by Rita Gabis
Before Petras turns off the van’s engine, we drive slowly up and down the Vilnius highway into the town center, then back out again. We look on both sides of the road for the front-yard flowers, the two glass porches. It feels futile.
I wish I could ask my uncle Roy questions about his visit back to Švenčionys, but then I remember what Aunt Aggie told me: “He wouldn’t talk about any of it,” she said, not once, but several times, when I pressed her, during phone calls before my trip, to make sure. “It” was the war, Švenčionys, the DP camps, the loss of his mother. Uncle Roy never wavered in his view of Jews and their corrupt dominance over world affairs, particularly economic affairs.
I’d thought, before I came to Švenčionys, that I’d find the house he’d lived in with his father and my mother and my aunt and that the house would be an orientation point: I’d know the sidewalks my mother walked on, the distance between Senelis’s house and the jail, the ghetto, the roads to different borders, different towns. I stare out the window of the van and make a different kind of map in my head. The Belarusian border is a half hour’s drive away. An old Russian Orthodox church, blue and wooden and beautiful, sits just beyond the town center on the Vilnius highway—continuity in the midst of so much change.
IN THE POOL at my hotel in Vilnius, Rose swims in a striped bathing suit that looks as if it was made in Russia in 1920 and so is instantly hip, contemporary. (In Soviet times she worked as an engineer in the telegraph office, transformed now into the very hotel where we wade into the pool.) She does the breast stroke carefully with her head out of the water at all times, like a woman from Missouri in 1962 who gets her hair done twice a week and doesn’t want the orange-juice-can curls to flatten out. But Rose doesn’t have this kind of vanity. In the van with Petras she pulls obsessively at her lovely tight curls. If I had to go to war, I would want her by my side. She is strident and delicate. She teases me like a sister, eats like a forager, nothing thrown away. Handfuls of berries. Hard ends of cheese. Bread. Presses it on me. As if I were withering away. As if my life in New York guaranteed a vitamin deficiency she is required to correct. Over the months we work together, I come to love her. This first trip though, I’m appalled by her blunt approach to potential interviewees. People run from her. An old woman shakes her head furiously, No no, I don’t want to talk about the war, and totters away as quickly as she is able, Rose shouting after her.
We make a good team: She’s bold. I’m overly decorous. Soon we’ll be joined by a third, Viktorija, fresh out of graduate school at Vilnius University; her braids and braces and glasses make her look sixteen. Her intensely blue eyes are lively, lovely. For a long time during our work together, the only history she’ll care about is Putin, the madman, the gangster—and it’s not really history, not Putin of the past, but Putin of the future. He’s gunning for Lithuania. She knows it. Dreams of it sometimes, wakes, frightened. Holds her landlady’s cat that came with her apartment. Her landlady is Jewish. Her friends make comments. The old Jew landlady who counts and recounts the rent payment, in case there’s a lita missing. She tells me this without a filter, worries that I’ll find it offensive, but because I’ve asked about her generation and its attitudes toward history and ethnicity, she remains stubbornly truthful. Her transparency makes her invaluable.
NEXT TO THE Catholic church, in a small row of buildings, is the Nalšios Muziejus, the Švenčionys Museum. Nalšia is an old tribal name, a throwback to the pagan. Which was what the country was through the 1100s: a people who worshiped trees, goddesses and gods, cohered into tribes by geography. Dalia, the weaver of fate. Dievas Senelis, the wise god in beggar’s clothes who could warn you when you were about to lose your soul by doing harm to another—a shuffling old man like a moral stop sign: retreat, put the club down, go back. The “old believers” still existed, here, over the border in Belarus, in my Lithuanian family tree.
The glass doors of the museum open into a small, cool, rather sleek lobby. No one is at the front desk. We climb one set of stairs. On the walls, tastefully matted photographs turn back time; Švenčionys when it was Polish, Russian, finally Lithuanian. Schoolchildren. A field of flax. A day at a shimmering lake. The photographs make you want to unpack your suitcase. Find a canoe. Bring along some dense, dark bread and lie back in the narrow hull, let the slow current of the nearest river carry you until sundown.
In 1941, the year my grandfather came to Švenčionys, roughly 30 percent of the regional population was Jewish, though this is not evidenced by the photographs, and only barely noted in the even chillier exhibition room off the first-floor lobby, its formidable door unlocked by a rather formal and very sweet museum employee. She wears a suit jacket and a wide smile that is at once proud and serious and nervous and enquiring.
The exhibition room opens into darkness and smells like a church before mass—polished wood, fingerprints buffed from glass with a mix of vinegar and water. Our guide switches on a light, and as objects in the room take shape, Rose heads for a locked case. There a prayer book in Hebrew, a siddur, one of the few artifacts of Jewish life here, is propped upside down on a carefully arranged shelf.
“This should be fixed,” Rose says abruptly, pointing and striding as if the museum is her castle and she is the grand mistress. “This—upside down, you see,” and the museum employee looks dubiously at the upside-down Hebrew writing, murmurs an acknowledgment. A year later, when we return, the book will still be upside down. And again, the next year. The museum has a limited staff. They are working hard to expand and contemporize and in fact have just digitized an extraordinary array of photographs; so of course there are oversights, forgotten tasks—an upside-down book among them. I write this without irony, but the oversight gnaws at me like the unknown provenance of the ham my grandfather shows up with. What did he trade for the momentary appeasement of his children’s hunger, for the special treat in the upside-down world?
WE TROMP UPSTAIRS into a large, light-filled room. Our host at the museum is Naderda Spiridonoviene. With her is Giedrė Genušienė; she is blond, with a thin musical voice that quivers a bit and is somehow at odds with her sturdiness. I find out later she’s a woman who walks a lot. She notices the seasonal alteration of pines—their litter of brown needles, silver underside of green—and, seeing the mark of tractor tires on a dirt road, can calculate, like a detective, how long ago the tractor broke up the ground. Employed by the municipality in the cultural department, she used to work for the museum, fund-raising and promoting cultural exchange. One of the heritage projects the municipality contracted her for was the small book Švenčionių Krašto Žydų, 1941–1944 (The Tragedy of the Jews in the Švenčionys Region, 1941–1944).
Naderda fetches a thin file of museum material Giedrė used for her book. Aside from the file, Giedrė did interviews and archival work. Perhaps most significantly, she met and became close to Blumke Katz. Jewish, a formidable Yiddish scholar, Katz left Lithuania for Russia in 1935 after the Polish occupiers of Vilnius made Yiddish study impossible. In Russia, in a purge that predated the sweep in Lithuania that swallowed up my grandmother, Katz’s husband was murdered and Katz herself sentenced to twelve years in a labor camp. She returned to Lithuania after her sentence with vital memories of prewar Jewish life and an encyclopedic knowledge of Švenčionys as it had once been. She taught and befriended many. She died in 2006. Giedrė’s voice grows softer when she speaks of her. She misses her. (I think of my mother with her one friend.) “Spirituality is not really valued these days,” Giedrė says when I ask her what the young people in town think of their local history.
Giedrė used to walk with Blumke Katz, long beautiful walks and walks of vigilance that were part of a territorial claim Katz kept over a place known as the Poligon or Poligony or Poligon or Polygon—a vigil that Giedrė keeps now. We agree that we will walk together, in a few days time, the route Giedrė took with Blumke Katz to Poligon.
Giedrė checks her watch. This is her lunch break—she needs to get back to her office. We
agree on the date and time of our walk, weather permitting—it’s the spring rainy season.
“Lithuanians care about what happened here,” she says. And yet, the sparseness of the museum’s file is stupefying.
POLIGON MEANS “RANGE” in Polish—it connotes a military camp for Polish soldiers. Just outside of Nowo-Święciany (the Polish name; Švenčionėliai in Lithuanian)—a town a little under seven miles west of Švenčionys—Polish soldiers once kept horses and practiced their shooting.
Poligon is not a particular place name; it is as generic as “railroad” or “museum.” But history has made it code for something else in Švenčionys and nearby Švenčionėliai (Nei-Sventzion in Yiddish—to add another version, another population to the town) and the other nearby villages: Ignalina, Daugeliškis, Lentupis, Khone Zak’s Podbrodz, Adutiškis, Stajatzishkis, Tzeikiniai, and Tveretzius. Perhaps in Švenčionys a woman, one day when it was still spring in 1941, saw a girl walking on the Nowo-Święciany road—a girl who grazed cows at Poligon, someone the woman’s family knew, because the girl’s cousin, local to Švenčionys, did washing for them from time to time. And the girl’s face brought to mind a milk cow, a green stretch of land beyond a barren plateau trampled down by the past presence of horses, and then a river—a quick collage of images the woman’s mind didn’t work at or hold, a poligon that did not signify. Distance; the girl grows small, becomes part of the road and the spring land that borders it. New barley, field pansies—white petals at the top, bright yellow below—and though the future for both woman and girl gets a little bit closer, it is not within reach.
AFTER OUR APARTMENT flood, in the long, perpetually dark rented apartment (“Wonderful light!” the agent had said) where we lived while the walls and floors of our apartment were gutted and rebuilt, I did a phone interview with Jonathan Boyarin. At the time, a scholar in the Religious Studies Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Boyarin translated Lithuanian survivors’ testimonies from Yiddish to English during his days as a somewhat impoverished grad student at the New School.
The collection of testimonies was painstakingly gathered and assembled by Leib Koniuchowsky, a survivor of the Kovno ghetto. After the war Koniuchowsky, fulfilling a promise he had made to himself and to those who begged him to record their fate (he was trained as an engineer, which is perhaps why his interviews are methodical and comprehensive), sought out and interviewed Jewish survivors from his home country who were living in the DP camps in Germany, where Senelis, his sister Ona, and my mother and her sister and brother had also been sheltered.
On the phone Boyarin and I talked about small things—how much Koniuchowsky paid him to do the work, how long it took, what it was like for Boyarin to do the translations, and finally, why Koniuchowsky had such trouble finding an American publisher who would print the testimonies in their entirety. Then we veered off.
“History is by its nature retrospective,” Boyarin said at one point.
So obvious, but I’d never thought of it before. His words utterly changed the way I considered the past.
“We give order to it, as if it was orderly. But the people who lived it or died during it—there was nothing retrospective about their experiences, about what they thought would come next, how they interpreted, for instance, a day of brutality. How could they know, the way we know, what would follow?”
ROSE AND I are on our way out of the museum, but Naderda wants to show us more exhibitions. In one expansive, bright room, ancient farm and fishing equipment hangs or is propped against the walls. A large, frightening scythe with its quarter-moon blade stands at the ready.
Fifteen minutes later, at the entrance to the Jewish cemetery, a man holding a twin of that scythe will appear and start working it methodically across the high grass, a little apologetic; with the heavy rains, it’s been hard to bring down the thick green, to thin out what looks like a mix of honeysuckle, wild rose, and Queen Anne’s lace to the right of the main path.
I’ll have the sense of history stalled, a town where time doesn’t accrue but circles back, forward, then back again.
But before the Jewish cemetery, as we walk from one room to another with Naderda, she points out a huge old loom used at the museum to demonstrate the art of weaving, the art of the goddess of fate. I think of my great-grandmother Barbara, an old believer, it turns out. A spell caster. The loom is extraordinary, but whose fates are remembered by its presence?
Naderda unlocks another door. For a moment, I don’t know what I’m looking at. It’s a taxidermy show. Extinct wildlife? Naderda corrects me. Most of the stuffed birds and mammals here can still be found in the countryside, on farmland and the acres of parkland that surround many of the local lakes. In my small blue notebook Rose scrawls a few of the Lithuanian names: kranklys—raven, several of them, the huge black wingspans stiff and stuck; tigero—tiger; vovere—a frozen squirrel stranded on the white floor of one display. The whole room is dead.
In our interview, Boyarin said that what haunted him most after he was done with his translations were the accounts of humiliation that so often accompanied or preceded the slaughters. The hacking off of beards while German soldiers jeered, snapped trophy photos. Elders commanded to strip and then dance, perhaps on a Torah or clumsily on the corpse of someone they went to shul with, broke bread with.
Often murder is written about as animalistic, beastly. People who torture and kill are swept up in a deep reversion. They are actually pre-people, unleashed. I scan the group of trapped and shot and stunned creatures, the glass eyes, iridescent feathers, the long brindled animal claws. Beasts and animals—there must be other words to describe those who took part in what happened outside the door of the museum, in the priest’s field near the Catholic church, through the entrance of the Jewish cemetery and to the left, in a well down a side street, at police headquarters, at the Poligon outside Švenčionėliai, in my grandfather’s house, and elsewhere.
Those who let it happen.
CHAPTER 18
* * *
MIRELE REIN/HIGH HOLIDAYS
FALL 2011
I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story.
—EDGAR ALLAN POE, “THE TELL-TALE HEART”
* * *
That fall, rain every day, then every other day. Our postflood rental was on Edgar Allan Poe Street, a designate given to West Eighty-Fourth in honor of the poet and mystery writer who lived there before the city sprawled north. Almost every day I saw his name on a nearby street sign, and thought of Dupin, Poe’s amateur sleuth who seeks out the savage murderer of a mother and daughter on the rue Morgue. A plague of mosquitoes descended upon Poe’s street (and only his street) the months we were there. Somehow this seemed fitting. It was written up in the papers; something about mosquito traps in clogged sewers. Our neighbors slept under netting. The invisible buzz and bites kept us up at night right until the first snow.
In a small back room of our rental I put my computer on my transported desk and unloaded a box of books that had been out of reach of the deluge. From Lithuania, Viktorija, at the time still working on her graduate degree in translation, sent me several hundred pages, in hard copy and disc, of KGB interrogation files from the Lithuanian Special Archives. In many Senelis was mentioned, but I had also requested any files related to Poligon, as well as Babita’s arrest file. I found a Russian translator who conveniently lived on the Upper West Side, downloaded the material (most of it interrogation files) and sent it to her.
It was, of course, raining, the night I walked a few blocks uptown to pick up the first set of translations. We hadn’t spoken by phone. I imagined a deep, heavily accented voice. I imagined someone like Krukchamama, only younger—thick-soled shoes, kerchief around her head.
Anastasia was thin, a lovely sparrow. Trained as a lawyer in Moscow, she was studying for the bar exam in the United States and earning
her keep as a translator. Her fair, almost translucent skin instantly made me worry; did she have anemia, mono? I would see that same pale skin on the lovely cheekbones of Lithuanian women in the streets of Vilnius in less than a year, and she would prove herself to be rugged and sharp. She’d put on lipstick for our meeting. She slid the packet of typed pages across the table at Starbucks.
“The language is very formal, very dry,” she said. “But somehow I could picture it; a man in a room somewhere. A desk. A light. The interrogator. It was”—she paused—“moving.”
I didn’t ask her what the pages contained. She shook my hand in a gentle, slightly decorous way and went off into the night until our next meeting.
Back at the apartment I shut myself in the small room. The ceiling light was dim—the apartment seemed to resist illumination the whole time we were there. I’d found two desk lamps and put both on the floor near the only outlet. So there it was: the chair, the desk, the lights—two white ovals overhead.
Of course I looked first for my grandfather’s name. I found it in an interrogation on June 19, 1952, conducted by Senior Lieutenant Suslov. On June 12 the subject of the interrogation, Stasis Gineitis, had been sentenced to twenty-five years in a Gulag camp. For a short while longer he would be in custody in the dank KGB prison in Vilnius. He was thirty-three years old. Since he had already been sentenced, the number of interrogations he’d undergone was not listed in this particular file. Does a man who already knows he’s heading off on a train for twenty-five years bother to hold back, obfuscate? Even though he was sentenced, he could still be tortured. I thought of his family; if they were in the country they were vulnerable. Suslov knew this. Gineitis knew this.