defused the episode, but I knew that he viewed what had gone on as a test of my willingness and loyalty to the squad. And I’d failed. I wasn’t capable of killing anybody, Jewish or not. I must have had something in me that resisted that.”
We reached the post office and stood outside the entrance.
“The soldiers killed everything they could lay their hands on. Incidents like that made me feel that I was a killer just because of what I witnessed. Just because I was with them. Perhaps those interviewers are right. I am a killer of Jews, not literally, but because I stood by and did nothing.”
“Dad, you were only five or six then,” I tried to reassure my father. “What could you have done to stop them? You would have been powerless against grown men. They would have turned their guns on you and killed you.”
My father nodded. “Perhaps that would have been a better solution to my fate,” he said. “To have died as a child, a forgotten, unknown martyr, rather than face their hate and accusations now.”
My father was quiet.
“What happened to the boy?” I asked.
My father shook his head. “When I returned later in the day, the rope was still tied around the tree, but there was no sign of the boy.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
NIGHTMARES
After his initial enthusiasm at sending the letter, my father’s spirits began to flag. One morning I found him alone in the kitchen, staring bleakly into space.
“Even if Koidanov turns out to be my village,” he said, “what will be there for me but a handful of memories? And they are here with me.” He tapped his chest.
“So what do you hope for from the letter?” I asked.
“To be honest, son,” my father replied, “I don’t know. Are we clutching at straws? Who would remain there to miss me, or remember me? My entire family perished…though I still cannot place my father at the extermination.”
I had no answer for that. I also suspected that working from the scant, nonspecific clues that we had provided would stymie Frida’s efforts, no matter how enterprising.
The question of Panok remained especially oblique and intriguing for us all. Frank had finally contacted me with the news that his search had failed to establish any definite connect between Panok and the village of Koidanov. Yet why were the two words so strongly associated in my father’s memory? Frank also told me that the Panoks who had lived near Minsk in prewar times had all perished in the Holocaust. It seemed that there would be no Panoks to find.
Yet my father would not let go of the mystery of the Panoks. On several occasions he insisted that Panok must be his name, only to retreat moments later into a state of stoic resignation, claiming to have no interest whatsoever in who he might have been.
I began to worry about his mental and emotional fragility.
Despite the somber mood that had descended over the household as we waited for a reply, by day, at least, we maintained a semblance of normality. My parents tried to return to the routine of their daily lives. My father spent his days in his workshop tinkering. On Sundays he and my mother went out for lunch or visited friends. Often they were drawn to the secular synagogue of Café Scheherazade. My mother would browse through her women’s magazine over coffee and cheesecake, while my father sat on the edge of his chair, restlessly observing the comings and goings of other customers. He seemed eager, almost desperate, my mother said, to talk to the ones with sympathetic faces and tell them his story.
I was somewhat buoyed by the hours I spent in research at the library trying to get a picture of the historical context of my father’s fate. At times, rather frustratingly, the research itself threw up different versions of the same event. In the end, I could construct only the very broadest of canvases based on indisputable historical evidence.
For example, records revealed that in July 1941 Heinrich Himmler had visited Minsk. The purpose of the visit was ostensibly to facilitate “living space” for western European Jews deported to the east. Himmler was keen to see the eradication of Jews in Belarus for that reason, and during that period he ordered Aktionen to begin in the region. (This was prior to the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, and the Final Solution, the systemized efficiency of the gas chambers and death camps, had yet to be implemented. In the pre-Wannsee period shooting the Jews one by one and leaving them in mass graves had been the predominant means of clearing the Jewish population out of the villages and towns of eastern Europe.) The killings were carried out by Einsatzgruppen, composed variously of Baltic police battalions and other military units. These groups were ultimately under the command of the German SS but had an internal hierarchy of local commanders. I learned that Einsatzgruppen had entered parts of White Russia, especially the area surrounding Minsk, and begun their Aktionen in the late summer and early autumn of 1941.
During subsequent days I learned also about the Latvians in the region. A police battalion, commanded jointly by Commander Lobe and Captain Rubenis, had been dispatched to the region in November/ December 1941 to assist in “mopping up duties” and hunting “partisans,” an umbrella term used along with “Bolsheviks” as a euphemism for the Jewish population. These facts coincided exactly with my father’s confused memory of the presence of both Lobe and Rubenis when he was with the soldiers. It also accounted for the fact that my father had initially insisted to me that his battalion had hunted for only “partisans” and not Jews. As a boy of five, he would have accepted at face value what the soldiers had told him. What was most significant was that different versions contradicted each other as to whether the Latvian police brigade could have been present in time for the Slonim massacre.
In mid-1942 the brigade was incorporated into the Wehrmacht as the Eighteenth Battalion. It was eventually recalled to Riga in the late spring of 1943, where after a brief period it was again transformed, this time into an SS unit, the Kurzeme Battalion, under the command of Krlis Lobe. In July 1943, the Kurzeme Battalion was sent to the Russian front south of Leningrad to a place called the Volhov swamps, north of Velikiye Luki, exactly as my father had remembered. Crucially, the transformations of the Kurzeme Battalion had involved at least two changes of uniform, which again resonated with my father’s memories.
I verified in a number of sources that there had been an extermination in the town of Koidanov, and that it had indeed occurred on October 21, 1941. This date seemed familiar; but later, going through my father’s documents, I noted that it was two years later almost to the day that my father became Dzenis’s ward.
Each night after dinner, my mother would wash the dishes or do the ironing while my father sat at the kitchen table in silence as I, much like a private detective reporting to a client, related the grisly details that had come to light that day.
The certificate from the Orphan’s Court of Riga that gave Jekabs Dzenis guardianship of Alex.
On one such occasion, after learning of the Koidanov massacre and recounting it to my father,
something very sinister occurred to me.
“Perhaps…” I began, and then stopped myself.
“Perhaps what?” My father was suddenly alert.
I didn’t want to let my father into my train of thought: what if the Latvian police brigade had committed the Koidanov massacre? In other words, what if my father had been adopted and cared for by the very men who had murdered his mother, brother, sister, and extended family?
The thought sent a shiver through me. I didn’t want my father to have to even contemplate the terrible possibility that Lobe and Kulis may have murdered his family.
In the end, I was glad that I’d held this suspicion back from him. I learned later that the Koidanov extermination had been perpetrated by the Lithuania Second Brigade, which was also operating in a number of villages southwest of Minsk during 1941.*
During my research, I came across a controversy about the actions of the Latvian police brigade that directly touched upon my father’s memories. It pertained to the massacre in Slonim, which may have been within striking distance from “S,” where the brigade had set up temporary camp.
According to what Uncle told my father and to the records, in the postwar period the Kurzeme Battalion had been held responsible by the Soviet authorities for a massacre that had taken place there in late 1941 (though again I found a number of conflicting dates for the incident). A war crimes trial had resulted in the execution of several members of the battalion who had not managed to escape from Latvia. Others, including Lobe, claimed that the battalion hadn’t been involved and had never been in the vicinity of Slonim. Judging by what I read, their involvement was still a matter of controversy among historians and Latvian patriots alike. What attracted my attention above all, and most troubled me, were several eyewitness accounts of the massacre. Witnesses stated that they saw Jews—the elderly, women, and children—herded into a synagogue and burned alive. This account perfectly reflected the memory my father had recounted to me. It had taken place on the day he’d been tied to the soldier on the roof of a train and transported with the brigade to an unidentified location. It was also the day when soldiers had jostled for a chance to be photographed with the unusual boy soldier in his uniform.
Had my father in fact been taken to Slonim, where he witnessed the massacre?
When I put the question to him, my father had prevaricated.
“It could’ve been another time and place.”
And that may have been the case. Certainly many synagogues would have been set alight as the troops went about their dirty business.
But then my father had a change of heart.
“The soldiers claim to have picked me up in late May 1942, but what if it had been sooner, much sooner, even before Slonim? The key question is how long I was in the freezing Russian forest, and you know I still find it hard to believe that I was alone there throughout the entire winter. How could a child survive such deprivation?
“It was Commander Lobe who told me about how they rescued me, even that it was the summer season. Perhaps with time I’ve grown confused. I remember clearly that Kulis rescued me from the firing squad, but in my mind I’ve pictured that it was summer because that was what Lobe insisted. But, you know, I am sometimes troubled by a sense that there was snow on the ground when I was dumped in the firing line. That’s my problem: my memories blend together between what I actually remember and what I was instructed to remember.”
My father paused. “Why would they have lied about such a thing?” he asked.
“To cover their tracks,” I reminded him. “You could have been a witness against any of the men who were there. I wonder what happened to the photographs that were taken that day. I wonder if any of the soldiers kept them.”
My father shrugged. “Who would be crazy enough to keep something that implicated them as a war criminal?”
The fragile silence of our household was disturbed almost nightly by the wails and shouts that emanated from the spare room where my father had taken to sleeping to avoid disturbing my mother. I would lie half-awake in fear and anticipation of what that night’s dreams would bring to my father. My mother and I often found ourselves together outside his room, our ears pressed against the closed door, eavesdropping on the tormented man.
Sometimes we would hear my father stir and begin to move about the room. At that point my mother would tap lightly on the door.
“Alex?” she would whisper, as if unsure it was her husband on the other side. “Alex? Are you okay?”
We would hear his muffled and drowsy-sounding answer: “I’m fine. Just a bad dream. Go back to bed.”
“I’ll talk to him,” I would say to my mother. “You get some sleep.”
“Tea?” I would say to my father through the closed door.
His usual response would be, “Okay, son, I’ll join you shortly,” though on a few occasions he ordered me to go back to bed. He needed his privacy, and I wondered what he had seen in his dreams that he couldn’t share.
On most occasions, however, I would prepare tea in the kitchen. My father would enter some minutes later, after what I imagined to be a process of recovering himself, literally, from his dreams.
Sometimes he sat silently, as if in shock, sipping from his cup. I would sit opposite him, waiting for him to speak. These moments were both ghoulish and titillating because I didn’t know if my father would be able to recall what he had just dreamed and if it might somehow be another clue to unlocking his past.
But that past was beginning to overwhelm him.
One night I woke with a start. For a moment, as I lay in my bed, the house was quiet. I rose and tiptoed down the hallway. The door to my father’s bedroom was open. The room was dark. I softly called his name, but there was no reply. I continued toward the kitchen, where I could see light coming from under the closed door. I gently opened it, just a fraction. My father was sitting at the table with his head in his hands. He was utterly still and was so absorbed in his thoughts that he had not heard me. I opened the door farther.
“Dad?” I whispered.
He gave a slight jump and turned toward me.
“Another nightmare?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Recall any of it?”
He shook his head. “But a memory came to me the instant that I woke up. In fact, I wasn’t sure if I was awake or not.” He laughed darkly.
My mother suddenly appeared in the doorway and stayed, listening.
“For a moment I was back in the town where the synagogue had been set on fire with all those poor people inside. But this time everything was more vivid.”
My father stopped speaking and screwed up his eyes as if to avoid seeing what was in his memory.
“I could see the expressions on people’s faces, the little children. And the cries as people burned. I can hear the screams even now as they clawed at the burning doors trying to get out. And then the silence that followed, apart from the sound of the wood crackling, I can still hear that, if that makes sense.”
For an instant my father seemed to struggle for breath, as if he, too, were being immolated inside the synagogue, deprived of oxygen.
“And there were other flashes of images. Men and women stripped naked and shot in the back of the head. I think that happened on that same day. I thought that it had gone from me, as you said, that I’d blocked it out, but there’s no escape from it this time. It’s like a film that plays itself over and over, and I cannot control it. Now that I remember I will never forget it…”
My father was silent for several minutes and then he seemed visibly to gather his spirit together.
“You still don’t know where and when this was?” I ventured.
My father shook his head despondently. “I want to remember,” he said reflectively, “but not this. This is madness.”
I turned to my mother, who was still standing in the doorway. She was weeping quietly.
The strain of nights such as these eventually made it difficult to maintain e
ven false cheer.
But the dreams were not always alarming. Ever since we found Koidanov, my father had gone through phases of excitability that opened up more pleasant and nostalgic memories and dreams of life in his village. Yet even then he sometimes found himself traumatized by a growing sense of what he had lost, and a growing bewilderment over why he alone had survived.
One night I made my way to the kitchen, where I found my father standing by the sink, waiting for the kettle to boil. He was staring at his own reflection in the kitchen window, and he must have heard me enter because he didn’t startle as I came up behind him.
As I came closer, I realized that he was not staring at himself but outside. “Dad?” I whispered.
He raised his hand in the air, indicating that I should be quiet.
I waited expectantly and suddenly he spoke, or rather exclaimed, “An apple tree! I’ve just had a dream about one. It’s jolted my memory. There was an apple tree in our back garden. I’d always be climbing it, playing in it, picking apples for my mother.”
My father was elated. “I can see my hands in front of me,” he continued, “trying to get a grip on the trunk as I climb it. Then suddenly I am in a fork of the tree and looking down through the branches and leaves to the earth, which seems miles below me.
“My mother is down there, looking up at me. I’m reaching out and plucking apples and then tossing them down to her. She catches some in her apron, but she misses others, which roll on the ground.”
I noticed that my father was recounting his dream to me in the present tense, as if it were happening at this moment, as if he had returned to a past more vivid and real to him than the moment I shared with him.
“I can see her lips breaking into a smile and then she laughs as her apron begins to overflow with apples. She is calling out to me ‘Enough! Enough!’ But the eerie thing is that I can’t hear her voice. I’ve no idea of how it sounds. Then she calls out my name, but again I cannot hear her. And, worst of all, I am looking at her face, but I can’t see her features. They will not crystallize for me.