by Rita Gabis
“There was a Jewish boy,” my mother begins, as she leaves the dishes stacked in the small kitchen sink to return to the table. She sits, speaks slowly, as if sleep is overcoming her. “I played with him. I even went to his house.” She stops, corrects herself. “No, I never went to his house.”
Aunt Karina garners my attention. The look on her face is the look she wore when she told me about the parquet floors.
“Once,” she begins, “when I was very small, your grandfather and I were walking through town and a rabbi passed us. I was so frightened of him—his long beard. His hat, his flowing black robes. Your grandfather said, ‘Don’t be frightened. This is a very important man. He’s like our priest.’ ” She pauses, studies my face, gauges the impact.
I don’t know what she wants me to take from this.
The rabbi—was he the famous Rabbi Kook? Rabbi Yakov Dov? No, they were all gone by then, to Palestine, away from the northern village, the cold coming, the Russian Cossacks with their whips.
One day in 1939 Aunt Karina was at the library with Babita. How high the library windows seemed back then! You could see the whole square. And there, suddenly, men were racing and ransacking the marketplace. Aunt Karina wanted to go out and buy Babita cigarettes and with the change purchase a huge ginger muffin. But the whips and the men. God, they were riding cows (she’d never seen pinto horses before)! Swords and smashing and crashing. The Russians had come snorting and stamping and smelling like wolves. No more trips to the market. My grandfather was a member of the Šauliai, the Lithuanian Rifleman’s Union, to which Babita also belonged. Ultranationalistic, charged with defending a pure Lithuania, the Šauliai were a threat to the Russians. Senelis was, in fact, a Šaulių leader of a platoon of anti-Russian partisans, and was gone, hiding in the woods, a wanted man. (Šaulių refers to the Lithuanian Rifleman’s Union, šaulys to an individual member.)
But just before all this happened, one of the last beauties of childhood: a trip to Gindviliai to visit Grandmother Barbara, who was what Babita should have been: warm, always a bit of something sweet in her pocket—dried blueberries, the like. Senelis is home from the border! Babita stays behind. She has her job at the library. She has the chickens to feed. So Senelis drives the cart full of his children, stops at a certain place—green inner world of a forest, the clayish soil, pine litter. Out of the cart they go to hunt mushrooms, and it’s Karina who discovers the largest, the most stupendous mushroom of all. Senelis throws up his hands. Ah—it’s the best! Praise she’ll remember her whole life. She adores him for it. The youngest. The left-out one.
In Gindviliai their Grandmother Barbara sings to them and cooks for them and brings them to her small garden and pets them and prays over them and when it is time to leave says, “Tell your mother I still have one tooth left in my mouth.” Then they are gone.
TIME HAS CAUGHT up with us. There is a boat to catch. A train. Quickly, my mother and Aunt Karina describe the Russians crashing in first, nationalizing all the little businesses, killing, making promises, promoting this one and that one to fake party jobs, then the Germans chasing out the Russians, bombing and burning. Aunt Karina recalls a little ditty in Lithuanian from wartime whose lyrics roughly translate into “Red shirt/brown shirt,” the first as evil as the next. I decide to press her.
“What exactly did Senelis do for the Germans?” I ask, as if I don’t expect any particular answer. As if I’m not waiting like Homer for a dry bit of bread that will satisfy, even in the most minute way, my terrible need to know.
Aunt Karina is offhand. “Oh, something. I don’t know exactly. Something with administration and so on, army security.”
Then she changes the subject.
Our coats are on. The little tape recorder tucked away. Kisses all around. Chicken sandwiches offered and refused. (The train is hot; mayonnaise spoils.) We’re stuffed anyway. The pancakes! I’ll remember them, like Aunt Karina’s mushrooms, for the rest of my life.
My mother is pleased we’ve come. “I’m proud of you,” she whispers to me.
Aunt Agnes is radiant. Her gray halo shines.
Aunt Karina, before she holds me to her and tells me she loves me, her voice breaking a little, stands in the doorway between the kitchen and the heat of the great ceramic stove in the other room.
“So, the Jews,” she says.
I stop. Put down my bag. Can’t breathe.
“It’s true your grandfather didn’t like them.”
I say, in as noncommittal a tone as I’m able, as if I’m not a hungry dog, as if I don’t really care, “Did he think of them all as Communists?” (As so many Lithuanians did during the prewar Russian occupation, and after.)
Aunt Karina shakes her head.
“No, he just didn’t like them. But he had Jewish friends, so go figure.” She shrugs a little, pauses to consider, then continues, matter-of-fact. “Everyone needs a scapegoat. The Jews were his.”
CHAPTER 11
* * *
THIS KIND OF WORLD
MAY 2011
Just off the train, I drop my bag at my hotel and walk in the naked morning light the twenty minutes or so to the library and archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. These days every library, even this one, makes me think of Babita in her library in Žeimelis. Cigarette between her thumb and index finger, her mouth a straight line, she calculates the odds of getting the children out, away. In Lithuania now there are the Soviets; in Poland, the Germans, after a swift, devastating assault—the main arteries outside of Warsaw glutted with the wounded, the overnight refugees, cows, broken soldiers, a dowry chest in a ditch, a feather bed on the side of the road.
Over and over I’ve magnified and scrutinized this photograph taken when Łódź, Poland, was overcome in the fall of ’39. The three different faces of a particular kind of shock; a hand to the forehead, the almost sheepish smile of the man on the right—perhaps reflexive, even in the moment; a picture is being taken, after all, but what face to show to the enemy? The woman on the left, a quick glance front and behind. Make a decision. Go to the store and buy … a phone call before the lines are cut. Shrewd, maybe hopeful. We’ll survive, we’ll suffer but survive—Jewish, a third of the population of the central manufacturing hub of Poland.
I am projecting, of course; three faces, the obliterating advance of three German flanks, among them one soldier and his scrapbook of the adventure of war from which this photograph comes. Łódź, where the pianist Arthur Rubinstein was born in the late 1800s. In the disarray of his study, my father and I used to listen to the Chopin Nocturnes. No. 2 in E-flat Major, the needle in the groove of the old prized recording; note by note, a world of such precision and delicacy and restrained power you know it has to end when Rubinstein’s hands come to rest at his sides. And it does end in Łódź. If you were a Jew in 1939, Lithuania, compared to Poland, was briefly a haven—if you could get across the border.
I stop for a minute across the street from the Willard Hotel, just to orient myself. A breeze takes up the hotel’s flags and awning, blows them back. I fish in my bag for the glossy map from my own hotel—I’ve been here more than once, but my sense of direction is terrible—find instead of the map a ticket stub, an envelope, those illegible taxi receipts, like chewing gum wrappers. I think suddenly of the feel of the envelopes in a large packet in my study, the old hard creases in those tragic packets of letters in Yiddish from my mother-in-law’s relatives in Nowogrod, Poland, written around the time the German soldier snapped his picture in Łódź.
In one of the letters: “Life like a dream—bad or good. I’m sure you know what’s going on here … does it pay to live in this kind of world?”
In other letters, gratitude for packages sent, for money, but what’s desperately needed is a way to escape. Who do you pay off now that visas are no longer being issued? Who might hide you or your children?
What last-ditch presence of mind would guide you, as it did one of my Jewish boarding school teachers, who as a bo
y on the run when the Germans completed their takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1939 found the right train track, the freight car under the belly of which he’d ride, his torn hands holding tight to the iron underpinning, gravel pelleting his back. Those fists never unclenched, even when he came to America. Even when he led a group of young people through the Berkshire woods and pointed out the white on the wings of a mockingbird that makes up its song from the songs of other birds, from barking dogs, even from your own whistle in the clear air, a stream nearby.
My paternal Jewish great-grandparents, Israel and Esther Gabis, lived in what is now Belarus, just across the border from Švenčionys. They’ve gone to America by 1904. Wolf Treegoob, after taking his family to London, became a master horologist—a fixer of watches and clocks on Third Street in Philadelphia, “a genius” with anything mechanical. There he is, behind a cubby with a window, among small glass disks, hour wheels, and minute wheels. He fixes time with his dexterous hands, fastidious, the hairspring, the balance arbor perfect when he returns the piece to its owner.
I give up on the map, look at my watch, a gift from my husband. I blot Senelis out of my head.
Compared to New York, central D.C. always feels compact to me, organized, though in truth it’s a city that sprawls without an even grid to follow. At this early hour, even as I pass the gargantuan Willard Hotel, pedestrians are scarce. I think about the standing order the D.C. metro cops must have: keep the riffraff away from the tourists. The poor congregate in the little triangles of parks and benches between angled streets.
On Fourteenth Street, the wide sidewalk is immaculate. I’ve missed the cherry blossoms, but the air still smells of them—only fainter, like the scent of roses in a room when the vase has just been whisked away. The warm spring sky has a slightly opal cast. The grass spreading out from the Washington Monument is a green fluorescent mirror back to the sun. I feel dizzy. Tired. More and more often, I’m tired. I don’t know what I’ll find at the Holocaust Museum, why I’m going there. Every time I try to articulate a formed intention about what I’m doing, it slips away. I’m left with just questions:
Did he hurt anybody?
The translator … Her name?
Did he carry a weapon?
Chief of what?
Saugumas?
Of course I’ve looked things up, am reading too many books at once. “Sowgoomas,” Michael MacQueen will pronounce it when I meet with him at ICE. To really know the word you have to know the country, and I don’t.
On the wall just inside the museum, there’s a large photo commemorating an African American security guard gunned down by a neo-Nazi. Stephen Tyrone Johns smiling in his uniform. Forty years old. A son, two stepsons. Von Brunn, his killer, in the notebook he kept, wrote, “Obama does what his Jew owners tell him to do.”
Two years earlier, I had visited the museum for the first time. Like everyone, I was given an ID card of a Holocaust victim; mine was a young Jewish girl from Lithuania with serious eyes. I look at the face of Stephen Jones and think of her. Turn away.
I’m not a researcher. I’m not a historian. My grandfather did something—I don’t know what. Upstairs, the entrance to the archives and library has those sensors that go off if someone tries to head out with archival material. I expect it to sound an alarm as I pass through.
When I pick up my first of two-hundred-something microfiche reels at the reference desk and settle in at my cubby with the viewer and computer to scan what I might find, the first thing I do is take the reel out of the small white box and drop it, reflexively, into my bag. As if I’m a thief, a criminal. As a child I flagrantly disobeyed library rules. All my books were late, months late, years late. I had been told that my lost Babita had been a librarian and was locked up or dead. I doubt this influenced me, but you never know how deep the family story turns inside you. Sometimes I stowed books under my jacket, avoiding the checkout process altogether. I was an outlaw reader. And in the end, my parents would have to pay up.
I immediately pluck the white box back out, look around. The slightly harried reference librarian with her loose dress and quick smile is as congenial in person as she was via e-mail and has no interest in my sudden reflexive transgression. She doesn’t care that my grandfather worked for the SS. I’m searching. She’s helping me.
It’s only later that someone will politely suggest that I shouldn’t bring my bag into the microfiche area but leave it in a locker in the hallway. Meanwhile I’ve done all the wrong things. I have a chocolate chip cookie with me. My cell phone. Both not allowed.
I break the rules, as if I were a girl again. Then I begin.
I start out with the records of the Gebietskommissar Wilna-land, accession number 1999.A.0107, five microfiche rolls from the captured German administration records from the time of their occupation in the Vilnius district of Lithuania. Only five rolls to start with because I’ve limited my search geographically. Senelis worked in Wilna-land, north of Vilnius itself. My mother speaks German, used to teach it. (Of course, she would never utter a word of it in the presence of my nana, my Jewish grandmother.) I don’t really know it, but it’s a knowable language. If you look at it long enough. If you stare at document after document, if you grew up in several households and heard Lithuanian, German, Yiddish, a bit of Russian, Polish down the block in Oak Bluffs in the summer. And then there are those loan words from the French and the Latin that make German familiar. Take terror, for example: terror in Latin (“great fear”), der Terror in German, terror in English.
Juedische. A name: Jakob Zimon. “Bei 50.” Age fifty. My plan was to look for letterheads that mentioned Švenčionys, where my grandfather worked. My plan was to focus only on correspondence, edicts, orders that concerned Švenčionys and Wilna-land dated from 1941 to 1943. I don’t.
Jakob Zimon. “Juedische Kommunistas in Litauen.” This is a list. They’re after him. “Erotisch abnorm”—the description continues … an insinuation perhaps that he’s not only a Communist but homosexual as well. The Communists/Jews were the first victims of the roving baltaraiščiai—the Lithuanian “partisans” who wore a white (balta) strap or band tied around one forearm. The smallest gesture toward a uniform, that white marker—in the open, a young man among other baltaraiščiai brethren must have felt as if he’d kicked open a door of his life.
In a few weeks’ time, the Germans trample in and make a false offer of autonomy to the Lithuanian government, then quickly install their own superstructure over a command chain primarily of Lithuanians, including the white bands whose violent zeal makes them difficult to control, makes them useful.
Zimon is in Kaunas/Kovno, where Elena Buividaite-Kutorgene, a Lithuanian physician who refuses to follow the edict that forbids doctors from treating Jewish patients, is keeping her diary. “Perhaps world society does not know what is happening here,” she writes. Jews forced to gather excrement with their hands. Everywhere the snatchers, the catchers, the kidnappers. (Someone is coming. Get off the street. Leave your house. Forget the dinner on your table, the cat, the baby’s toys.) Lithuanians with guns. Looting. Raping. Going after some of their own as well as the Jewish population. Wild murder before the killing becomes more organized. Kutorgene will bribe a policeman and throw food over the ghetto walls. Read Tolstoy at night, an Asian travelogue, Turgenev, for escape, for “oblivion.”
Jakob lives at Maironio str. 18. I want to tell him to get out of there. Run. Flee on your own or with the departing Soviets who according to this list you so loyally served with distinction. In other words, promoted, uppity, parading around, upsetting the old order of things. Maybe he was a true believer. Maybe everything written about him is a lie.
And then there is another: Leib Schaus, twenty-six years old, blond, tall, wrote newspaper articles that agitated against Germany. Good information has it that he took off from Lithuania several days before the Germans trooped in. Wife in Minsk. I stare at the words on the list, on the pages of the five rolls of microfiche. For hours I’ll stare.
I turn the dial. Glass and light. All the records stored during World War II and immediately after on microfiche are perishable because of the film’s acetate base. Of course, by now, thanks to places like the Holocaust Museum and other archive treasuries, many of these records have been transferred to film without this flaw, or digitized. But not as many as you’d think, living here in the United States, sitting, for the moment, at three in the afternoon, in a chair with arms that make it impossible to get close enough to the bright screen, so I scowl and lean in, cookie crumbs falling from my shirt, second after second disintegrating before me.
On the screen appears the first major order in German and Lithuanian signed off on by Gebietskommissar de Wilna-Land Hingst. I can’t work the scanner right: big dark letters, tacked up everywhere in the cities and then the towns. I end up copying only a slice of the Lithuanian text that sits next to the German, a list of orders on official paper that began to appear on public noticeboards, on telephone poles, in mail slots, on the outer doors of the libraries or police stations, at street entrances on August 2, 1941.
Looking at my scan later, I’ll think of the paradox of nationalism—how it slices away, eviscerates the richness of identity, of place, including Švenčionys, where my grandfather would soon be working. I’ll think of the yellow star (the size and placement would change and change again), the rule about walking in the gutter instead of on the sidewalk, the rule that forbade all Jews to enter parks and squares. There would be no strolls along the gravel walkways between beds of summer flowers outside the large stone imperium, once the mansion of a duke but now housing the offices of the SS, with the delicate crocus just outside, while across the street spread purple rock cress with leaves like velvet sandpaper, yellow-gold rue—the herb of repentance, the Lithuanian national flower. The movement of time in the passage of the noon sun expanding there like a door pushed open after the short days and still, cold nights of a late spring.