by Rita Gabis
Chaya Palevsky had given me very thorough instructions on the phone—You must write them down, in the manner of my Jewish grandmother—for the least expensive car service to take, a phone number that she repeated slowly twice.
“THIS WORLD TODAY—unbelievable,” Chaya Palevsky will say to me; astonished that after the carnage of war people would create more carnage, more war. After we meet, I will think of her often, think of a cup of water filled with small worms a Lithuanian guard offered her father, of the unexpected, the deadly, think of the resolute intelligence I could see she’d had since she was young. She had been a little breathless on the phone, a year away from ninety and fighting a cold; courteous, precise, thoughtful, her Yiddish accent more pronounced than my Jewish grandmother’s, and instead of the bit of British, a small undertone of Polish. One of her sons had vetted me for this meeting, then e-mailed to say his mother was ready for my call.
And so I called, which means I entered the past of a stranger my grandfather might have seen in passing in 1941, when she was just out of her girlhood and ran in utter horror with her family down a road in late fall, all of them refusing the wagon that waited to take them (for a price) away from the barracks at Poligony, as she called it, taking the paths and the roads without stopping until Sventsian (her spelling) came into view. Which was home. The steeple of the Catholic church, the Orthodox priest’s field, the late grasses there tamped down into mud, a shoe, a few rags, a piece of soap, a bit of bread, some cutlery perhaps, maybe a handful of photographs strewn as well in the field that cold had frozen brittle the night before. A field in which everyone they knew had been gathered several days earlier and at dusk into night marched west, those who could not march beaten or shot or borne in wagons the locals offered or were ordered to present themselves with at a certain appointed hour.
They ran more than six miles. Her father. Her mother—were there heels on her shoes? Her younger brother. The hair of her sisters, perhaps flowing long and disheveled. Why were they taking the road in a panic, almost flying, almost mad? Did my grandfather know what they were running from? Where was he, as they passed the field? The question of proximity will never leave me. Of distance, of closeness. How long does it take a family to run seven miles? How long did it take my grandfather, in his motorcycle with the sidecar (perhaps abandoned by a fleeing member of the Red Army, or war booty, the soldier dead) to drive, if indeed he did, from the gray, serviceable office not quite in the town’s center, not quite within sight of the Sventsian ghetto, to Poligony? Maybe he rode a German BMW, the ubiquitous retooled R75, a light version, but still able to cover upward of fifty miles in an hour. So if he drove the Nei-Sventsian road in the opposite direction of the Palevsky family, he would have reached the witness house in less than fifteen minutes, a wooden, now tumbledown affair, with opaque windows and overgrowth close to the road at the fork where the right meant death and the left meant other houses on a sandy lane, where even at night the inhabitants on September 27, 1941, must have heard the farm horse clatter, the frightened jostle of men marched ahead of the women and the children and the elderly, wagon after wagon stubbornly clearing ruts left by rain, hardened now, like sinews in rigor. A curtain drawn. A lamp put out. The report of a revolver, then a kind of after-stillness amid the noise of the exhausted and confused.
On the wall near the table where Chaya had prepared an elaborate meal for me—fruit cup, a frittata, bagels with guacamole (a combination I’ve never had before), store cake, cup after cup of instant coffee, bitter and hot—there was a painting of a violin, in vivid reds and browns: a violin just like her father’s. She saw the painting in a shop window years ago when she was a new immigrant in New York, the city strange and expensive but livable. The painting stunned her, as if her father might come out the shop door, a little tin of resin for the bow in his hand. She had to have it. It was much too costly, so she made an arrangement. It is easy to imagine how she drew herself up outside the shop, perhaps arranged her scarf in the partial mirror of the window. A perfunctory cough before the storekeeper, who would never know the mix of shock and desire the painting of the violin called up inside her. Only a few other customers, and even then she was a commanding presence. She would pay perhaps a dollar a week, as long as it took until the painting was wrapped in brown paper and she squared the frame under her arm and took it home.
A violin. So her house in Sventsian, as it partially appears in the left-hand corner of the postcard above, next to the old synagogue (the new one is out of view, across the street), was a house of music. A house with wood siding and a stone foundation with a window that could be opened from the outside by sticking something in the hook of the lock and lifting it free.
Inside the huge finished half-basement, there were two bedrooms, a kitchen and two large rooms with two typesetting machines, the leather bindings and threads for the books (Chaya shows me, holds up a book and makes a stitching motion). There her father, Eliyahu—Elias in Polish and Elyohu in Yiddish—often helped by Chaya and one of her sisters, sewed the typeset pages and perhaps, after work was done, took his violin from the case upstairs and played.
We ate and stopped eating and ate some more. Chaya talked, sometimes stopped to grab the right word from the air so that the radio—Dobbs Ferry, Long Island, terrorists—intruded; the present veered into the past and then faded out.
They have a little dog, Funya. When Funya is fourteen and blind, she is given to a farmer many kilometers away. But one day, after several days, they watch, amazed, as blind Funya makes her slow way down Schul Street to their doorstep. Inside, safe across the threshold, Funya lets go and dies with the final accomplishment of return. There are cats too; kittens, so the children saw birth happen, the mother cat mewing or silent as the bluish clear sac fell on the paper or the rag, then another and another and as she licked and tore with her sharp cat’s teeth, the blind new lives began moving against and atop one another toward the swollen belly to feed. As Chaya spoke, I remembered it from my own childhood, the scent of a little birth, the small scissors my mother used to spare our cat Mitzi the job of chewing through the little ribbon of umbilicus.
Jews had been in Sventsian since 1450, Chaya told me. Four hundred in the fifteenth century; after World War I, three thousand in a population of nine thousand—a town that had been famous for all the small and two quite large factories that produced the felt boots sold all over Poland (much like the felt boots used until recently by Russian soldiers). Sventsian was part of Poland, then incorporated into Byelorussia, and a few months later given to Lithuania along with Vilna. Chaya finished her high school years in the same school, only because of the Russian occupation, the Polish school became Russian (both her parents were fluent in the language). The Russian curriculum compared poorly to the Polish, but there she would learn about Darwinism for the first time and after school take a Red Cross course that, several years later, in the forests of the country she was born in, would be useful in ways she never imagined as she, all purpose, no nonsense, learned at sixteen or seventeen to tie a tourniquet. Focused, attentive, like her mother, as she was in our time together while she drew me a map of Sventsian from memory, peering down hard at the paper with her glasses on, apologizing for the partiality of it. This talk with me, one more mission out of the many missions of her life.
“I’m sorry to say it,” she prefaced any ugly detail about the Lithuanians during the war—a gesture toward my own history, my Senelis. Don’t be sorry, I wanted to tell her. I’m sorry. I would say those words to some of the other people I interviewed, but somehow her kindness and intensity and shrewdness silenced my apology. Coming too late.
So much running in a war; running to or away, running to the wild shouts of drunks who have sung and raped and shot off rounds near huge blistering bonfires the night through. Running in slow motion through the marshes. You can taste the carbon dioxide in your mouth, the oxygen in the air seems thin, your chest feels as though it might crack, pus pushes out of the blister in your ank
le, your hairpins fall, as the stitching of your life is undone, and page after page falls away, as if it never existed.
CHAPTER 20
* * *
MESSENGER
LITHUANIA, JUNE 2012
“All the Reins were beautiful,” Zinaida Aronowa said, eyes wide, even as she grimaced. All painful; memory. Her husband, rugged and gleaming in the photographs, died in 1985. (Of the Reins she knew, none spoke of a girl named Mirele, a name that, given the complications of testimony and translation, could also be Mirl, Mirela, or even misspelled as Mary—all a derivation of Miriam in Yiddish.) Zinaida is Russian, born in 1920 in Vidzy, Belarus—where Mirele Rein apparently fled after Poligon. Zinaida married after the war; every member of her Jewish husband’s family had been killed at the Poligon.
Next to Zinaida, on the couch in the boxy apartment in Švenčionys, her friend Teresa, her face as tanned and vital as Zinaida’s is pale, held Zinaida close. I watched the two women, watched how Teresa marked Zinaida’s grief, rocked her, but continued to punctuate any gap in our talk with loud commentary, smiling, serious, bright—pushing forward, as she did for thirty-five years on her bicycle, delivering telegrams to every home in town. Stocky, stalwart, she’s a Polish version of my Jewish grandmother—doing the yard work of two men, her voice rising over other voices.
Rose and I had come upon her before our meeting at the Nalšia Museum, when we walked the small side roads and shaded yards beyond the town green and the Catholic church. We followed the lines of the town map Chaya Palevsky had sketched so carefully for me in the Bronx. (She had apologized for its roughness; I don’t think she understood how grateful I was for her memory; the pen, the quick indications of a world.)
Chaya Palevsky’s map
“BOB MARLEY” GRACED the side of an outbuilding. For a second I heard that rusted, sweet voice sing “many rivers to cross” and thought of home. Once a gutter carried waste water from the pump in the market square through the synagogue courtyard to the Kuna River. We turned away from the river and came up to a chain link fence around a huge garden.
Teresa hitched herself straight from a long raised bed (I thought I saw leeks and lettuces), shielded her eyes from the bright sun, and shouted, in answer to Rose’s quick questions, “They were all here, all the Jews lived here, my mother did washing for them.” We told her we had to go to the museum, would be back in an hour. She smiled and crouched down again. I wondered if she’d really be waiting for us. I hadn’t moved into village time; in New York everyone, including myself, has to run out, take a call, is sorry—forgot an appointment, stuck in a train.
She was there. In her living room, her quiet, lovely daughter had laid a small table with sweets and coffee; a large ceramic fireplace took up a third of a wall. The tiles were bright and new. We talked of the past. Teresa was only seven when Chaya Palevsky was a teenager in the large house on Schul Street. I ask her if the name Porus (Chaya’s maiden name) meant anything to her. No. She talked sometimes in a streak, mixing things up—said that Beck was killed in winter. Her best friend’s Polish mother threw herself down a well to get away from the killers coming for revenge. The men were cloaked in white, their faces hidden (I think of the Klan), and pulled her out of the well’s darkness. It doesn’t make sense—not the winter, nor the white clothing (except that the anti-German partisans and the Soviet winter army wore white in the snow, loose coveralls that looked like they were made from old parachutes). But it makes a child’s sense—seasons blurred, every murderer dressed the same.
A smile took over Teresa’s face, exuberant by nature, when she showed us the certificate her aunt Anna and uncle Piotr Miksto received from Yad Vashem. They are counted as Righteous Among the Nations for taking in the Jewish girl with the peroxide-blond hair who grew up to be the woman I interviewed from Moscow, Karina Margolis. Only now Karina carries the last name Kavina, after the uncle who adopted her away from Teresa’s relatives in a bitter court battle when the war ended. Kavina also because it echoes the last name of her biological mother, who, along with her husband, was most likely killed at the Poligon.
The Shpitz family, whose shirts and skirts and socks and pants Teresa’s mother Salomeja scrubbed and rinsed (Teresa laughed a little, made sure we knew there were no washing machines back then), hid in an attic during the roundup for Poligon. Salomeja brought them food, but they were betrayed. At some point Teresa said “Lithuanians”—she’d said it outside too. “The Jews all lived here, the Lithuanians killed them.” Her voice carried. I cringed, thinking of her Lithuanian neighbors, their ire. I realize now, in hindsight, I was thinking of my own Lithuanian-American family.
TERESA DID HER knees in biking through snow, though she was always warm enough, she said, in her messenger’s uniform. For those who couldn’t read, or couldn’t read the language their telegram was written in, she translated. And for those who had to send news of a birth or a death, she often composed the short missive—the details in Polish or Russian or Lithuanian or Belorussian. In this way, she was the first to learn about all the large events of her town. Knows them still, sings at every funeral. (“I’ll be home,” she said when we arranged to meet her again, “unless someone dies.”)
Some of Teresa’s memories are clearer; along with the Shpitz family, her mother, Salomeja, washed for the Roiphes, another Jewish family, and was friendly with many of the people who would one day cry out to her from the ghetto, a fifteen-minute slow walk from my grandfather’s house. “Help us, help,” Teresa remembered the pleading after the ghetto was formally sealed off. But she was too young in the fall of ’41 to know any details of Poligon. Undaunted, she went for her phone book to find someone who might know more, called her friend Zinaida, older by ten years, and off we went.
Petras drove us away from the large backyard garden that made me want my old garden back, want to have dirt under my fingernails again like Teresa. We parked behind a low apartment building across town. There were versions of them everywhere; the same small stoop, the hall light you clicked on that lasted until you reached the right door. We climbed a flight or two of stairs.
In fifteen minutes Zinaida was overcome with weeping. She had spent the entire war in a concentration camp in Alytus, Lithuania—south, near swamps, crammed in with Russian prisoners of war, liters of blood drained out of her for wounded German soldiers. In 1944, the ragged end of the war still happening, she was liberated and met her husband, Solom Aron, in Švenčionys. He’d been in the Soviet Army on the Japanese front, had come home looking for his family.
I asked a question about life in Švenčionys in 1944, and Teresa chattered matter-of-factly about how nice the German soldiers were on their way out, the Soviets on their way in. They gave her chocolate, praised her grandmother for taking the children to church. She wasn’t championing them, and she certainly wasn’t devoid of empathy for her friend; she just said what she remembered, unfiltered, and when she talked about the chocolate Zinaida began to cry.
But before Zinaida’s face went white and she put her palms to her cheeks and shuddered, she showed us a photograph of her husband and a group of other men—friends, one with the last name Rein—reburying remains from the mass grave at the Poligon. There, for years after the massacre, storms washed away layers of the pit and tides of rain carried bones off for miles into yards and farmers’ fields.
The photo was dated on the back, “1950–1960”—vague, someone’s guess, perhaps Zinaida’s—but somehow I sensed it was taken earlier, soon after war’s end. The men seemed so young, so determined to bring some dignity to a desecration. Zinaida could not, at our meeting, remember the names of the last four men.
From left to right: Rein, Aron (Zinaida’s husband), Ushpilas
Zinaida told us something else: Moishe Shapiro from Pobradze, whose father (the barber Shapiro) survived Poligon, had donated the photograph I’d just been given a copy of at the museum. Neither Giedrė nor Naderda had known where the photograph came from.
“Blood, maybe?” N
aderda had said, when she placed the photograph on the wooden table where we sat. She put her small hand near the rust marks on the image, as if she might touch to know, to learn.
I shook my head. Perhaps someone put a rusted open can on the photo, or a cup of strong tea that slopped a little, the tannins leaking onto the fraction of documented physical evidence that remains of the massacre. When I gain access to the forensic file of the Soviet Union’s Extraordinary Commission in Moscow, specifically to see the Poligon photographs—which exist as only shadows or dark, blurred lines in the frames of the Holocaust Museum’s microfilmed copy of the same file—they will be missing. So it’s Zinaida’s photo of her husband and the four other young men carrying a wooden crate, and the photo saved by the barber’s son for documentation. And then, of course, the long mound of earth at the site itself where Rose does not go without a yahrzeit candle, without scouring the memorial to free it of dead pine boughs, spent matches, trash.
CHAPTER 21
* * *
LILI HOLZMAN
ISRAEL, 2012
On either side of the entrance to Jaffa Gate, two enterprising Arab men make a small market on top of two overturned trash barrels. A pyramid of huge oranges rises next to their juice machine. Atop the other barrel, gorgeous breads cover a board, every shape in the world, glazed or speckled with poppy seeds or long and braided, like thin challah. A lookout shouts—Police!—and in an instant the men (they look thirtyish to me) hurriedly stow the fruit and bread, tossing their wares in large plastic carryalls with such acumen that I suspect this scene is repeated several times each day.