by Rita Gabis
He knew my grandfather, Pranas Puronas, but first was asked about Iozas (Joseph) Breeris, the warden of the Švenčionys prison—a man my grandfather had frequent dealings with, a man Gineitis worked for as member of the prison police in a jail built from the ground up for the occasion of war. Most of the records created there were destroyed near war’s end or sent down straightaway to the Gestapo in Vilnius. My grandfather’s office and the office of Jonas Maciulevičius, his direct superior, were above the cells, the barred windows. Across a utilitarian hallway, one secretary ran between them, placed their phone calls.
Suslov: Who and under what circumstances took a group of arrestees from the prison in spring of 1942?
Gineitis: Spring 1942, after the German commandant of the town of Švenčionys Beck had been murdered by Soviet guerrillas, one afternoon I stopped by the prison (I was on authorized leave at the time), and there in the yard I saw a group of prisoners, two or three German officers, the head of Saugumas Puronas [in other documents my grandfather is referred to as the “chief” of the region’s Saugumas, or security police], and the prison governor Breeris. Puronas was instructing the prison governor as to which prisoners had to be brought from their cells … Puronas asked everyone’s last name and suggested that some of them be taken aside … Where to the arrested Soviet citizens had been taken away from the prison was unknown to me … I learned that they had been gunned down … outside the town.
For two years, every time I read this section of testimony, I’ll read it wrong. “Puronas suggests that some of them be taken aside”—this means, I think, that these prisoners head back to their cells, that the names he calls are not the group gunned down. I see my grandfather’s face cloud over. One of the German officers has a Walther pistol with a wooden grip shoved into Senelis’s back, growls in German: “Read the list … That little daughter you love, the money we pay you—do as we say, or …” My grandfather can’t do much, but he can do this; choose a handful to be spared. Even with the Walther digging into his right kidney.
I misread, but at the same time some part of my brain gets it right.
I wonder about the translator my mother mentioned—the woman who was in the vehicle with the ambushed Germans and survived. Is she among those driven off and shot? Her face battered. Her feet swollen from a truncheon smacked against her insteps until they disappear. Is she in one of the two isolation cells? Two boards across a floor. No light. Rats.
I hate the fact that I’m still healing from surgery and my family and our home are in limbo and shambles and I can’t get on a plane and go to the faraway place where there might be answers. “Saugumas Puronas.” I’m glad my chest hurts and our apartment is ruined and I have to stay.
According to Gineitis, the doomed are driven away. Another description of this event comes from Yitzhak Arad, who witnessed a march on that day from the prison yard to the Jewish cemetery: “I encountered the prisoners being led away from town in threes, under escort of several Lithuanian policeman and two Germans. Most of the men were familiar to me. This was the elite of local Polish society, a few priests among them. They walked quietly and soon disappeared around a curve in the road … they were all shot at the edge of a pit that had been dug that night. Two Jews from the ghetto, for some unknown reason, were included and murdered with the hundred Swienciany Poles.”
A hundred victims, not ten. Over time, these two versions of one event will multiply into six versions, a dozen, more—combined they form a kind of hologram of the past.
Gineitis is on leave, but he happens to “stop by the prison.” Which of course sounds like a man trying to inoculate himself—he’s describing part of a crime scene. He’s either there because it’s an event worth coming to for the show or because his “leave” was suspended for this special occasion. I don’t know yet how deep the local antipathy between the Poles and Lithuanians runs. I don’t know yet that the translator my mother mentioned has been taken by the Gestapo down to Lukiškės prison in Vilna with her mother and her sister. Tortured again. I don’t know that she’s a Pole from Wilno/Vilna who arrived at the age of twenty in Švenčionys in 1939, speaking perfect German. I don’t know that she’s beautiful.
I put Gineitis’s file down. In the moment, I have little context for any of this; only Arad’s version and the interrogation record. I’m sickened, but also feel a small relief; the German officers were there, so my grandfather with a list was following the orders of war, their orders. “We did it!” the German historian Joachim Tauber will tell me one day in an outdoor café in Berlin. His face vital, elastic somehow, opening to the import, the drama of the moment, the declaration. “No way around it. Guilty.” The context at that juncture of our conversation was admission—how “guilty” only arrives after any kind of plausible denial is turned on its head. Done. Bombed away. Had it been possible for the Germans to create a fiction about the atrocities ostensibly committed in the service of Lebensraum, “living space,” they would have.
I pick up another file. My chair is stiff-backed and overstuffed. I move to the floor by one of the lamps.
This one starts midinterrogation and concerns an earlier time, 1941. Bronius Gruzdys, a police chief in Novye Sventsyany (Russian for Švenčionėliai):
Along with the other Volost police chiefs, I was secretly instructed … to place all citizens of Jewish nationality, men, women, and children, into the barracks located on the artillery practice ground … and to confiscate their property.
This is Poligon.
I ordered all my police officers … to go along with my Acting Chief to the Jewish quarter and without delay huddle all the residents into the above mentioned barracks … Once the Jewish population from all Volosts of Sventsyany County had been huddled … there were over 7,000 … In early October 1941, the Chief of the County Police Januskevicius arrived … with two Gestapo representatives … He informed me that by order of the German authorities all the Jewish population of Sventsyany County had to be executed by firing squad.
The grave has to be dug. Three hundred workers with shovels are enlisted from their minuscule farms and railroad jobs and torpor and poverty and fear. Each signs a paper. Fail to show up, someone will come looking.
On the following day, October 5, 1941, when the ditch was ready … a punitive squad of up to thirty people arrived at the township of Novye Sventsyany from the city of Vilno. The squad consisted of Germans and Lithuanians under the command of Lieutenant Siblauskas.
In addition … about eighty police officers had been sent to assist … In the morning … Siblauskas’ punitive squad and the assisting [officers] under his orders began taking the people doomed to execution by firing squad out of the barracks in groups of forty. Taking them up to the ditch, they shot them dead with rifles and pistols … The execution … lasted exactly two days … I ordered the workers to backfill the ditch … Despite that, however, the blood … was still showing through.
I turn off the light nearest to me. A little click. Anastasia is an expert translator. The word huddle is as close to the English (from the Russian) as one can get. That one word robs me of protection against what I’ve just read. A human word, used here in a way it would never be used in English.
Those people, those families, those children. The different occasions in life when you draw close—dancing at the Purim ball; linking arms before the soccer goalie gets in position and the kick off sends time spinning in the spring grass; the violin players in the orchestra, first chair, second chair, three others tuning together, leaning in to hear over the shuffle of the audience; the games of hide-and-seek—the grown-ups play too. Twilight in the field. A boy whose mother you know, nine or ten or eleven, shares your spot behind a fallen tree. He smells of boy sweat. The acrid scent of manhood not his yet. He whispers in your ear about where the others might be, and you realize he’s in the last few weeks of childhood. Hear, somewhere, where night begins, the Ural owl, with a syrinx instead of vocal cords, a call that’s made from membranes and pressure and
air and vibration that carries so far it seems the round face should be before you, then the boy is gone, the fallen tree is gone, the owl is a hunter, the huddled have broken hands and cratered empty eyes.
In one file my grandfather holds a list. In this file he’s invisible.
AN INVISIBLE MOSQUITO wakes me mid-dream that night; it’s a dream about Krukchamama. My mother has opened a long, low cupboard in her kitchen on the Vineyard. Krukchamama is wrapped in linen, the fabric just tight enough not to drape away from her corpse. She’s been dead for a long time, but no odor comes from her body. No decomposition has begun. Autolysis halted. The skin cells still alive. Her chest cavity neither bloated nor collapsed.
“In the spring,” my mother says, “when the ground softens, we’ll bury her.”
I slap at a buzzing in the air. Hear shovels lifting dirt. Loamy. The ping when metal meets rock, finds it, works around it. The diggers were afraid they were digging their own grave, but they were reassured. It’s for the Jews, not for you. How long does grief last? I’ll see it all differently when I take my walk with Giedrė, surrounded by new-growth timber, trees that were not there when first the men, then the women and their children, were marched from barracks to ditch. Not even leaves for them, shriven by fall, or glistered into a transfusion of color: red, gold, crimson.
Something’s been hidden away, the dream says to me. “Exactly two days,” Gruzdys reported, the time it took for the shooting. There was an aftermath, there were aftershocks; they’ve never ended.
IN 1925 A center for Jewish history and culture, rooted in the study of Yiddish, was founded on Wiwulski Street in Vilna. YIVO, originally the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, became a home to the poet Avrom (Abraham) Sutzkever, among many other writers, educators, and progressive intellectuals. Max Weinreich, an early force in the creation of the institute, would be instrumental, when war became a reality, in developing the New York–based branch of YIVO as the new anchor for the institution that was being destroyed an ocean away.
On yet another rainy day, I take the train downtown to Fourteenth Street, walk east and up two blocks, check my coat, and take the elevator to the YIVO archives.
The back room is windowless, so the rainy day disappears. The carpeted floor makes the room even quieter, though there is much chatter at the reference desk. There are books from floor to mezzanine and from mezzanine to ceiling. I think of my father. Insofar as I know, he never came here when he traveled to New York to visit his sister and, a few times, me. He would have loved it. He would have driven the reference librarians nuts. He would have stood for a long time just looking at the sliding ladder and the old bindings and the students bent over a ponderous text or working the keyboard of a laptop, faster than the fastest typist could fly over the keys on a manual.
I stand still for a minute, as he might have; my thoughts jump. His mother, my grandmother Rachel, once saw Queen Victoria go by in her carriage in a procession in London. Grace (my husband’s first mother-in-law, my “second mother”) wrote that her great-grandfather Archie “watched the troops of the French Emperor Napoleon … along the roads and through the fields toward … Vilna … Weak soldiers who could barely walk, were pulling carts of wounded men. Thousands of horses, along with their riders, had been killed.” I think of time all the time now—just as I think of Senelis, make and remake my questions about his wartime life.
The librarian brings a large cardboard sleeve from the massive collection of testimonies gathered by Leib Koniuchowsky after the war. The 297 pages I’ll end up copying concern all the towns that make up the Shventzionys region—Shventzionys, Shventzioneliai, Ignolina, Daugeliškis, Padbrade, Adutishkis, Stajatzishkis, Lentupis, Tzeikinia, and Tveretzius. They are a fraction of the work he did. The attestations, signatures, witnesses to the signatures at the end of each narrative speak to Koniuchowsky’s meticulousness and also, I think, to some prescient awareness that as time passed the reliability of the testimonies he collected—traumatized individuals recalling the collapse of a world a second after it happened—would be questioned. He was right. But of course his work and that of his initial translator, Jonathan Boyarin, followed by the remarkable collection assembled by the late David Bankier at Yad Vashem (not yet in print when I went first went looking for Koniuchowsky’s material) stand.
Sometimes repetitious, when Koniuchowsky summarizes to offer the reader the sweep, the scope, each time I open the white binder of hole-punched pages, more of life appears. Loan societies spring up, teenagers back-float in Lake Kochanowka, an old smithy brackets a leg back to a chair. Shokar had an iron business. Yankl Svirsky, a woolen boot factory—his four or five employees worked the good wool and the not-so-good wool, the gloppy oil, pressing and sizing. Whatever yarn goods came his way, Svirsky saved the best for his granddaughter’s dresses. (“I was a spoiled girl,” she’ll tell me, shrugging one shoulder, leaning slightly to that same side, as if listening to those who loved her, just out of sight in the other room.)
I read the pages at YIVO quickly at first; skimming, skipping, stopping and going back again, looking for Senelis’s name. Not there. Not there or there. The horror of Poligon is mapped out; the roundup day, September 27, 1941; the Sabbath of Repentance. The Haftorah reading is Hosea 14:2–10.
Take words with you/and return to the Lord … Forgive all guilt/And accept what is good … I will heal their faithlessness; I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them.
Just as at the Holocaust Museum in the spring, I’m about to turn away. I’ve gone through two-thirds of the material. The Germans Metz and Beck and Wulff are mentioned. Skarbutenis. The Lithuanian Antanas Kenstavitzius. My copy to take home will be ready in a week. I can retrieve it, read in privacy, read alone. I think of the dark apartment, keep going. Take words with you, take with you words—suddenly, there is a girl. Suddenly, there is my grandfather.
The girl is the cousin of Fayve Khayet, one of those whose testimonies Koniuchowsky recorded on April 30, 1948, at the Feldafing DP camp in Bavaria—the same region of Germany where, in a remote hilltop village, my grandfather and his children, having left Lithuania with the retreating Germans, waited for the war to end, watched the Allied bombers head for Munich, using the church steeple as a coordinate.
The girl’s name is Mirele Rein. She’s “very pretty … didn’t look Jewish and she spoke Lithuanian perfectly.” She is rounded up and taken the roughly thirteen miles from Tzeikiniai to Poligon with her family, with everyone she knows. On Wednesday, October 8, when the shooting begins, a Lithuanian policeman she can plead to with his own language, a man who remembers her lovely features—he’s seen her, maybe even knows her name—covers her with branches in a gulley, a pit in the earth different from the mass pit prepared with the work of the three hundred shovelers. “All day Mirele watched as groups of men, and then groups of women and children, were taken out of the compound to be shot.”
With the help of the policeman she makes her way to the Vidzy ghetto, a far fifty miles from Poligon, in what is now Belarus. When the Vidzy ghetto is liquidated and the Jews fit for work transferred into the crowded Švenčionys ghetto, Mirele Rein “stayed at Fayve Khayet’s house … for exactly two weeks.” There she describes Poligon, the sound, when the children were killed, the “terrible weeping and screaming … like a slaughterhouse.”
She’s fifteen or sixteen, relentlessly determined to live. She leaves the relative safety of the Švenčionys ghetto and goes “to see the wife of a Lithuanian policeman who had promised to obtain papers for her. Instead the woman reported the matter to the Lithuanian Puronas, the head of the security police … [Mirele Rein] had been a member of the Communist youth in Tzeikiniai under the Soviets.” My grandfather “summoned” the head of the ghetto, Moshe Gordon, along with Dr. Taraseysky, a member of the Jewish Council. He demands the girl be brought to him. The beautiful girl who speaks perfect Lithuanian. I can see him, slamming his fist on the table. What was started at Poligon can’t be undone. She won’t come
to his office and get a reprieve. She won’t be put in a cell and sent out on a daily work detail. She’ll be shot, as she should have been on October 8, 1941, the third day of Sukkot—a time of joy and deliverance, when one dwells in a homemade hut under a roof of leaves. I see them in front of the synagogues all over New York City in the dark chill. They remind me of Missouri fields. Of cropland starting the winter rest, of the moon and childhood. “Bring her to me,” my grandfather demands. She finds out she’s been betrayed, takes off for Pastoviai, is killed when the ghetto there is liquidated.
I write her name in a small notebook, close the large file, and leave it behind me on the reading table. I don’t stop to thank the archivist. I don’t ask about the pickup time for my copies the following week. It’s already dark when I leave. I think I’m weeping, but I can’t tell. I can’t feel anything. Only late fall and, when I look up—rain.
CHAPTER 19
* * *
CHAYA PALEVSKY NÉE PORUS
FEBRUARY 15, 2012
The entryway of the Bronx apartment opened into a narrow room cluttered with life; newspapers, books, art on the walls. It was raw outside, so the heat was like pulling on a sweater. A radio tuned to a continual news cycle in the kitchen scanned the five boroughs in loud, clipped voices so it seemed, at first, as if more than just the two of us were there. Something both formal and familiar in her welcome: “Yes, well, very good to meet you.” And also a bit of wariness. How much to tell? Who was I, with Senelis in the background of my life, and my Jewish husband in the present tense of my life? “And your husband is Jewish”; she nodded, a bit pleased, I think, after she asked the question, though in the end, for her, it was the transmission of history that mattered most.