by Rita Gabis
“Now we have taken the last path of the victims, the last they saw in their lives,” Giedrė says.
Cloud cover steals the light. In the van she quietly asks us to drop her outside of town. “No, no—don’t take me to my house, I prefer to walk.”
Only when she looks back as I call good-bye again through the open window of the van I see that she’s crying. Almost immediately, a hard rain begins. Color catches my eye; stuffed in the corner on the other side of the seat is Giedrė’s blue umbrella. But she’s turned down a street. She’s gone.
DURING OUR MEETING, Chaya had raised herself taller in her chair, leaned slightly forward, as if she might quickly stand, as if she was on the road heading away from Poligony again. “We ran like a storm,” she said.
A side view of Poligon pit mound (left), and the Killing Tree (right)
CHAPTER 23
* * *
DAY OF MOURNING AND HOPE
JUNE 14, 2012
We outdrive the rain on our way back to Vilnius. I want to go back to the hotel and sleep. Vilnius is sunny—it’s only late morning when we pull up to a corner where Viktorija is waiting—but it feels like a day has passed, a week. Viktorija’s energy highlights my fatigue. She’s translating for me; today Rose is off somewhere. Viktorija with her bright blue sweater and glasses and braces; she asks me how the walk with Giedrė went.
“Fine,” I say, the word flat and blank.
Petras stops by a café so I can pick up a coffee. My husband is at the hotel, sick now also. Tomorrow we fly to Frankfurt, then home. I ask Petras to call Rose about Giedrė’s blue umbrella. We have to get it back to her. It’s a trick I’ve learned on this first trip; worry about something small and material. Wrap your sadness around it, your confusion, your rage. Focus on the coffee cup that’s too hot. The impeccable makeup job on the face of a woman with long ash-blond hair and very white skin, clicking her heels past you in front of the coffee place.
Rose has arranged for me to get access to Lukiškės prison, where my grandfather spent ten days in October 1943. According to my mother and her sister, he was arrested for releasing prisoners. Many. Eighty perhaps. A hundred. He’d “had enough of it.” Of what? As it happened, in fall of ’43, when he was arrested, the Germans, increasingly short on labor, decided to conscript Lithuanians into labor camps and factories. I suspect, if the family story has merit, that it was a group of Lithuanians, rounded up in a sweep that filled the prison yard in Švenčionys, that Senelis “let go.” But his reinstatement to the security police after his brief prison term, and the absence of any mention of his derring-do in Švenčionys in the considerable amount of German correspondence that mentions him after his time in Lukiškės, calls that part of my family narrative into question.
He told my mother, her sister, and I suppose his son that while he was incarcerated, a vision of the Virgin Mary came to him and let him know he would be freed. (Bribery for minor offenses was particularly effective, though I have no information from any quarter indicating the brevity of Senelis’s prison time was a favor given for a favor received.)
Before prison, back in Švenčionys, he walked the children out of town to a friend’s house, then left for Kaunas. It’s quite possible that a connection with other Saugumas officials in Kaunas helped, for a short time, to keep the Gestapo off his back. He contrived to be arrested in a Kaunas newspaper office. He left his pistol in his jacket pocket and draped the jacket casually on the back of a chair when he arrived at the office, and made sure he wasn’t in that room when the German police came and got him. How smart to be arrested at a newspaper office. Even with all the silence and propaganda and censorship that dogged each press outlet in the country (and there weren’t many during the war), he was in a public place, around people who would take note of what was happening to him. According to my mother, he was afraid to be arrested in Švenčionys, where the Gestapo could just “shoot you.” That kill first/ask later license is something I suppose he would know more than a little about, after almost three years as chief of security police there.
Even with his savvy, swiftly made plan, when he was put in the back of a car and driven on the street that led to the Ninth Fort, he thought he was done for. By the time the war is over, more than forty thousand people—infants and octogenarians; Soviet POWs, German Jews, Lithuanian Bundists, Zionists, and secular Jews; thieves and scholars; Poles and Lithuanian Communists; rabbis and kindergarten teachers—will have been shot at the Ninth Fort or one of the other forts that flank Kaunas.
I’ve wondered how my grandfather heard of the first mass shootings in Kaunas throughout October 1941. Over a dinner with Gestapo up from Vilnius? Or perhaps from a friend, also police, but working somewhere else, visiting? From Jonas Maciulevičius, his boss, who perhaps crosses the hallway to sit on the edge of my grandfather’s desk and have a chat?
Litvaks (Lithuanian Jews) killed in October 1941. On October 29, almost 4,500 of them were children. German Jews sent by train to Kaunas to their death at the Ninth Fort in November. SS-Rottenführer (section head) Helmut Rauca, a name my grandfather would have known, decided during the selection on October 29, 1941, who would live and who would die, his mouth full of a sandwich, his fingers wedged tightly into his gloves. He pointed one way, then the other. (Some months down the road, I’ll find a long complaint against Senelis in the Lithuanian Central State Archives which will contain—among the scribbled names of several SS acknowledging they’ve received and read it—Rauca’s sign-off, the dark R heavy on the ink from a pen held in the hand of the man who reigned death upon the Kovno ghetto.)
But the car my grandfather was in, a black Opel, glided past Žemaičių Street, took another road; even then the Virgin Mary must have been beside Senelis. Who knew what awaited him at Lukiškės, but at least he’d left that zone of horror, where prisoners scratched last messages into the cement walls—On this day so many were shot, a name, an outline of a face. It was 1943. Unlike the region around Poligon, where no large group was left to mow down, there were still many who would lose their lives in Kaunas at the fort, but not Senelis, not on that day. He was taken to Vilnius and remanded into Lukiškės on October 11 with 152 other people.
THE DAY HAS opened up: blue sky, a small cool wind in the shade of the trees outside the entrance to the KGB Museum. We park there because some event is going on along the green outside. Folding chairs are set up. We’re early for it. A group of junior-high-schoolers and a woman in a white suit jacket clucking over them mill about as the same piece of music, valiant, melancholy, plays and stops and plays again. Petras sits in the van with the door open, but curiosity gets the better of Viktorija and me. We head over to the folding chairs and sit as a small crowd gathers. The schoolkids are like all schoolkids; they half ignore the woman who directs them this way and that across the grass, but when she claps her hands, they shake off their disregard; the thin boy with the striped shirt, the girl in black flats with a little purse slung over her shoulder, a few boys a head taller than the others.
It feels good to sit in the shade. White clouds bluster overhead. Press people are setting up behind us; a staging area for a television feed, cameras pulled out and lenses adjusted. Near the van where Petras waits, a station wagon pulls up. A woman with white hair carefully gets out of the back seat in a long skirt and little apron—traditional dress. Another woman, wide-hipped and also elderly, cradles a large bouquet of flowers as she heads for the green. The music starts again, and this time the marching children clutch suitcases of different sizes: old leather valises, cheap cardboard boxes; PETRAS, one reads. I take a photo of it for our Petras. The music gives way to the chug, chug and whistle of a train; the kids pick up their suitcases and march in a diagonal across the green, wave when the melancholy music again drowns out the train.
Then it hits me— June 14. Babita, the day of one of the huge Soviet deportations before the Germans came in, memorialized as “The Day of Mourning and Hope.” The slightly embarrassed adolescents, a little
bored with all the walking back and forth, smiling or practicing despair or talking among themselves as they march to the train whistle, are all so unlike my Babita as she’s been described to me on that day in 1941, that the reenactment seems utterly dissociated. I wonder what the kids thought as they held their empty suitcases, moved through the grass with their crushes and mothers and fathers and summer jobs and homework over (thank god!) and the awareness of cameras that will shortly focus on their brief journey.
An honor guard of young Lithuanian soldiers strutted into view: white gloves, caps, too young—like soldiers everywhere—to be in the military. June 14. The schoolkids walk away and stand in the sun and turn and wave, and then they come back. A trim woman with gray hair moves next to me. I offer her my chair, but she won’t take it. A man and a woman with a video camera sit behind us and eat ice cream that melts down their hands. It isn’t a large crowd, but still too much noise for me. The train whistle keeps blasting. The waving. The music. Poligon, the Ninth Fort, my stern Babita combing the hair of her beautiful daughters, Ramutes, the youngest, on her lap. All too much.
It’s time to go to prison. I take video of one more tramp across the lawn, and then we get in the van with Petras and go.
CHAPTER 24
* * *
ARTŪRAS KARALIS
I check in on my husband by phone. He feels better, wants us to stop by the hotel and pick him up. I shift my worry from the blue umbrella to him; he’d had his own surgery before our trip. While he woke up from the thick dream of anesthesia, one of his doctors took me aside in the hallway and listed the symptoms that would make it crucial he go immediately on antibiotics. He had the symptoms. The night before, in the Ramada Vilnius, we fought about it. I have amoxicillin in my suitcase; since my heart surgery, I always carry it when I travel.
While the endless loop of music by Sting played in the small courtyard out our window, I yelled at him to take the antibiotic, wore him down until he swallowed it with so little water I couldn’t believe he hadn’t choked on the capsule. I was thinking of Chaya’s mother’s pot when I yelled, of the candle stub, the scratches in a cement wall at the Ninth Fort, of Yitzhak Arad, who had left Švenčionys before the Poligon roundup, without his sister. How they had found each other in Głębokie in Belorussia. I was thinking of how stupid it is to refuse the luxury of help when it’s right there, at hand. I kept at him even after he took the amoxicillin. But later, when we get out of the van in front of Lukiškės Prison and he asks me about the walk with Giedrė, I lean into his left shoulder and close my eyes. He puts his hand on the back of my head, and for a second, I rest.
At an earlier time in my life, I taught at a maximum security prison for women. Now I buzz the metal door to the ubiquitous double-glass checkpoint inside, oddly modern for a huge yellowish brick fortress with a Russian Orthodox church rising beyond the walls and coils of barbed wire—stained, leaded-glass windows and five domes. In a cramped entryway of buzzers and a guard booth that smells like a prison—strong floor cleaner, a way station, a holding pen—Viktorijia translates for me: the appointment time, the prison tour. The correction officer on duty checks a sheet of paper. I expect him to say there’s no appointment, but he confirms it.
He tips his head in the direction of the door we just entered. “Wait outside, please, someone will be with you shortly.”
Already there’s a traffic jam. Two guards are coming on duty, one jocular and beefy, the other a bit sallow—both young, both preparing their faces for inside.
Outside, the sun cranks up. The morning’s rain and flutter of humid wind from the river are a memory. Without shade, my husband starts to wilt, retreats back to the van and folds his long frame into the back seat. Viktorijia and I stand where women stood when their Jewish sons and husbands were being picked up in droves at the start of the German occupation and taken first to Lukiškės and then on to Ponary (Ponary of the buried lemonade bottles, the round tombs in the earth). Here the women cried out for them, tried to throw their voices over the walls, bundles of food, their love. When the German and Lithuanian collaborators who administered the prison vanished, the Soviets returned with new local lackeys and thousands of scores to settle.
The large electronic metal gateway, a kind of iron curtain that opens for vehicles and certain workers, gives way every ten minutes or so after the blast of a loud alarm. A fleet of prison buses go in, windowless in back so there’s no way to see if they are empty or ferrying in arrests from outlying jails. A man passes through the open gate with a shirt and a paper bag; he’s young. He doesn’t look like an employee. He stops for a minute, looks at the lineup of parked cars across the street, as if hoping for a ride, someone he knows. There’s no one. He lights a cigarette, studies Viktorija and me without much interest; we’re just two women waiting at the place women wait. He lingers a little longer then lopes slowly down the sidewalk, looking back over his shoulder.
In the drill of the late afternoon sun, Viktorija and I are both sweating. She’s taken off her blue sweater. “Two o’clock,” Rose had said. “Don’t be late.” At two thirty we go in the small entryway again. The guard on watch is annoyed. He’s held up; a meeting, we’re told. I don’t know who he is, suspect he’s a corrections officer who doubles as a liaison with the outside, or someone from the public relations office, if they have one. In the prison where I taught, the COs were the ones who really ran prison life—doled out brutality, sucked up bribes, fought the good fight with press conferences when the suicide rate spiked. The warden, a woman whose portrait graced the lobby where the bondsman’s desk waited, kept the same lax oversight after the multiple suicides, the same soul-killing processes and procedures.
I never met her, never even glimpsed her outside of the picture frame in which her hair was a frozen golden helmet around her face, so after an hour of waiting, I’m surprised when the director of Lukiškės emerges from the doorway and apologizes—the meeting—brisk but not unfriendly.
He studies us for a second: Viktorija with her braces, the green tint to my skin, the sweat matted into my hair, which I’ve pulled up and away from my face—thick hair, like my grandmother Rachel’s, like a wool cap in summer.
“Artūras Karalis,” he introduces himself. (In English, King Arthur.)
He’s in his forties, sturdy, graying. There’s a vague resemblance to my grandfather in a certain photo, when he was about the same age. Handsome, his face not undone yet.
Through Viktorija I explain that my grandfather was incarcerated here during the war. I’m writing a book about his life during wartime and want to see what the inside of the prison might have looked like to him in October 1943, behind the high barricade of brick. (Even as I say it, I feel slightly ridiculous; what I really want is source material that can confirm the reason for my grandfather’s arrest.)
Karalis speaks rapidly, looking directly at me. He doesn’t want to be rude, doesn’t want to discourage me, but even though the exterior of the prison hasn’t changed, the interior has been completely altered. There’s nothing left of the old cells, the lonely passageways, the crowded loading dock where trucks would pick up the next group of men and later women and children for the convoy to Ponary—flaps pulled down over the sides so those being carried away couldn’t track their destination, though over time one man, then a group of men, then the sick and elderly who had to be helped up into the truck (its shocks worn out so every incline, every rut, every stone buried in mud shook the travelers, jostled them further into shock, into a fevered escape plan, into an understanding no one wants to ever come to) knew, but perhaps hoped it was not so.
Karalis tells us that yes, there’s another prison where you can pay a bit of money and spend the night in an old cell, a tourist thing—the look on his face displays what he thinks of that kind of adventure—but that’s in Riga in Latvia, not here. There’s a pause. I somehow can’t quite believe there isn’t one old cell left inside Lukiškės.
“The church is administrative offices now, sin
ce the Germans,” Karalis says, in case the aged structure misleads us. Then again; “Inside nothing is the same.”
For a second I consider thanking him and going on our way, but he waits and I wait and then ask if he’ll talk about himself, about his experience as director.
He agrees, but continues to stress how much has changed inside since wartime. He doesn’t want to discourage us, he’s prepared to take us in if we’re bent on it. But he wouldn’t advise it. He circles back this way several times. A kind of official hospitality and also a respectful discouragement, for reasons that become clearer over time—reasons that have nothing to do with the modernity of the cell blocks, the dining area, the cage where a certain group of prisoners is allowed outside, inside the brick walls.
“I trained at a police academy and then got my master’s. It was something I wanted to do, so I pursued it.” Some pride there, at what he’s achieved.
I tell him I used to teach at a women’s maximum security facility. He raises his eyebrows just a bit and shakes his head. “Men are different,” he says. “In here, all kinds.” He shifts his weight, perhaps has something to say but doesn’t say it.
I ask him a question, something about the most challenging aspect of his job, something a student would ask for a school paper about the work men and women do in their lives, a student like the kids with the suitcases in front of the KGB Museum.