The Girl from Human Street

by Roger Cohen

  Žagarė is a place of echoes and absences, my grandmother’s being but one. Like many Lithuanian villages, it hovers over loss, a void that whispers. I have come back to see what might have been. Next to a bridge on the Švėtė a plaque commemorates the death on June 29, 1941, of Jonas Baranauskas, who was “killed defending his homeland.” He died a few days after the Nazis invaded Lithuania and embarked on one of the swiftest mass murders of a nation’s Jews in the entire European extermination program.

  Circumstance was propitious for the slaughter: a local population inclined to blame “Judeo-Bolsheviks” for the Soviet occupation of a year earlier, a nation disoriented by the Soviet deportation eastward of its elites, a Lithuanian nationalist movement bent on the removal of a centennial Jewish presence and given to the naïve belief that Hitler would restore the independence of Lithuania. Purification of the nation meant an end to “Asiatic Bolshevik slavery” and the “long-standing Jewish yoke.” By December 1, 1941, of Lithuania’s roughly 200,000 Jews, at least 137,346 were dead. The Nazis had broken through the psychological barrier of murdering women and children en masse.

  Baranauskas, who merits a plaque, was not a Jew. Yet he alone is identified in Žagarė. He is thereby accorded a presence that feels like more than a dutiful nod to shadows. He lived, he resisted, he died. His name is there, legible. It is there at the center of a town that lies between two disused Jewish cemeteries, one in the “new” and one in the “old” town. In the cemeteries gravestones lurch, lichen advances, and Hebrew inscriptions crumble or fade into mildewed illegibility. Fragments of letters recall Anna Akhmatova’s words in Requiem, “I should like to call you all by name, but they have lost the lists.”

  Mendelson was not buried in the Jewish cemeteries; nobody is any longer. His younger son, Vidmantas, tells me he “can’t even imagine” how his father “might have been buried in the Jewish cemetery.”

  None of the people thronging the sepia photographs of the Žagarė market square in the early twentieth century could have envisaged how Jewish life would end. You, sir, are doomed—and you on the wagon, and you with a hand on your horse’s withers. Deaf to entreaty, they all live and breathe. In every old photograph, as Roland Barthes observed, lurks catastrophe.

  Driving across the flat countryside from Šiauliai, I pass Joniškis (where Jews once attended the “white synagogue” in summer and the “red synagogue” in winter) and enter Žagarė through an avenue of oaks and firs that adjoins the former Naryshkin estate. The splendor of the canopy is suggestive of another time, before two twentieth-century totalitarianisms gripped the small town like a vise and excised its raison d’être. The towering trees carry the message that life once had a different scale here, a different tenor. There was commerce, pleasure, a touch of grandeur, before everything faded like vapor trails.

  The Naryshkins, a Russian noble family, acquired the property in the nineteenth century, when Lithuania was part of the Russian empire. They decamped every summer with a large retinue, an object of fascination to the shtetl children. My paternal grandmother, Polly, loved to wander in Graf Naryshkin’s woods. She spoke often of spangolių she picked there. That word, in Johannesburg, was met with great hilarity, a tongue-twisting throwback: spangolių! Cranberries were not the town’s specialty. Žagarė was renowned for the excellence of its cherries and the quality of its horses. Yet it was the cranberries—spangolių—that ushered Polly back from South Africa to a lost world, a memory as comforting as broth.

  She grew up in the Pale of Settlement, the large crescent on Russia’s western edge, in a time of pogroms. They had flared with the assassination in 1881 of Tsar Alexander II—a young Jew named Gessia Gelfman was involved—and intensified after 1903. Polly’s older sisters, Assja and Zera, were involved in the revolutionary movement of 1905 against the tsar. That year Cossacks swept into Žagarė, destroyed Jewish houses, shot a tailor named Zemach Essin, and sent several Jews into Siberian exile. The resolve of Assja and Zera hardened.

  My grandmother Polly Soloveychik in Žagarė. She was born in 1894.

  Polly was still young. Born in 1894, she became a wanderer in the woods, an idler on the banks of the Švėtė, where she would run her fingers along the deep ridges in the trunks of the willows. She would touch the delicate petals of the fragrant sweet peas and gaze at the water eddying through reeds. The busy storks made nests, and when the days grew shorter, they were gone. The river rushed in winter but dwindled to a small stream in summer. You could cross it and scarcely get your ankles wet in the months after the cherry blossoms. She had a love of trees. In South Africa, decades later, she would plant three jacarandas opposite the Houghton golf course. Trees endured. Around the child in Žagarė stirred unrest and uncertainty.

  The fate of Assja and Zera has passed into family legend. They were young, they were beautiful, they were arrested by tsarist police, and they ended up in Capri, joining a colony of exiled Russians established on the Italian island in 1906 by the writer Maxim Gorky. This much is known, but not a lot more. In a memoir written in Italian, Assja’s daughter Mya Tannenbaum, a concert pianist who became a music critic for the Milan daily Corriere della Sera, recalled: “When my mother evoked the events of the revolution, emotion turned her dark almond-shaped eyes a silvery color. At that point I would interrupt her out of fear that the past would sweep me away. And so memory has its lacunae and is full of the question: Why?”

  Memory embroiders, facts get lost, and still some fragment of truth remains. My Italian family is in Rome and Capri, the descendants of Assja and Zera. Mya’s account has the girls being schooled in Kiev, hundreds of miles from Žagarė. This seems fanciful. But her story of the night of the arrest of Assja and Zera conveys a haunting past that might persuade a child of its power to sweep her away.

  Assja and Zera have slipped out at night. They are teaching young, illiterate laborers how to read. One of Assja’s students appears, pursued by police. As he races by, he hands her a bound package. She throws it into a well. The package is fished out. It contains subversive documents, manuals of communist agitation. The girls are arrested. They are young and innocent-looking enough to provoke an incredulous outburst from the Russian chief of police: “And these would be the dangerous revolutionaries?” He calls them deti—mere children. Still, Assja spends long enough in damp solitary confinement to contract lifelong rheumatic ailments. She hears the cries of fellow prisoners condemned to execution by firing squad: “We will die for freedom!” After a year she and Zera are put in a convoy, to be taken east to a Siberian prison camp. They are saved when an armed revolutionary unit conducts a raid and later engineers their escape westward to Gorky’s Mediterranean haven.

  Another family account has a letter arriving in Žagarė from Vilnius, today the Lithuanian capital, saying Russian authorities have arrested Polly’s sisters for insurrectionary activities. Polly’s mother, Sarah, was illiterate; the news was kept from her. Polly invented letters from Assja and Zera to give the impression that all was well. In time her mother saw through her. They went to plead with Graf Naryshkin, who was not himself ill disposed to the Jews, and prevailed upon him to lend a troika and driver for the arduous drive to Vilnius. There contact was made with an organization set up by Gorky to rescue imprisoned young leftists and bring them to Capri, where the author lived between 1906 and 1913. So, in the revolutionary turmoil of 1905, the Italian branch of the family was born. Polly remained in Žagarė until the following year.

  Part of the process of getting out, of uprooting, is to shed origins. In Rome, as elsewhere in my family, the past was less a source of fascination than a thing to be overcome. The pride of the Bolshevik revolutionary, confronted with the Soviet terror that spread after 1917 and hardened over decades into Stalin’s imprisoning European empire, yielded. This was not the classless paradise of which the young Assja and Zera had dreamed. In time the only trace of communist credo that endured among my Italian family was a dismissal of religion in general and Jewishness in particular.<
br />
  One of the countries absorbed after 1945 into Moscow’s communist realm was, of course, Lithuania. There is a sign now pointing into Polly’s woods, where spangolių grew, beneath the snow-clad canopy. It has changed since 1945. A Soviet sign once read, MEMORIAL TO THE VICTIMS OF FASCISM. It now reads, GRAVES OF THE VICTIMS OF THE JEWISH GENOCIDE.

  The revised wording reflects the tumult of Lithuanian history and the nation’s ongoing struggle with memory. It is not only within families that facts are hard to recall. The Soviet Red Army, driven out by the Nazis in June 1941 as Hitler tore up his pact with Stalin and embarked on the calamitous invasion of Russia, fought its way back into Lithuania in 1944. The country was annexed as a Soviet republic. Lithuania disappeared for forty-six years into the Soviet empire. The liberators were not liberators. They were other occupiers.

  When Soviet forces reached Žagarė in 1944, they found a mass grave in the woods. A Soviet special commission examined the remains and determined that there were 2,402 corpses: 530 men, 1,223 women, 625 children, and 24 babies. This accounting showed a small discrepancy from the numbers given by SS Standartenführer Karl Jäger, the chief of German security and SD Einsatzkommando 3 (EK 3), who in a report dated December 1, 1941, from the Lithuanian town of Kaunas, stated that 2,263 Jews (663 men, 1,107 women, and 496 children) were executed in Žagarė on October 2, 1941.

  Jäger, at that time, was in an exultant mood. “Today,” he wrote, “I can confirm that our objective, to solve the Jewish problem for Lithuania, has been achieved by EK 3. In Lithuania there are no more Jews apart from Jewish workers and their families.” This was a reference to the 45,000 Jews still confined in the ghettos of Vilnius, Kaunas, and my grandfather’s Šiauliai. Their labor was required for the German war effort—until the calories the Jews consumed could no longer be justified. Jäger had wanted to shoot them immediately. “I also intended to kill these Jewish workers,” he wrote, “but came up against strong protests on the part of the civil administration (the Reichskommissar) and the Wehrmacht.” German bureaucratic wrangling might prolong Lithuanian Jews’ lives by a couple of years in the name of extracting their labor. It could not change their fate. The Nazis were meticulous about killing the Jews of Lithuania, as if they were combing out lice.

  In Žagarė, there was no stay of execution. Death came as harsh and swift as a hailstorm. On October 2, 1941, the Jewish ghetto in Žagarė—enlarged over the previous months by the herding into it of Jews from the shtetls of nearby villages—was liquidated. So was Jewish life. What remained after that in Žagarė was no more than a coda, a slow drift toward extinction. The corpses were in the 120-meter-long ditch in the trees on the outskirts of town. A shadow had fallen on the fruit-laden woods. Nobody spoke about the mass grave. The slaughter was a nonsubject, even for Mendelson, whose own family lay among the corpses.

  The Soviets found the human remains but had scant interest in an accurate identification of them. Stalin spoke once, in 1941, of Hitler’s murder of Jews. Otherwise he evaded the issue. His aim was to forge Homo Sovieticus, not to reinforce Jewish identity. The Jewish question was delicate and divisive. The Holocaust had to be managed within the Soviet political agenda. A cornerstone of this was that the war had begun in 1941 with Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, rather than in 1939 with the Hitler-Stalin pact and the joint Nazi and Soviet invasions of Poland. Over 1.5 million Jews were then killed by the Nazis on territory, including Lithuania, annexed by Stalin in 1939 and 1940. As Timothy Snyder has written, “The murder of the Jews was not only an undesirable memory in and of itself; it called forth other undesirable memories.” For Stalin, any manifestation of Jewish separatism was suspect. Religious sentiment was reactionary, and Zionist conviction was seditious.

  Hitler had managed to blame the Jews for communism as well as capitalism, one measure of his obsession. Stalin nursed his own hostility to the Jews. They would become the “rootless cosmopolitans,” “agents of American intelligence,” and “Jewish nationalists” of his postwar propaganda. Jews, rather than victims of Nazism, became agents of an imperial conspiracy against communism. To sustain his victors’ history, Stalin had to conflate Jews’ particular suffering into the general (read Slavic and Russian) sacrifice of the “Great Patriotic War” against Hitler. So the Jews in the Žagarė ditch and in the Ponary forest near Vilnius, and in countless other pits around Lithuania on the fringes of provincial towns, were identified as “Soviet victims of Fascism.” In those days, any mention of the Jews was inadmissible.

  In this way, the facts hidden by Nazi propaganda were further entombed by Soviet ideology after the end of the war. That the Jews in the Žagarė death pit should have been identified for decades as “Soviet citizens” killed by fascism, rather than as Lithuanian Jews killed by Nazis and their local Lithuanian henchmen for the crime of their Jewishness, demonstrates how totalitarianism manufactures its own “truth.” Once Nazism and Stalinism met in their death dance in Lithuania, the Jews there had to perish, and after death they had to be killed again, airbrushed from history.

  Only since Lithuanian independence in 1990 has a memorial detailing the Nazi crime in Žagarė gone up in the woods where my grandmother picked cranberries. It reads: “In this place on October 2, 1941, Nazi killers and their local helpers killed about 3,000 Jewish men, women, and children from the Šiauliai region.” The phrase “local helpers” remains controversial. Many Lithuanians would rather see themselves as victims of the Soviets than as accomplices of the Nazis. They do not want to have been both—to have had a double identity in the inferno of triple occupation, first Soviet, then Nazi, then Soviet again. This much at least is clear: if my grandmother Polly had died in the massacre at her hometown, she would have been forty-seven.

  Žagarė is a town where most homes still have no running water. Wells are shared between neighbors. Roofs sag, masonry is cracked. Even the satellite dishes look battered. Winter is spent keeping warm and summer is spent growing food and gathering kindling and timber for the winter. Young people leave to study or to find jobs in Vilnius or Dublin or Oslo. They do not return. Close to half of the two thousand inhabitants are pensioners.

  No more than a mile from Latvia, Žagarė is a border town whose lifeblood was trade in grain and metals before its natural outlet to rich German markets was closed. It paid the price of redrawn European maps. As borders shift or close, a hub may become suddenly isolated. Žagarė’s decline has been steady when it was not precipitous. It was a victim of twentieth-century Europe.

  Isaac Mendelson returned from the war to Žagarė in 1945, a twenty-three-year-old Red Army soldier who had fought through some of the bloodiest killing fields of the eastern front. He would live in a small apartment on a corner of the Žagarė market square. It was in this square that his mother, two sisters, and a pregnant sister-in-law were gathered on October 2, 1941, before being killed by Lithuanian police units overseen by the Nazis.

  Perhaps the massacre of Žagarė Jews, of his own kith and kin, played on Mendelson’s mind. The Jews were gone, after all, a vanished community. His mother had disappeared without trace. Still, he was silent. “He never talked about it,” says his older son, Mejeris. “The times were like this.”

  The times were like this. It is not easy to weigh what part the trauma of battle, what part the pressure of Soviet occupation, and what part the isolation or opprobrium of his Jewishness played in Mendelson’s silence to his children. There were many such postwar Jewish silences and not only in the Soviet bloc. I lived in one. The shame of survival had many expressions, in Europe and the United States and Israel. Repressed feelings, forms of wordlessness, inflections of latency were common to all of them. Mendelson was aware that some of the executioners who had taunted and stolen and raped and killed still lived on the streets nearby. They had stripped their victims naked in front of the ditches into which they would be dispatched with a bullet to the back of the head. One man who had helped police the short-lived Žagarė ghetto tried to reconcile with Mendel
son. He was rebuffed. At least that is what Mejeris was told by his mother after Lithuanian independence in 1990.

  Mendelson had survived by escaping eastward on a bicycle in the mayhem of June 1941. He turned nineteen that month. Soviet forces abandoned Žagarė on June 29. For a Lithuanian Jew, the arrival of the Nazis could only spell doom. For other Lithuanians, it might portend an accommodation with Germany that would restore the country’s independence after the Soviet occupation of the previous year. The nation split with devastating consequences.

  Jews in Lithuania had been a community still set apart by language—Yiddish—and by ritual, prayer, scripture, and calendar. Integration and emancipation had not gone as far as in neighboring Poland. Some, like my grandmother’s sisters, had been Marxists. A few had looked favorably on the Soviet occupation of 1940. But the synthesis of Jew and communist, energetically pursued by Hitler’s propagandists, involved the forging of a myth. A significant proportion of the Lithuanians deported to Siberia as enemies of the Soviet Union between June 1940 and June 1941 were in fact Jews. This did not prevent Jews from being paraded in the streets by Hitler’s executioners and forced to carry portraits of Lenin and Stalin to demonstrate their supposed communist sympathies.

  Nazi hatred of the Jew encountered widespread Lithuanian connivance with that hatred for material or political gain. Mendelson pedaled into Latvia with all the hatred gusting at his back. Other Jews tried to flee on horse-drawn carts. A few found trucks or other vehicles. They were pounded by the Luftwaffe. Mendelson, without his mother and sisters, lost in the screams and turmoil, reached Riga and from there boarded a packed train into Russia, whose vast Asian depths afforded some shelter to Jews.