by Rita Gabis
I think about that reconnaissance trip, made when Rachel and her younger brother and her mother and father were required to wear the Jewish star, when the borders were still porous but full of danger. She was fifteen.
Warsaw to Święciany—south to north—is about three hundred and thirty-seven miles; now, she has her younger brother in tow. At the train station at the start of the journey there is one last glimpse of home, their father’s face as he waves them aboard; then the train’s huffing and all the other faces, those in flight, or with military orders, or in disguise (Itzhak and his sister have slipped off their starred armbands on the train).
There is snow, a river to cross. There are wolves. Their belongings are stolen.
In Israel, Itzhak, now Yitzhak Arad, will report this detail to me with the briefest smile—a bit of irony in the smile, perhaps, about a world that quickly became rife with thieves of all kinds. Or perhaps I read the smile wrong. Perhaps it was a remembrance of and fondness for the innocence they quickly lost. It is their Polish guide who steals their belongings on a trek that includes an encounter with a German cavalry patrol, Itzhak and his sister running at times to keep warm, alongside a sled meant to carry them.
The smoke of their breath, declension of horse hooves in the moon-crossed roads and fields. How quickly the snow fills up the trace of the animal’s progress.
The smuggler looks at the running children, notes perhaps the boy’s height, measures it against the height of his own child. Or perhaps he has no children, but he has cunning. Perhaps he has always been someone who knows how to find an opportunity when it appears, or perhaps this is a recently discovered talent.
“Oh, I wrote it all already in my book,” Yitzhak Arad says to me, shaking his head. He’s a bit mystified to see me; anything of any import about his experience in Święciany he wrote in a book I carry. On the worn red paperback cover: The Partisan—From the Valley of Death to Mount Zion.
The name of the high school library that ultimately deaccessioned it is magic-markered out with a thick, uneven black line, like the dark water under the ice of the Bug River.
Which is, of course, the river Yitzhak Arad and his sister Rachel had to cross; the ice they tested with each step ever so carefully, the pine scent sharp in the back of the throat, and the brazen clarity of winter stars.
They make it to Święciany. They are there on June 14, 1941, when the Soviet purge that consigned my Lithuanian grandmother to torture and imprisonment sweeps through. In The Partisan Yitzhak Arad noted that among those arrested throughout Lithuania at the time were Polish officials, political activists, and people with influence and wealth; five to six thousand Jews among them. “The social elite of the Jewish community,” Arad wrote—but that fact would evaporate even before the first Soviet freight car of those purges vanished with its stunned cargo of human lives.
CHAPTER 17
* * *
ANIMALS
LITHUANIA, JUNE 2012
A green park studded with little white flowers. A breeze like a soft scarf one wears in late spring. The fabric caresses, almost weightless, smelling of the night’s perfume. The fields outside of town have been plowed up for planting. Another weightless gift—that scent of day and new heat in the turned earth and beyond—forest, lakes. The Vilnius highway, the one main road from Vilnius to Švenčionys, is a straight shot. Hawks circle in the light. A single cloud moves a silver shadow here, then there.
A young woman with a leg that doesn’t work right maneuvers down the sidewalk across from the pharmacy; she hitches up one hip to drag the useless limb forward. At day’s end my fixer, Rose, and I will enter the small pharmacy at almost the same time as the young woman, and the effort she has to expend to cross the threshold will seem heroic, her face determined, tight and fatigued, as if she were thirty or forty instead of nineteen or twenty. She’ll look at me, bored, dismissive, imperious, then move with great complication out the door.
Švenčionys is roughly fifty-three miles from Vilnius; I’d expected to get out of the van and see—what? At the end of a street that is not as wide or grand as it is in the old photos before the war, my grandfather walking toward me, his vigor restored. He’s eager. Happy. It’s his town; a town that feels strangely in suspension. All of Lithuania that I discover on this trip will feel the same way. Waiting. Everywhere. A black dog on a chain hyperalert in a dusty pen. When the knock on the door comes, will it be a lover? A brother? The one you cross a river to wait for? The one you drowned as casually as the unwanted litter of puppies a friend of mine’s neighbor down South bagged up and threw, with a stone, into a pond?
But I’m no longer waiting to learn about the contents of the first of my grandfather’s reports I discovered at the Holocaust Museum. It’s about gold—the missing gold of missing Jews. It’s an interview in 1942 with Kazys Šuminas from nearby Ignalina who is informing on Juozas Miciūnas, who apparently has been seen with a golden bracelet and a gold watch.
These interviews are part of the German Civil Administration’s attempt to halt the dispersion of Jewish wealth into the hands of police chiefs, German officers and administrators, and locals via thievery or bribes. All over Lithuania, men like my grandfather are conducting these interviews. All over Lithuania they make it clear to the peasants they bring in to “testify” that there is to be no mention of Jewish goods, especially gold, in the hands of Lithuanian police chiefs, their cohorts, and their favored underlings.
A German document puts the house where Senelis lived on “Commissar Street”—but no such street exists. Rose, my fixer, is convinced this was just another name for the Vilnius highway. “He was an important man,” she says. “He would have lived out front, on this road.” She speaks with certainty. I’m not so sure. Though perhaps she’s right; perhaps Commissar Street is a name the Russians gave Vilnius highway—which is a real highway, though without western modernity (no six whiplash-fast lanes, no tall buildings bumping the sky, no exits leading to sprawling suburban outcrops).
It is a highway I’ll be on weeks later, my heart rhythm slightly awry, my blood pressure spiking, when a thought like a whisper will come to me—You won’t live very much longer. An intuition that feels more local than personal, less nightmare than fact—but not a fact from my own life. It might have been a disconnected fear, a result of having had my chest cut open, my heart stopped and fixed and started again. Or something else, inexplicable, subtler, as if a door to the past of this place was left ajar—a few words, a private prayer. The door slams shut, and I’m back in the van, video cam and papers and water in my blue canvas bag, the tic tic tic of the turn signal as Petras, the driver who often works with Rose, pulls into the usual gas station for a pit stop.
FOOD POISONING BROUGHT me to my knees a few nights before the moment of terror on the highway. I felt it coming on at the hotel while I watched, on the big flat-screen television, a Lithuanian-dubbed version of Edward Zwick’s Defiance—the saga of the Bielski partisans (born in what was part of Poland before the war) and their forest camp. The movie was filmed in Lithuania in 2008, though the events of camp life it depicts took place across the border in Belarus.
I’d eaten pork that night. I hadn’t had it since childhood, hated it. Fear, hatred, self-hatred; whatever it was that made me order it, I watched the waiter arrive with the large, white, elegantly plated hunk of meat and forked it into my mouth, even though it made me gag.
My stomach cramped while Daniel Craig, stocky, wary, rallied his camp members in an English/Belorussian accent while on the half beat after each word, the Lithuanian voice-over chimed in. Confusing, it matched my own confusion; Jewish, not Jewish, Lithuanian-American, American. The cramping worsened. I felt sicker and sicker. A neighbor of mine in New York had gone to school with a boy whose father, a truck driver, was one of the Bielski brothers. (The Bielskis’ famous forest camp gave shelter to over a thousand Jews hiding from ghetto incarceration and death. It offered one of the few options to families on the run, men and boys whos
e prewar lives had never taught them to fire a weapon or survive in the open.) The father of my neighbor’s classmate never talked about his time in the forest. There were no class visits on what-do-your-parents-do days. No sign on his truck: YOU’RE SAFE WITH US. YOU CAN TRUST A BIELSKI.
That night, soon to end in a narrow hospital bed in a clinic off the Vilnius highway, I remembered a passage from Yitzhak Arad’s The Partisan: “On the way to a small island in the marshy swamps north of the Kozyany Forest, I watched the faces of the people as they passed, dragging along with their last ounce of strength … the only survivors of tens of small Jewish communities wiped out … struggling to save themselves and their children. I stood there … powerless.” No camp for them, with love affairs and brotherly feuds and green-black potatoes to share. No time or means to help them, no shelter to offer.
“This is the one place in all of Belorussia where a Jew can be free,” Daniel Craig proclaims in the Belorussian/Lithuanian woods—“Tai viena vieta visi Baltarusiją, kur Judėjas gali būti nemokamai!” I thought of a Jewish woman living in Moscow I’d interviewed recently by phone; she remembered the sting of peroxide on her forehead, poured on her dark hair to make it blond by the wife of the Polish couple from Švenčionys who had taken her in as a child.
In Švenčionys (then Polish Święciany) in the interwar years, a Lithuanian gymnazija (school) had, before first the Poles and then the Russians shut it down, also served as a meeting hall. There the Lithuanian minority could gather, celebrate national holidays, and vent its anger at being locked out of the best jobs, just one more proof of what was viewed by some as the treachery of the Poles.
Švenčionys gymnazija that became, in 1941, a Kasino and banquet hall.
For proof, go back to 1920 when the (Lithuanian-born) Polish general Żeligowski mutinied against the soon-to-be leader of the Second Polish Republic, Józef Piłsudski (born in the Święciany region), by marching on Vilnius, thereafter to be known as Wilno. It is the stuff of international intrigue; Piłsudski was actually behind the “mutiny,” the stealing away of Vilnius, all the while pretending to negotiate a mutually acceptable border with the Lithuanians while his general “betrayed him.”
This is, of course, a gross simplification of an event preceded by border battles, interventions by the League of Nations, the Polish-Soviet War, and the Lithuanian struggle for autonomy. The theft of Vilnius, their glorious capital—where Polish and Yiddish were the dominant languages—was an assault on a complicated Lithuanian dream. For some, like Senelis, the dream was the return of a Lithuania with borders as vast as the old, vanished grand duchy, a Vilnius that could not be taken from them, and a population that might be polyglot, but was purely Lithuanian. It was partly a fiction and partly a refusal to be broken by a series of invasions, demands, and gifts with hidden price tags. On October 10, 1939, the Soviets offered to return Vilnius to the Lithuanians if they allowed Soviet military installations within their borders. The Lithuanians got Vilnius back, but with the Soviet military in place, their country was soon overrun and in 1940 the Soviet occupation and purges began.
In Švenčionys, Jews and Poles and Lithuanians and Russians knew their own history; they had their own divergent and sometimes overlapping narratives, interpretations, travesties experienced by one but not another, wars fought together or against one another. In 1941, during the German occupation, the Švenčionys gimnazija was no longer a place for the Lithuanian minority to commiserate. It became a watering hole for the local German command, the Saugumas—the Lithuanian security police headed up by Senelis—and other branches of the Lithuanian police. The gimnazija turned Kasino was full of black-market and ration-card food, cards, and liquor, with Gestapo from Kaunas or Vilnius on the scene when events required their presence. (By this time the local Jews were incarcerated in the small ghetto, soon to be hit by a typhus epidemic.)
In the hotel room, I was sick for hours. A cab stinking of diesel fuel sped me off to a clinic. The cabbie and my husband banged on the front door until a nurse came from some interior room and let me in. Three IV bags later, the lovely high-heeled doctor said in slow, heavily accented English, “I think you will be very fine.” I’d asked for apple juice long ago, and it hadn’t come. Even with my husband in a chair by the bed, I was lonely and scared and furious, the fury from dehydration and disorientation, but even more so from the past I was chasing down, so hard to find in the Lithuania present, yet at the same time everywhere. That week I’d gone to the death pits at Ponary and again thought of Kazimierz Sakowicz’s notes buried in lemonade bottles, of the demonic inventiveness of the Germans who stumbled upon the huge, deep wells in the earth that the Russians had dug out for petrol storage, just close enough to Vilnius to make them convenient, just far enough away in a wooded area to make a perfect, secret (at least for a time) killing ground.
After the doctor (beautiful as so many Lithuanian women are) click-clicked elegantly from the room, a nurse in a smock entered, holding carefully on a tray a glass full of foamy liquid. They’d had to go to a store—waiting first for dawn and places to open—for apples to press into the fresh, incredibly delicious juice. I marveled. The juice instantly made me think of my grandmother Rachel, who always had Mott’s apple juice and apple sauce on hand—she would have made matzah brei for me, a special treat even though it wasn’t Passover. “For your strength,” she’d say. “Eat!”
“I want to go home,” I said to my husband.
“You have to stay,” he said, softly, but with great seriousness, stroking my hand. “You have more work to do.”
WE DRIVE SLOWLY, Rose, Petras at the wheel, and I, looking for my grandfather’s long house, really two houses with two front doors, two glass porches, one on either end, like an antiquated duplex. For a time, Aunt Karina had recalled, a Polish family lived in the adjoining house. A gate of wrought iron—or was it wood? (here my mother wavered when she tried to remember for me during a phone call before my flight out of JFK)—then a paved walkway that led to the front door, but first, in the yard, a profusion of flowers. Cosmos, she recalled hesitantly, then with more conviction. Tall, fuchsia and white, brilliant at the end of summer. Did the German officers notice them on the walkway to my grandfather’s door? Kosmosblume; they shine even when the sun goes down, as if each flower contained a battery.
My mother remembered the officers in stages. No Germans ever entered our house. Then, Yes, it was a soldier or two, they never stayed long, I never saw them. Finally, Officers from Vilnius. Uniforms a young girl’s eyes were drawn to, low and then loud voices. Clatter of forks and knives on dishes during the welcome dinner the children didn’t take part in, shuffle of good-byes at the door, the end of a drunken joke.
My grandfather’s unmarried sister Ona/Anna (she had the same name as his vanished wife), helped from time to time by my namesake, my great-grandmother Barbara, cooked for the German visitors. My grandfather was a hunter, so deer probably. Or rabbit, still studded with a bit of shot. Maybe wild boar. No, my mother says, not boar—then, Yes, perhaps.
My mother remembers that after my grandfather’s three-year tenure in Švenčionys was over, after he had moved on and was working for the Germans in Panevėžys and the children were with Krukchamama in Gindviliai, he came to visit once with a whole ham! Where did the ham come from? A black-market coup? Payment for a job well done? A bribe? A small, dumb question—it haunts me.
Petras parks opposite the imposing Catholic church my mother went to as a child, her ankle socks clean, mud brushed hard from her shoes.
Švenčionys Catholic church
She had one friend. The friend lived far from Švenčionys, so my mother barely saw her; in fact they only played together a few times, and then the girl, who spoke Lithuanian instead of the locals’ impenetrable Polish, was inexplicably gone. But when one friend is all you’ve got, you claim her as such, even if you only nod to each other in the street, or meet briefly every few months, or have a picnic and then part forever.
“
Are you a big shot?” my mother asked Senelis when they moved into Švenčionys.
“Yes,” he said. This makes her proud, but her mother’s absence is a splinter in her heel; every step hurts.
A BROAD-SHOULDERED BELARUSIAN, Petras, our driver, wears dark glasses; he looks tough, lounging by his dependable secondhand van as if it were a prized horse that must be guarded from market thieves. And in fact the first place he parks, opposite the church, is on the edge of what was once the crowded market square.
It smelled of fish, someone I’ll interview remembers; many horses, feed buckets, warm flanks, and in winter the white clouds of horsey breath, smoke above the trampled snow. Animal life and the crush of buyers and sellers were overwhelming for a small child: the jammed stores and crowded stalls, the tannery, the apothecary, the expert tailor’s shop, two book binderies, one in the basement of a large stone house where among the supplies was gold leaf for the rare order that spared no expense—a book like a jewel, like an inheritance.
Petras speaks almost no English and offers little candies in the van when the miles drag out between Vilnius and Švenčionys. The van is solid as a tank. Gas is astronomical here, cheaper in Belarus. And because he has a Belarusian passport, Petras is permitted to wait hours at one of two border crossings to visit his mother and fill up the tank; if it’s a lucky day, two hours; an unlucky day, seven or eight hours or more.
Rose, my fixer, has a great, albeit condemnatory, fondness for the home country she shares with Petras, even though it’s more or less a police state. “Things work there,” she says. Farmers plant and sell. In Lithuania everything is imported now. After communism, the small farmers who used to belong to collectives couldn’t afford all the big equipment agriculture requires. They couldn’t beat the import prices. Hundreds of acres are idle. She can’t abide that—the waste of it, the poverty it signifies.