A Guest at the Shooters' Banquet

by Rita Gabis

  The Lithuanians were the worst.

  The words cut through me, stuck. In the moment—an image of my grandfather, the freedom fighter, running across a field, in a country I’d never seen. Running into my life.

  I got up, clattered a few dishes together. Ashamed. Embarrassed. Something. But not enough of something to ask any questions of any family members. Start reading. Wondering.

  Until now. Eight years later.

  Exhaustion hits. I float a little, close to sleep.

  Before the unremembered dreams, a little half-dream—mountains, denuded, strange. Not a real place. It’s the past—somehow I understand. But how to get there? How to come back?

  CHAPTER 13

  * * *

  OUR ANNE FRANK

  The next morning I’m at the archives again. One day I’ll be able to read, with a fair amount of exactness, what my grandfather was writing about in Lithuanian in the captured German records. But now, at the Holocaust Museum, I can’t.

  A little bomb is busy constructing itself in my chest. A dry cough rests in the back of my throat—no lozenge or syrup or hot tea chases it away. My hands are sweaty, and my eyes in the mirror of the quiet bathroom down the carpeted archive hall seem too shiny, a gaze without clarity or depth.

  My mother had a private liturgy I inherited: disappearances are utterly possible—people, houses, goats, carefully stitched slippers (a bit too tight but beloved), her mother with her familiar officiousness, her subtly acrid sweat, the nails of her thin fingers clipped and clean. They’re here. They’re gone. Better stay put. Better hold on tight. Better doubt than believe. I download all the records from Lithuania again. Next, on a different flash drive, red like a stoplight, I download only the files in my grandfather’s hand, in case the first flash drive vanishes between D.C. and New York.

  All I want to know is what my grandfather’s reports say, but I make myself continue with other files I’ve ordered.

  FOR MY MOTHER, Babita was the victim of a terrible magic trick. No one mentioned her after she was taken; no one explained. So my mother waited. Spring rains churned an unfamiliar road into muck, washed out paths to doorways of strangers and relatives who hid my mother for a while, and then passed her on, sometimes with her brother and sister, sometimes alone. Once in a while, when circumstances demanded it, someone led them all into fields, burrowed them at night in a trough of ground that smelled of the molting of animals and tall broken grass.

  My mother, the oldest, had a duty to her brother and sister to discern, predict; what had happened to the imperfect order of chickens, the apples she and her brother buried, the vinegar they poured on burdock? Was their mother’s disappearance an irrevocable event? The old life was close enough still—when would it enclose them all again like a coat my mother could hand down to her younger sister, like the heat from the great brick stove?

  In the white boxes tagged at the long, low archivists’ desk, my next batch of microfiche reels waits. Every reel they contain is in Russian. I can’t read the Cyrillic typeface or handwriting. I’ve been tricked by my own half-conscious expectation—everything important in this world is in English, or at least Latinate.

  The Cyrillic alphabet creates a whiteout in my brain. And because it was the Soviets and their local collaborators who, in the early summer of 1941, surrounded my Babita’s house in their long coats, I think of her again. Of the wire sent for Krukchamama, Senelis’s sister, to come collect the children. Then Babita fled to a hiding place in her church rectory closet until the fourteenth of June.

  I knew some of her story from my interview with my mother and my aunts on Martha’s Vineyard, and from Babita’s arrest files sent from the Lithuanian archives. Months later, I would get them fully translated, but they were instantly evocative with their official headings and a blurry photograph of Babita’s membership card for the Lithuanian Rifleman’s Union (Šaulių Sąjunga).

  On the morning of June 14, 1941, Babita left her hiding place in the rectory and took a quick detour back home. It was dangerous, foolish, but she couldn’t help herself (we have all done some small version of this: in the middle of a personal hurricane, watered a plant, straightened a portrait on the wall of a house that won’t exist in an hour’s time). She went to feed the chickens one last time. She worried for them. The domestic routine that was hers, her hours, as she lived them; she had to let them go but couldn’t, not quite yet, not her yard, her birds, their eggs, rabble and scratch marks in the dirt, her fate.

  Afterward she’d simply walk away, take to the road, quickly but casually, a scarf around her head, as if heading out to mushroom, pay a call, take eggs to someone old and homebound a half mile away. She stood surrounded by chickens, her hands empty with the last of the feed, by the sand pile her children dug through to foreign lands. Then the Soviet secret police (the NKVD) were everywhere—backyard, front door, side alley, at the window with the broken pane.

  The ubiquitous gas seal revolvers, an old Russian make good for seven rounds, weighed down their side pockets. They had their lists, their processes of inventory and arrest, had gone to the home of the janitress at the rectory as well. She was missing, but her child was there. They took the child.

  The page of Babita’s KGB (what the NKVD morphed into) file that lists the minimal contents of the family home speaks of a Comrade Jakuchonas who is part of the two-person processing team—a man or woman, one can’t know.

  The inventory paints the scene: a thin woman cursing herself for stopping home one more time, watching two “comrades” rifle through coats, rip through the feathered interiors of pillows she stuffed and sewed, put their hands, their scent, on all she has to leave behind. The stubs of her cigarettes, perhaps, to check the brand, a bit of blanket her boy used to suck on when he was teething. Babita watches; even in her panic the details won’t evade her. One agent’s eyes linger a bit longer on the Philips radio, the other strokes the velvet fabric of the couch.

  “It was her Jewish neighbors who turned her in,” Aunt Karina had said on the Vineyard, somber, matter-of-fact. Turned her in because she was married to the chief of the border police, a Lithuanian military man, was educated, was, as her Rifleman’s Union card indicated, a nationalist, not a good Communist, turned her in because my grandfather was fighting the Russians, because Stalin in June 1941 had ordered a purge; anyone who might be a threat to his regime was to be arrested, collected, vanished. The order brought forth informants quick to make their own allegiances clear, or perhaps settle a score, or both.

  Prior to the actual roundups and deportations, the Soviet secret police gathered denunciations. Their “interviews” had a single set of answers and a single purpose—to justify arrest, jail, torture, and/or deportation of the “criminal.” The following “Record of interrogation” was badly handwritten, but the gist is clear.

  [?] Salote _neidiene, daughter of Jakubas, [born] 1895 in Koenigsberg [?], Germany. Illiterate, no party affiliation [residing at] Žeimelis.

  Question: When did you become acquainted with reserve lieutenant Pranas Puronas?

  Answer: I’ve known Pranas Puronas for about 6 years. He [was] the border commander and an active rifleman organizer. He was a very ambitious man and paid no heed to anyone, especially proletarians [or “working people.”]. He covered [provided protection for] various fascist demonstrations. Now he seems to have gone somewhere else. His wife lives in Žeimelis, has 3 children, an 8-year-old son, a 7-year-old daughter and a small 4-year-old son Darius [the list of children is all mixed up] … She has worked since 1937 at the library, now the state [library]. Over all, the reserve lieutenant and former regional border commander is and was an active worker for the capitalist system. I have nothing further to testify. This testimony has been read to me and is written correctly.

  [signed] S. [?]

  [signed] senior district authorized executive Stokauskas [?]

  May 31, 1941

  Žeimelis

  [signed:] [illegible]

  chairman, Žei
melis rural district executive committee

  [stamped] Žeimelis Rural District Exec. Committee

  The name of Comrade Jakuchonas on the inventory form is a Lithuanianized version of Jakushok, a Jewish name. In Žeimelis and nearby Panevėžys, the Jewish family name Jakushok appears on countless tax lists, necrologies. Names were routinely altered; depending on the native tongue of the person who asked the voter, the arrestee, and the taxpayer, and then licked the pencil lead, writing it down. So one must look at a name and imagine a Russified version, a Yiddish version, the Lithuanian one with the different endings for masculine, feminine, married, unmarried. I wonder if “Jakubas” on the interrogation record is my translator’s mistake in light of the difficult script—it’s just close enough to Jakushok. One of the neighbors who is saying what she knows she must say, or maybe she never liked my grandfather. Maybe he was too loud, drunk and carousing. Perhaps he included her in his hatred of the Russians and of the Communist Jews.

  Babita was taken on June 14, 1941. But war is a quick-change artist, a con done so swiftly—the shuffling cards and the money you put in the game fly off the table long before you understand you’re the mark. In a few weeks’ time those who gave the order to shove Babita first into a truck, then the truck to a train, must themselves take to the road or they’re dead. Dead if they can’t outrun the baltaraiščiai—Lithuanian partisans wearing white armbands, intent on exacting revenge from anyone who supported the Russians—and the advancing German army. On August 8, baltaraiščiai and Germans gun down a mother and daughter who bear the Jakushok name, along with the rest of the Jewish population of Žeimelis; roughly 160 people. Families with children. Widows. Wayward sons.

  Jakushok/Jackuchonas. On June 12, 1941, the paperwork on Babita and Senelis and their children was stamped and sealed. When the time comes for payback against those who helped implement the purge, the baltaraiščiai, young, barely literate, good Catholics or drunken thugs or midlife lawyers, doctors, business owners (before the Soviets nationalized their livelihood), leave their houses in Žeimelis or jostle in a truck from Panevėžys, with rage, a long list of old humiliations that can be rectified now that the Russians are out and the Germans are on their way in. The baltaraiščiai won’t worry about derivations of a name before they shoot, won’t pull on the threads that bind rumor and fact. The fact, for instance, that as late as 1938, there were 1,004 members of the Communist Party in Lithuania—among them 303 Lithuanian Jews (Litvaks) and 598 Lithuanians. Though they kill Lithuanian Communists as well, in the end it will be the Jews of Lithuania who are seen as Bolsheviks—all of them, devils of Stalin.

  My mother had told me that she thought that after the war, relatives of either Babita or Senelis were able to retrieve some of the family property in Žeimelis. This amazed me, that one could go back, claim the coat with a fur collar, the electric iron. I imagined a huge warehouse. A thousand radios, bedsteads piled haphazardly, stacks of chairs, as in the basement of a thrift shop. She later surmised that it probably didn’t happen; she had remembered wrong, or perhaps gotten errant information in a letter from a Lithuanian relative.

  Stowed in my bag, on this return visit to the Holocaust Museum, in a narrow locker out in the hall, is a thick book: The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944. Meticulously edited by Benjamin Harshav and translated by Barbara Harshav, it is a large compendium of diary entries made by one Herman Kruk, who created the library in the Vilna ghetto, and was also conscripted into the German work detail, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg. Kruk’s diary is, among many other things, a record not only of the people of the ghetto but of property lost, destroyed, stolen, hidden.

  Alfred Rosenberg, chosen by Hitler to lead the Reich Ministry of the Eastern Occupied Territories, was also the head of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg. He conscripted ghetto prisoners to sort, destroy, or box for shipment to Germany looted art and books, including centuries-old Judaica—all for a macabre, grand showcase, reaped from destroyed public institutions and the private collections of Jews and other Untermenschen (subhumans) who, by the time Rosenberg’s museum was a reality, would all have been obliterated from the earth. Rosenberg was a dandy, obsessive about his clothes, a needy sycophant. Like Kruk, he too kept a diary, but of a different sort—a scribble here about a night when Hitler invited him to pull his chair closer to the fire, another scribble about a dinner when, like a bad father, Hitler cast him out of the magic circle with a glance, a whisper in another direction. Though he was instrumental in constructing the murderous analytics that justified a doctrine of racial purity, he never achieved the full approbation from either Hitler or his peers that he so keenly sought.

  Partial interior of the Vilna ghetto library, 2014

  Kruk and others (including the Lithuanian Ona Šimaitė, a librarian at Vilnius University), at great personal risk, took advantage of this work detail to aid in the smuggling out and hiding of precious manuscripts and books to stock the Vilna ghetto library on what was then Strashun Street. The ghetto prison sat just across a small courtyard visible from the library windows. The library was a sanctuary. Resistance fighters held target practice in the cellar.

  As I sit in front of the microfiche machine, I think of Babita’s name: Ona, like Ona Šimaitė. How differently their lives splintered forward. Šimaitė received her library training in Moscow, Babita in Kaunas. Šimaitė wasn’t deported during Stalin’s early purges. In 1944, as Julija Šukys, her biographer, notes, the Gestapo arrested Šimaitė and “burned the soles of her feet with hot irons.”

  ANOTHER SECONDHAND STORY, from the past. I’m a child; either my mother or my aunt tells me that after Babita’s arrest, after the crowded, stinking cattle car and the brutal interrogations, the inscrutable system whereby she was shuttled from one prison camp to another without warning, a particular Gulag guard took a liking to her and out of kindness and pity (certainly it wasn’t passion for a woman so stern and ossified—was it?) gave her a little milk, a little extra bread, and so saved her life.

  But during the February meeting on the Vineyard, neither my mother nor aunt remembers this small story. The details brought me comfort as a child, and so I carried them into adulthood. They had made me happy for a grandmother I’d never met. In the great frozen expanse, Babita had a tin cup of milk! On the Mongolian border (wherever that was), a bit of bread was stashed in her hand, food the most essential possession.

  Men starved first, then children. Women survived the low caloric intake the best, though thousands died anyway. If not from hunger, from typhus; if not from typhus, of infection from a wound incurred in the forests, a beating doled out by a fellow inmate or a guard, anemia (even though menstruation stopped), suicide. Late in Babita’s sentence, conditions began to improve. One day a cat was spotted wandering delicately between barracks, a cat no one had killed and skinned for a scrawny bit of meat.

  The truth, it would turn out, was that for the luxury of cigarettes—Babita was a chain smoker—and perhaps, now and then, milk or bread, she bartered, made a trade. She stripped the threads from bandages and, a beautiful needleworker, stitched delicate “gifts” for the wives of the guards. Nothing was free. Not in the desolate Siberian camps, not in Švenčionys.

  I COPY RUSSIAN files from one reel, then another. In the postwar interrogations conducted and compiled by Soviet commissars and their secretaries who fanned out across the Baltics, some schooled in forensics, some barely literate, intentions were multifaceted. Enough testimony about the crimes of the “fascist invaders” might (though this was unlikely, given the Allies’ efforts to rebuild and stabilize Germany) entitle the Soviet Union to reparations. Collaborators like my grandfather had to be hunted down. Their punishment sent a message to the occupied population—rebellion, even small acts of defiance, would be met with swift repercussions.

  Investigations that produced information troublesome to the regime were quashed. The religious and cultural identity of the vic
tims was ultimately forsaken—for the murdered, an after-death death. If there had been a Holocaust, it had been a Holocaust of brave Soviet citizens (excluding criminal Soviet citizens like Babita who, before the war, were justly sent away to the Gulag). Otherwise how to account for the numbers of brave Soviet citizens walking around in the shoes of the Jewish dead, making soup in their houses, riding their bicycles? Focus must never be on Jewish victims, survivors, or partisans. The few Jews of Lithuania and other Baltic countries all now part of the Soviet Socialist Republic, as well as the Jews in Russia proper who survived World War II, would be targeted again when the wheel turned in the grinding Soviet machine.

  In his Prison Diaries, Edward Kuznetsov used the same word Aunt Karina had when she referred to my grandfather’s anti-Semitism, though Kuznetsov, a Soviet-Jewish dissident, was referring to the plight of Jews in Russia in the 1970s: “The most accessible scapegoat? Indeed!” (He also wrote passionately about the Soviet persecution of Catholic Lithuanians: “He who does not bow the knee must rot his time away in prison.”)

  I press on with my attempt to reach back in time, scan the unreadable like a blind woman, even the pages of microfilm that bled from front to back, one side a mixed-up mirror for the other.

  Finally I stop. Once my mother knew Russian, but as with her knowledge of Lithuanian, when I ask her about it, ask if she can help me, she’ll demur: “No, I never really could read it, a few words maybe but that’s all.” And my memory of her in our house in Kansas City with a loud-voiced émigré, a Russian she met during her graduate work in languages at the University of Kansas, booming out phrases that she responds to in kind—teeters, becomes a half dream. (I always thought of him as rotund, large; but my mother has corrected me—he was a slight man, a poet whose voice traveled ahead of him, took up all the space in the room.)