A Guest at the Shooters' Banquet

by Rita Gabis

  Artūras Karalis takes the question seriously. “I have to wear many faces in here. I have to be many different people because there are many different types inside; petty criminals like thieves, and then the worst—murderers, mafia. I have to know how to relate to them all, so I can control them and then leave, at the end of the day, with my own face, my own soul.”

  His openness surprises us. I ask him if he thinks about the history of the prison much.

  “All the time,” he answers. He looks at the metal gateway, the barbed wire, explains that the prison was built on top of a Muslim graveyard, Muslim Tatar, I’ll learn—a people who trace their ancestry all the way back to Genghis Khan. The graveyard was moved when the land was purchased for the prison, but during construction, the workers kept finding bones as they dug.

  Soon after I’d arrived in Vilnius, I met with Rachel Kostanian, an erudite woman both weary and indefatigable, whose efforts were evident everywhere at the Green House, a branch of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum dedicated to the Holocaust. At the start of a long discussion she said wryly, “Well, of course the country is one big cemetery.”

  In the early 1900s, Vilnius was much smaller. The big new prison was at the edge of the city, surrounded by fields, isolated. “The spirit of the old times is here. I feel it every day,” Karalis says, then insists again he’s not trying to dissuade me. But over the course of several more minutes of talk it becomes clear that he’s warning me. He’s thought my request over, considered what he presumes I haven’t.

  “This place is a bad place. You walk in here, and it’s like walking in mud. You’re stained, and what stains you can’t ever be washed off. You carry it home with you. That’s why when I leave here, I won’t ever come back. Five directors were here before me, and when they retired, they never came back to visit.”

  Viktorija and I look at each other. The sun has shifted. Half the block is in shadow. The one CO I liked at the prison where I worked was getting a degree in religion; he wanted to write a book about all the religions of the world. Reggie, his hair dark, not as close-cropped as his colleagues’. But even he, when the chips were down and it was time for a cell toss, or a midnight walk at rifle point in the yard in a storm for some group infraction, would toe the line. The next time I saw him, the animation would be gone from his eyes, his voice a monotone.

  I say something about wanting to understand Senelis, and Artūras Karalis shakes his head, adamant. “Normal people walk away from the bad things in the past. People shouldn’t keep pictures of funerals. Your Senelis wouldn’t want you to come back here.”

  “But isn’t remembering important?” I ask.

  “Why?” He returns to the subject of my prison tour. “There are bad people in there, bad things happen. You go in and you’ll be changed, but if you insist, I will take you through.”

  He waits. And perhaps because I’ve kept him talking this long, he expects a certain response.

  “Well?” He’s busy. He’s been generous with his time.

  I look at him; the square shoulders, a bit of steel in the nakedness of his eyes; a decent man, an articulate man. When he was young, did my grandfather envision a future version of himself—a position of authority like the one Artūras Karalis holds—envision how he would navigate through life with decency? Did he, at one time, want to be someone other than who he became? Or did he believe he was his best self, as his daughters knew him, remembered him?

  I don’t know who he was anymore.

  Artūras Karalis looks quickly at his watch, asks again. I shake my head.

  A bit of surprise flickers across his face.

  I reach out my hand to clasp his, tell him I’ll send him my book about my grandfather when it’s done, see immediately that he would never read it, even if it was translated into Lithuanian—he has no time for a book about the past, about memory. But he wishes me well, then turns rather abruptly, and Viktorija and I watch him vanish. The metal door closes behind him and the muffled sound of a buzzer announces his reentry.

  I step back and look at the security cameras, picture the new inside the old, the institutional paint of the cell blocks, the modern currency of prison favors, hope Karalis retires soon, but somehow can’t imagine him with idle time. Though I have no doubt that when he’s buzzed out of Lukiškės for the last time, he won’t even glance at the rearview mirror as he pulls away from the parking space marked “Director” and drives, at the slow speed required for this particular roadway, into another life.

  “I was surprised you didn’t want to go,” Victorija says as we walk to the van, now thankfully covered by shade.

  I look at her lovely face. She’s quickly become dear to me, and I’ll miss her. We immediately go over what Karalis had to say, both struck by his depth—what he was willing to reveal to us. I film the two of us as we recall everything we can about what was said. Viktorija is happy because she’s intrigued; we’re getting somewhere, she and I. But privately I’m saying good-bye to her. I won’t see her again, won’t come back to Lithuania again. I’ve had enough. As we walk toward the van, I harden myself after the rollout of this last, long day, touch Viktorija on the shoulder.

  “Time to go home,” I say, as if that explains my refusal, my turning away.

  III

  The Shvenchionys area is famous not for its developed industry, but for its unique and beautiful nature: blue-eyed lakes, lush green forests, the sky blue Zheimena River and old mounds including burial mounds.

  —ŠVENČIONYS MUNICIPAL DISTRICT TOURISM WEBSITE

  CHAPTER 25

  * * *

  LOST

  I think about the barracks at night. Not my New York City night, but the cold autumn evenings before Lili Holzman and Chaya Palevsky and their family members and the others they claimed as family in order to get them out escaped. I remember the road that leads back to Švenčionys, the quiet street where my mother slept, her hair still in braids, in the same bed as her great-aunt, the body heat of Krukchamama comforting in the chill. Frost has collapsed the flowers in front of the house, yellowed the grasses. In the other half of the house, the Polish family sleeps or looks through the window or speaks softly about the events of the last days. A family. It’s all I know about them.

  A woman had her ears torn off on the way to Poligon.

  I think of her as Heida Lapido, as she is referred to in the testimony of Michael and Hirsh Rayak. I think of the variations I’ve found of her last name: Lapido appears in the necrology for Švenčionėliai as Lapidus—the unnamed wife of Henoch. In the Hoduciszki necrology, there is a Hava Lapide—also possibly Heida Lapido, because the Jewish residents of Hoduciszki were also taken to Poligon. Who tore the earrings from the ripped cartilage? Who undid the clasps and pocketed the shine? Who washed the blood from the gold or plated wire?

  I’ve always hated questions without answers.

  Was Senelis home the first night the bleeding woman spent in a barrack—his boots off, exhausted, asleep like a sack in his own room? Or was he in the outer glow of one of the bonfires? Was he at the Kasino—a late-night card game before the long duty ahead? Did he miss his wife? Did his mind wander from the thousands of prisoners a handful of kilometers up the road to a lover he’d taken, a promise he’d made, a grudge he was nursing? And then there were the babies; impossible not to see them unless he turned away or absented himself, the certain gesture with which a woman in a wagon cupped the back of her infant’s head; her full breast and the baby’s sucking covered with a shawl. The shawl falls, and someone—maybe a grandmother next to her—pulls it up again in the din of movement. Despite orders to be silent, it’s just impossible for thousands of people to travel a road without a sound.

  If Senelis is not there, he’s near. How did he get there or near?

  IN 1920 MY grandfather joined the Lithuanian Rifleman’s Union, the Šauliai.

  As a Šauliai platoon leader in the early 1920s he took part in the revolt of Klaipėda. Klaipėda was a sizable and important port ci
ty that since the Treaty of Versailles had been an international no-man’s-land. The revolt was successful, and Klaipėda, where the Lithuanian population was already the majority, was won for the Lithuanians.

  To be a part of the Šauliai meant, at least theoretically, that you were trained and prepared to pick up your arms and defend your nation. When in 1940 the Russians set up military installations in Lithuania and then absorbed the country into the Soviet Union, it was the Šauliai, like my grandfather, who took to the woods as anti-Russian partisans, nationalists committed to an independent Lithuania. This is just one reason why Senelis’s family was marked for deportation during Stalin’s purges. He had also been trained in the Lithuanian Military Academy; he was border police; Babita was a librarian. In the end, almost any reason was enough.

  When the Germans occupied Lithuania in 1941 and promised an autonomous Lithuanian government, it was also the Šauliai who, joined by other local Lithuanians, came out of hiding and collaborated. The promise of Lithuanian autonomy was of course betrayed, but many men, like my grandfather, took positions that aided the German plans for Litauen (Lithuania) and Ostland (the East).

  My grandfather wanted, above all, an independent Lithuania. But he also wanted a military career. In 1927 though, he was pulled from active duty, relegated to the reserves and a job as a police chief along the Latvian border, and continually posted farther away from his family in Žeimelis. He vigorously campaigned for his reinstatement to active military duty through a series of letters and several supporting notes of confidence he must have sought as, one by one, his appeals for reinstatement were denied. After the war, during a KGB interview, the same Bronius Gruzdys whose Poligon testimony I had read in the postflood rental, a man who was also a Shaulist, told Captain Buglan, chief investigation officer of the Fourth Division of the Soviet counterintelligence agency Smersh, which would morph back into the KGB, that my grandfather was discharged from the military into the reserves “allegedly for excessive drinking.”

  My grandfather stated the situation differently:

  31st of January 1928

  To His Excellency the Minister of National Defense

  Request

  Last year, on May 1st, I was dismissed from the military service. My commanders suggested that since I was associating with people from leftist parties, I should send a request for a transfer to the reserve. That unexpected claim, however, was pronounced without any reason. Throughout my entire life I have never been close to any political party. I went to military school straight from high school, and when I became an officer, I placed my service above everything and worked with as much dedication as possible.

  I was delighted to know on the 17th of December in 1926 that our country would be ruled by really national minded people who, among other things, would restore the honor of the military officers, since in the times of the “real democracy” the status of the military officer was widely degraded …

  (My grandfather was referring to a coup that ultimately brought the Lithuanian dictator Antanas Smetona, and with him the National Rifleman’s Union, into power.)

  He writes again to the minister:

  In 1927, after the uprising [in Klaipėda] … I was dismissed from the army and exiled from Kaunas. Later, I was offered a placement in the border police office, but all this time I was persecuted and tossed around from place to place.

  And then another letter, undated, to the president of Lithuania, Antanas Smetona, himself—a letter in which my grandfather leaves out what was, in effect, his discharge from the military:

  It is an honor for me to ask Your Excellency to accept me back into military service.

  I graduated from the Lithuanian Military Academy on the 18th of December, 1921, and all this time, up until my transfer into the reserve, I was serving as an infantryman in the Fifth Regiment of the Grand Duke Kęstutis of Lithuania. I was transferred into the reserve on the 1st of May, 1927 on my own request.

  … Military service is my true vocation.

  (Antanas Smetona, with his white gloves and cravat, called unsuccessfully for an armed revolt against the Soviet occupiers in 1940 and 1941, but ultimately fled the country and ended up in Cleveland, Ohio, of all places—just one of thousands of strange trajectories the war created.)

  Another letter to the minister of national defense in 1928:

  Currently I am serving in the 7th category and with that salary it is difficult to support my family.

  I swear on my honor and my father’s grave that I was unlawfully dismissed from military service. Since my early childhood I was very interested in my country’s matters and stayed in the army; I did not belong to the party but always felt akin to it and now feel even more akin to the Lithuanian Nationalist Union.

  A Captain Stakonis vouches for him. A Colonel Birontas, who years later will appear on a list compiled in Israel of World War II Lithuanian killers and collaborators, wants it known that my grandfather would be reinstated, but for a dearth of positions. Senelis, Birontas assures, is deserving, and if circumstances were different …

  My grandfather gets high marks in pistol shooting during his training in the reserves. But according to one ranking officer he pleads his case to, he has been in the reserves too long and so has lost the edge of a military man.

  He has a wife who scorns him and children he rarely sees since his posting up the border. Then his wife is taken by the Russians and their helpers (perhaps Jewish, perhaps not).

  The Germans occupy the country. Almost immediately they break all their promises, but they bring with them a gift for my grandfather. A job.

  On June 28, 1941, the Lithuanian Colonel Jurgis Bobelis, who also supervised the creation of the Kaunas ghetto, called upon men like my grandfather—men stuck in the army reserves—militiamen who had just deserted the fleeing Red Army to come to Kaunas and sign up for active duty. I don’t know if my grandfather signed up at that specific moment or not, but his letters seem to indicate that if the opportunity arose for duty, he’d grab it.

  Chief of the Gestapo in Švenčionys, the aforementioned interrogation subject Bronius (also spelled in various documents Bronislaz) Gruzdys called him. But this is inaccurate. In late summer of 1941, my grandfather became chief of security police under the German SD, a substrate of the SS devoted to intelligence work. In Lithuania, during the German occupation, this meant many different things. In Švenčionys and the surrounding areas, officially, my grandfather was to rout out Communist Jews, Communists who were not Jews, Jews who were not Communists, locals who were hiding Jews, anti-German partisan bandits, and any last remnant of the Red Army that, on its way out of the country, had made a special point to savagely torture and kill those incarcerated in local country jails and the larger city prisons, easy targets whose deaths the Germans could use to incite and sustain an already activated and lethal nationalist fervor.

  AT OUR FIRST meeting, Arunas Bubnys, the thoughtful, soft-spoken director of research at the Genocide and Resistance Research Center in Vilnius, took a key and opened a cabinet near the table where we sat in his office, in the building that houses the KGB Museum and was once headquarters for both the German and Soviet occupation administrative bodies. He pulled out a thin Wehrmacht directory prepared for internal use by the German administration.

  The paper had the texture of soft sand: timeworn, friable. We found my grandfather’s name and his phone number. I felt as though I should be able to dial it, the past that close. Bubnys, who has painstakingly created an archival record of Lithuanian collaboration under the Germans, was one of my teachers from afar. I’d read everything he’d written that had been translated and struggled with work not yet translated. Collaboration pained him; researching it pained him. He spoke with a slight grimace, but from time to time smiled at some small irony. I appreciated the unlocking of the cabinet, the slim phone book of proof of Senelis during wartime.

  IN THE FIRST week of July 1941 a German advance team, heading for the Russian front, arrived in Švenčion
ys with a group of Lithuanian baltaraiščiai (white bands). Among them, Ona Cibulskiene, thirty-four years old, an elementary-school teacher from the outskirts of Švenčionėliai who walked with a limp and was an amateur actress. I tried to imagine what it was like to be her; to go from teaching the alphabet to farm children to walking through town with a gun (the fleeing Red Army left weapon caches everywhere—you could find a gun in a field, behind a barn, on the side of a road by a bloated body, or go ask Mykolas Kukutis, the Lithuanian white band leader for the region, what he could give you from a stockpile).

  THE DAY BEFORE I left Vilnius, the careful translator of my grandfather’s letters and also of dozens (still a fraction of the total) of reports Senelis filed from Švenčionys, particularly in relation to two events of railway sabotage, appeared at my hotel. He’d walked across town in the late afternoon. A bit pale, serious, impassioned, he handed me a plastic folder with the copied Lithuanian originals. The packet of papers reeked of cigarette smoke. I quickly saw him—working late, chain-smoking, with a black ashtray and cold black coffee—an instant fiction. He asked me quiet, thoughtful questions about my research. Though nothing he revealed about his own life flagged it, I felt I was in the presence of a person of courage. The years have confirmed this, in ways I would be at a loss to explain, even to him.

  He hadn’t realized, until halfway through the translating he’d done prior to my arrival in Lithuania, that Pranas Puronas was my grandfather. So he had sent a few comments about my grandfather via e-mail—just a notion or two about the man who was tasked, in the instance of these reports, with tracking down partisans and their helpers. What startled me was not his few innocuous comments—his goodwill had been evident since he’d begun translating for me—but my instant (private) defensiveness. How dare anyone refer to Senelis as if he was just, well—someone—a man dictating the same boring statement to an equally bored secretary, a man without a wife, a daughter, a granddaughter?