by Rita Gabis
One of the men curses as he shovels his bread away. Nadav, tall, more teacher to me than guide, his South African accent always a slight surprise, is proprietary in the Old City in the way my fixer, Rose, can often be in Lithuania. He interrupts the cursing man with the bag of bread, a man who has now worked up a sweat in the morning heat for nothing.
“Hey, it’s the law,” Nadav says, shrugging, arms out, palms up.
“Fuck the law. It’s not my law,” the vendor yells and goes running off, looking over his shoulder but defiant just the same.
In the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, amid the smoke and candles and singing and praying, two Armenian clerics in long black robes are having an argument with two Greek Orthodox clerics. “You pushed me,” one says. “You pushed me first,” says the other. Two Israeli police with guns slung over their shoulders are trying to mediate. In the middle of their argument, a solemn processional with prayers and candles surges through. Nadav takes me into the side room where supposedly Jesus was buried—a small cave with what looks like two catacombs, a candle burning on an iron grate on the floor. Just outside the cave, graffiti marks the walls, and on the ceiling the reddish trace of Roman frescoes appears only after Nadav points it out. Two other tourists wander in, graying, thin, friendly. They listen to Nadav tell the story of the rock in the cave mouth and the resurrection. The woman says, “But I thought the tomb was in there,” pointing behind us to where the clerics are arguing and candles are sputtering all around a gilded structure. “That’s just for show,” Nadav says. He puts a hand on my shoulder. “My friend here is Catholic.”
He knows I’m half Jewish—whatever that means. He’s calling me Catholic just to explain to the tourists something about why we are there, about the Christian need to see where things really happened. But when he calls me a Catholic, I wince a little and think immediately of going to mass on Christmas Eve in Hammond with my mother and her family. How—apart from my deep love of Aunt Karina, my wish to emulate her—it always seemed like a very smoky, loud, highly organized party to celebrate a guest I’d never met before.
It’s a momentary relief to be in the Arab quarter, on a dark, narrow street that smells of spice and dust and leather—a million little stands set back, almost like small caves in the walls, and the proprietors, all male, mostly older, paunchy, insistent, coming out to beckon you to buy, some with coins in their hands from their last sale, or clinking in a closed palm as a convincer. I recognize part of the scorn some of the sellers wear on their faces—it’s awful to be dependent on the capriciousness of the tourist trade. But there’s more to it; the darkness gets claustrophobic quickly.
In the stalls: sandals, old coins, more beautiful breads, other juice machines and piles of oranges, scarves and stacks of cheap-looking underwear. A group appears around a bend, heading in the opposite direction—men in their best suits, lovely dark-haired women carrying flowers. It’s a wedding procession. A small black Mercedes slowly honks its way through. Beside the driver, in the front seat, the bride sits, her face covered with vibrant veils.
Because it’s Shavuot—the Festival of Weeks that signifies the handing over of the Torah to the Israelites as well as the first harvest of the year—once we leave the crowds of Christian pilgrims following the Stations of the Cross, the Jewish quarter is quiet but for children playing. Jacaranda trees shed purple blossoms; the sound of Hebrew prayers from shadowed limestone houses spills out into the light.
I’M IN ISRAEL only briefly, to talk to two Holocaust survivors from Švenčionys: Yitzhak Arad and Lili Holzman (née Swirsky). Neither will remember my grandfather. I actually had not expected them to remember him, but maybe the name Mirele Rein (no; the last name maybe is familiar, but not the first). What I had hoped was that the details they remembered, or the archives at Yad Vashem, would help me develop more definitive information about my grandfather. I’d grown to hate the word collaborator—for myself I’d defined the term as someone who had intent, who stood to gain by participating in what the local authorities or German authorities requested of them. But the word doesn’t say enough, do enough—it’s an umbrella term, a word that quickly abstracts the moment of yes, the circumstances of no.
Yes, there was the testimony about Mirele Rein, but a historian whose work I had great respect for explained to me that had Senelis helped her and been found out, the German command would have considered his action a major crime, though perhaps not one worthy of a death sentence. He might have been sent off to a labor camp, certainly jailed—no one left to care for his children—and perhaps his children sent away with him.
But I wasn’t sure of this explanation; I didn’t know enough yet. Mirele Rein had been a Jewish member of the Communist youth. My grandfather hated the Communists/Jews. My grandfather was cunning when he had to be, an operator, a survivor. Wasn’t he? The possibility of choice dogged me—did he weigh the risk to his own life and the lives of his children if he offered help? Did he judge Mirele Rein as one who belonged in the pit at Poligon? I didn’t know.
IN THE PREFACE to his classic text on the investigation of unsolved homicides, Richard Walton, speaking of victims and witnesses, observes, “I didn’t need clinical research and ‘data’ to tell me that the pain and the hurt are just below the surface. It always has been and always will be.” He talks about the need to be able to feel something of the long-ago, the dimension, the threads, the gradations, the house in a space of green or snow where no house stands. The investigation of the past, the accumulation of some slight understanding of the intersection of trauma and memory, was not some intellectual pursuit for me. As time went on and my grandfather became more knowable—the man he was before I was, before immigration—the nature of individual testimonies, the verifiability of sources, became more complicated and more crucial.
What had happened at the Poligon was not a mystery, but what my grandfather had or hadn’t done during the planning, the implementation, and the aftermath of that massacre was. If I didn’t unravel it, it would unravel me. That’s the thing about looking back, opening the door, asking the question: the past asks its own questions of you, asks and doesn’t stop. The door—well, there isn’t one anymore. It’s off the hinges. Wherever you are in space and time, you’ve crossed a threshold, and unless you will your ignorance to overtake you again, you go where the questions take you.
“I WANT YOU to read this book,” my father said to me a little over a year before he died. He stood in the Vineyard living room, thin but not yet too thin, his complexion chalky with what after his diagnosis I came to think of as the color of cancer, and held a paperback out to me: The History of the Jews by the Gentile British writer Paul Johnson. “Marvelous, the way he writes about the tenacity and brilliance of the Jews—”
My father must have seen something in my face.
“They’re your people, you know,” he said.
I raised my eyebrows, tipped my head toward the kitchen, where my mother was at the table reading, or by the stove cutting up potatoes for chowder.
“Half your people,” he amended, smiling just a little.
“I don’t have time,” I said.
“Well, think about it anyway,” he said, quietly.
If he was finally going to pass on something of Judaism to me, I wanted it to be by a Jew: an English translation of the Steinsaltz Talmud with a Vilna page; Tanakh, the Jewish Bible; My Mother’s Sabbath Days, by Chaim Grade. The real thing. (There is no snob as great as an ignorant snob.) I said I might read the offered book down the road, and that seemed to satisfy him, for the moment. He shook out the folds of his newspaper, and I, in my busyness, took off—a very important walk on the beach with the dogs, or to the ferry, then the bus and the train back to New York, where, along with multiple student loans, a fund established by my father’s Uncle Bernie, son of Wolf Treegoob, had helped pay for my graduate education. In what he titled a “Biographical Sketch,” my great-uncle Bernie explained why he had made such provisions for his grandnieces and nephe
ws: “Father, to me, has always been the greatest living personality of his day and it is to perpetuate the memory of this great man.” Wolf Treegoob, who brought his watch parts to the dinner table and worked while he ate, would have been “the greatest engineer” of his day if he had gone to college. His son Bernie, who made big money selling Jeeps, wrote that with an education, he himself would have “gone through life with a clearer vision.”
Bernard (Bernie) Treegoob, my father’s uncle
And my own father, with his Ph.D., did what the next generation is supposed to do: went farther, accomplished, at least in terms of education, more. I’m not so sure, though, about clarity of vision. During the same war my mother survived, my color-blind father landed a desk job in Italy at a U.S. base that housed and trained army dogs to rout out bomb caches, alert sleeping soldiers, parachute under fire with their human partners. His service never brought him near the German front. Like his mother, he rarely spoke directly about the Holocaust. If he’d asked more questions … I thought at my hotel in East Jerusalem, wrapping a scarf over my scar by the side of the pool because strong sun would darken the still-jagged line, keep it from fading.
At a certain point my mother will tell me she’s glad her younger brother is dead, because of what I’m dredging up. But she won’t mention my father. If he’d asked more questions … I couldn’t even really imagine him asking. My mother’s early losses took precedence over any other legacy from the past of our immediate family—until the end of my father’s life, until the offering of the thick paperback.
IN ISRAEL, THAT visit, I was “too busy” to go to the forest named for my great-uncle Bernie’s brother Joseph Treegoob. My one day in the old city with Nadav was all I saw of the country other than the roads to Tel Aviv and its suburbs. I worked in the archives at Yad Vashem and then, with Irit Pazner Garshowitz, who fit me in around her schedule with the New York Times bureau in Jerusalem, drove out to Ramat Gan and sat down for hours with Lili Holzman, her story as long as the war she survived, so long that I heard only half of it on that day, the rest on a return trip.
LILI BEGAN BY elaborating the way she was “spoiled” as a girl. Listed in the Polish business directory circa 1929 that includes Święciany, written in Polish and French, is Lili Holzman’s maternal grandfather’s felt-and-fabric business: “J. Swirski (wojloki/feutre vegetal)” on Lyntupska Street. The business was in the basement of the large stone house where the best fabric was saved for the beloved granddaughter, Léye (Leah) Swirski, as Lili was known then. Lili and her mother, Rakhel, would take the best fabrics to the best dressmaker, Leah Murashky, on Szkolna Street, “tailleurs p. dames,” where in the front room mother and daughter could look through magazines with the latest fashions, choose what was coveted, beautiful. Lili, with the steel eyes and small, warm smile and then a purposeful embrace, hello or good-bye: what it means to leave and what it means to come back never trivial for her.
From left to right: Lili’s mother Rakhel; younger sister, Khanale; their father, Khaim; and Lili, in one of Murashky’s dresses
SO, THE SPOILED girl, and her grandfather’s large stone house on the corner of the market square in Święciany, her father Khaim from Świr, in Belorussia, twenty-four miles from Święciany, her mother from Russia. Her mother studied dentistry in Warsaw. When she married, her husband gave up his big beer and alcohol business (a business often taken on by Jewish entrepreneurs, who were blamed, at various periods in history, for encouraging drunkenness among the non-Jewish population) and went to Berlin to learn dental prosthetics.
Lili grew up in the long family home at 11 Piłsudski Street. A house with two clinics, one for her father and one for her mother’s work, two waiting rooms, and a lab her father built from scratch. He wasn’t educated, as Lili’s mother was, but he was smart, like Wolf Treegoob. He could make things, take them apart.
Young people would come to the dental clinic waiting rooms just to sit, because of the lovely mahogany furniture—a place to gather after school, a place to come in from the heat or the rain. Lili’s mother took care of everyone’s teeth; farmers, Jews, Gentiles, those who could pay and those who could only pay a little. (In Święciany, Teresa—gardener extraordinaire and retired messenger for the postal service—will remember going to a woman dentist, how the daughter sometimes was there, mentions it in a stream of talk in the van with Petras, and for a moment the present rolls back. Was it Lili’s mother? Was it Lili? As it happens, two female dentists worked in Švenčionys before the German occupation, so no way to tell—still, like a pop-up card children love, the flat, lost past gains dimension for a second, then vanishes.)
THERE WAS A younger sister, Khanale, born seven years after Lili. There was help for the working mother and father. Anja, a woman from one of the farms outside of town, walked barefoot from their house to the Catholic church each Sunday, carrying her shoes in her hand to spare them from the dust, from wear. Lili had some colored paper, and before the walk to church, Anja would wet it and rub it on her cheeks to give herself some color. She was paid roughly twenty zlotys a month. Nothing now, but a good wage then, for a woman from a farm without schooling who helped run the busy home along with a gardener.
They shared a courtyard with another well-off Jewish family, all of whom were arrested and sent to Siberia during the first Soviet purge in Lithuania in 1940.
“A terrible tragedy,” Lili says. “But they survived it.”
She tells this small side story of the neighbors with something that stops just short of irony. They were dragged off without knowing that their Soviet captors were, in effect, saving their lives. Something else was coming to that part of the world, something after the Soviets, after more snow, after the hidden expanse of leaves and green sorrel picked young for the spring soup, something of a scope neither the neighbors whom the Soviets rounded up, nor Lili’s family, could yet contemplate.
Light makes a thick, solid line across the round table where we sit. The mic of the video recorder picks up separate warbles from outside, small birds in the shade beside her walkway outdoors.
“Once I had season tickets to the Philharmonic in Tel Aviv. At intermission I stood up and looked around. I knew the auditorium held three thousand people, and it was full that night, completely. Three thousand—and I thought to myself, this is exactly the number of Jews from Svintsyan who were killed. Half the town.”
But not the neighbors who shared the courtyard.
Her father Khaim, suffering from a stomach ailment, couldn’t get through the sealed borders during the Soviet occupation to reach a bigger, better hospital. During surgery in Svintsyan, he died. By the time of the German occupation, her grandfather had died as well.
So on the twenty-seventh of September, it is Lili’s mother and grandmother (also named Leah/Lili), and Khanale, who see, from the windows of the smaller house they have rented (the large house with the two clinics requisitioned for someone in the German command or some high-ranking Lithuanian working for the Germans), carts that pull up beside every house where a Jew is living.
“This proves it was the Lithuanians. The Germans were new. They wouldn’t have known where the Jewish people lived,” Lili said.
“Was there a list?” I ask, because in that moment I don’t know what to say.
“There didn’t need to be a list. Maybe there was, maybe there wasn’t.” Lili is politely exasperated with my question; it’s of so little consequence.
She is not talking about names on paper but about the farm horses and the pregnant women and the bundles she and her sister and her mother and her grandmother prepared; food, clothing (all those dresses, the luxury of choosing from the magazines, the red paper, her father’s laboratory that was part of him, proof of him in the other, impossibly huge bundle of the irretrievable, the stolen life). The wagon pulls up to their door. Lili is fourteen and a half. Her grandmother and seven-year-old Khanale go into the wagon bed. Lili and her mother walk. First they go to the field right outside town. It’s still ear
ly in the day, and it takes a long time for the carts and the wagons to go back and forth, for families and men on their own and widowed women with in-laws and the sick and the community leaders and the very old to all reach the same place. Nothing to drink. A little food from the bundle. Infants wailing. Speculation. They’re taking us to work somewhere. They’re taking us away so they can rob our houses, and then they’ll bring us back.
The Lithuanians wore some kind of uniform, Lili remembers. She thinks it was green. The Poles who came out to the street to watch, well, some were smiling, some not smiling, just looking. Of course I think of Teresa and her mother, Salomeja, who did washing for Jewish families, when Lili says this. Of my great-grandmother Barbara, of my mother that day—where were they? Of Senelis. I imagine him in a uniform indistinguishable from the other Lithuanians in uniform. He’s not on the list of those “employed” for duty at Poligon (I had received a copy of a pay roster for Poligon in the old-fashioned envelope from the Lithuanian Special Archives, months earlier). The police station is perhaps a kilometer away from the field. It’s hard work to move half a town in a day. If he’s not playing cards, not at the station, not at home, where is he? This is why a list of the Jews to be taken is important to me. If there is a list, someone had to make it, consult it.
At dusk the panicked, thirsty group is commanded to move. Those who can’t walk the distance are put back in the wagons.