by Rita Gabis
I can’t remember the exact time frame—whether the information was in the plastic folder, or was something he’d sent later, when I was home in New York—but on his own, he’d also found something he thought would interest me. In a section of a list of Lithuanians who had murdered Lithuanian Jews, compiled by the Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel, he’d found the name Puronas listed as a killer in the town Skapiškis, a town not far from Gindviliai where Senelis’s parents had lived.
He’d also come across a section of testimony by Emilija Greibene-Laucinaviciene, born in 1912 in the Skapiškis area. On June 29, 1941, she and her husband were arrested by the white bands, “the punitive unit which ran rabid … at the time.” They were taken to the commandant’s office, where one of their captors said “to commandant Puronas; here we’ve caught a good Communist.” Her husband was forcibly separated from her and taken into a dark room. In mid-July, he was shot.
If this was my grandfather, it places him in Skapiškis at the end of June in 1941. But my mother and her sister never mentioned Skapiškis. Nothing in the Lithuanian archives, thus far, had located my grandfather there. No other documentation referenced Senelis as “Commandant.”
My translator wouldn’t take payment for what he’d passed on to me, had said, “Compensate me for two minutes’ work on the weekend? That’s really OK. Let me get the other stories to you tonight. All it says is something about a police commandant, nothing really. Could be anyone.”
He mentioned that Skapiškis had caught his eye because it was near another town that had come up in the translations he’d done for me. He was trained as a journalist, so I took his “could be anyone” to heart—when I got home, the section of the list and the testimony went in a file marked “Questions.” And then the file itself was quickly covered up with printouts of other testimonies, stacks of books, pieces of paper with inscrutable notes I’d written to myself—things not to forget, translations I needed, the many variations of a name in a town on a certain day in June of 1941. Heida, Hava. Lapido. Lapidus.
Before the violence befell her—before Poligon.
BEFORE: I’VE NEVER been able to absorb any information in a linear fashion. On a corkboard and sheet of poster paper, I make myself write out, again, a timeline of major events in prewar and wartime Lithuania. But for the timeline to have meaning, it has to contain the power shifts and vulnerabilities of Germany and the Soviet Union as well as Lithuania. It has to contain the gap between the Reich’s ideal of a massive land grab and the experience of the foot soldiers and field marshals on a vast, muddy, freezing arena of battle that even the brilliant tactician Field Marshal Erich von Manstein with the Fourth Panzer Army could not hold, and so was forced to retreat from Stalingrad. And it has to contain the experience of the young: a boy, for example, no longer sleeping on his uncle’s stove in Święciany because the weather has changed, winter to spring of 1941. The boy is Yitzhak Arad. Back in New York City, I watch the video of my time with him in Israel from the past summer, while outside my study window the cold days shorten.
“Now I’m going to speak as a historian,” Arad says.
Stalin reportedly gives a speech to the Politburo in August 1939. War is certain and is certain to last a long time, leach out a country’s resources. Let Hitler fight Italy or France or both. When the collapse comes, the Soviets will bring communism to a broken Germany, and/or to the already large Communist Party in a fallen France. I watch Yitzhak Arad’s face, notice how his hands move as if he is touching borders, winters, time.
In 1940 Soviet-occupied Święciany (no longer in Poland, but deemed briefly to be part of Byelorussia) Arad learns Russian and sings songs in praise of Stalin at school during the day, steals Hebrew books from the shelves of the off-limits, boarded-up library at night. Each house has a kind of loudspeaker from which two Soviet “channels” broadcast approved news and music.
Over coffee, in the large common room in Ramat Hasharon in Israel, we spoke of the interstice of time in Święciany when the Soviets were fleeing and the Lithuanian police and white bands were roaming the wide main street, the square where the private shops and lively trade on market day were already a thing of the past, living only in local memory.
His uncle has no children, and his house is small, with a privy out back, another reason to be glad for the end of winter. He and his sister have been getting letters from their parents in Poland. One particular letter comes, urging them to return to Warsaw. Their parents have heard a rumor. Arad stops.
“So many rumors … in the ghetto, rumors all the time. Without rumors people couldn’t survive. They needed hope.”
The Germans had something called the Madagascar Plan—if the British navy came under their control, they could ship all the Polish Jews to the isolated island of orchids and coffee plantations and poverty. The plan was abandoned, but it fueled a rumor among Polish Jews that they would be allowed to leave for Palestine.
“Come home,” the letter from his parents urges. Arad is fourteen now. He’s quick by nature—the complicated events unfolding around him grow him up. No, he won’t go home. Whatever will happen in Warsaw (perhaps he can’t allow himself to think that whatever through) he should stay clear of it, even though his father and mother and their sisters and brothers and grandparents—every part of his clan not in Święciany—are there.
In late June, when perhaps someone named Puronas is behind a desk in Skapiškis, passing judgment on the captured Communists brought before him, Lithuanian policemen round up two hundred (the number Yitzhak Arad recalls) Jewish men in Święciany, fourteen-year-old Itzhak Rudnitzky (Yitzhak Arad) among them. To be taken for work? To be moved out of town to a ghetto? (There is no ghetto yet in Święciany.)
At the last minute a Lithuanian policeman looks into a crowded car and plucks out Arad, the youngest, and another, much older man to clean his house. Mud on the front stoop, road dust on the floor and carpet and windows, unwashed so long the nicotine of the policeman’s cigarettes has yellowed the glass. The place stinks. And that’s the great luck of the fourteen-year-old boy and his fellow worker, who rub corners with rags and push brooms and beat rugs and pull out wind-seeded wormwood and broad-leafed weeds waist-high on either side of the front door. They throw out buckets of dirty water and scrape the scum from the stove burners while, a few kilometers outside the city, the others who were rounded up are shot. Among them are three of Yitzhak Arad’s uncles, including one who was an ardent Zionist. With him, bent over a forbidden radio, Arad would listen for news of Palestine.
Afterward the Lithuanian—a Lithuanian like my grandfather, in the power structure, with a “new” house that until recently belonged to someone else—administers a vigorous beating to his two house cleaners. The occasion of war or perhaps the arrival of the man’s family required that the place be spruced up, and so Arad and his work companion survived the day.
IN THE SAME interstice of time, twenty-four-year-old Ķlarah Gelman, a member of the Shomer HaTzaier, a secular Zionist youth group active in Lithuania among many of the young people until war came, is suddenly on the run. Before the war, she was happy, married to an engineer with a home in Kovno; life was good. The chaos of the Russian retreat and the German advance separated them at a critical time. In Pobradze (Paberžė, in Lithuanian) a local Jew told her, “Don’t go where there is no place for you. No one can let you into their homes right now. Continue walking.”
So she walks the eighteen miles to Švenčionys, walks into the middle of a kidnapping. A woman and her son are captured by a “Lithuanian on a horse. He killed anyone he could get his hands on. He killed the boy. He took the husband’s clothes, left him only with his white underwear. He also killed a woman, an old lady. He had this big sword and he stabbed her. I saw it all. He then took a pillow filled with goose down and threw feathers on us. One woman helped me. She took my feather-filled coat and bag and took me to her home and hid me … behind her stove.”
When I reread Arad’s account in The Parti
san of the events he describes in our interview, time has either altered or sharpened his memory. In his book, the taking of his uncles and the cleaning of the house happen some days apart. Ķlarah Gelman’s testimony, translated from the Hebrew from the USC Shoah archive, seemed at first slightly fantastical; the sword sounded more like a Cossack story my grandmother Rachel could never forget—something Gelman had been told about maybe by one of her parents or grandparents. I watched her tell her story in the online video archive. I saw, online, the photograph of her as a young woman—striking, unshrinking, a shock of dark eyebrows over large, intent eyes. It suddenly, belatedly occurrs to me that the horse and the sword suggested a military man—a clue to his identity. Later, his sadism will provide another.
CHAPTER 26
* * *
PLANNERS, DIGGERS, GUARDS, SHOOTERS
Horst Wulff’s identity card
When the German field command arrived in town, they immediately ordered residents to put out buckets of water for the thirsty troops on the move to the front.
In The Partisan, Yitzhak Arad writes,
In the beginning of August [1941], German civilian authorities replaced the military government in Lithuania. The country became a Generalbezirk [general district] … Swienciany was included in the Vilnaland Gebietskommissiariat headed by H. Wulff … The SD, the Security Service, was established, with the liquidation of the Jews as one of its prime tasks.
Joseph Beck in Švenčionys
Without giving a precise date, the Koniuchowsky overview of Švenčionys describes the arrival that summer of “ten men working for the security police … and two county agricultural directors, both S.S. men … Postal services [including censorship] came under the control of six Germans headed by the S.S. man Metz … simultaneously the military commandant of Švenčionys.” It seems likely that my grandfather and his assistant, Feliksas Garla (mentioned in several sources I’d found, including several of the KGB interrogations) were among the ten men working for the German security police mentioned here, though the exact process of Senelis’s hiring isn’t clear.
Prison construction was well on its way. Iozas Breeris, director of Švenčionys prison, was hiring thirty employees, sending the applications down to Kaunas for final approval.
My mother recalled, “The Jews were made to wear ribbons at first.” I’d never heard of the ribbons before, and for months dismissed this as a girl’s imaginings. But in fact a survivor interview done in Israel mentioned the brief period of ribbons with the word Jew marked on them.
In light of the danger for men, as evidenced by the fate of Arad’s uncles, one David Katz raced back to Vilnius from his grandmother’s house in Švenčionys by the Kuna River. As he got nearer to the larger towns, he saw “different billboards and propaganda materials … a picture of Stalin holding a knife in his hand dripping blood … Another poster declared that the Jews started this war. I already felt as if I was guilty of something. I felt as if I was dreaming all of this …”
In her passport photo taken before emigration, my aunt Karina looks as though she’s caught inside a dream that wasn’t a dream. Five years old in that first year in Švenčionys, still—the air of violence was so pervasive, even a walk to church on Sunday would catch a child up; a truck with locals in the back, a few with sawed-off rifles, three or four members of the town’s Jewish population patching holes in the road or painting a wrought-iron fence, men and boys watchful without watching, attentive, grim. Then there was the sound of rounds against concrete—too far away to place exactly, too close not to know the shooters were near.
Unless she and my mother were kept in the house all the time, kept behind the wrought-iron fence that marked the yard; she who longed to follow her brother and sister must have followed them sometimes, followed the official cars from Vilnius, followed the women in the late light, going to the stores during the shopping hours allotted to them, the hours when nothing is left but offal, the empty shelves that still smell of bread. (Though if you had a bit of a garden, or knew people who had bread, chicken, last year’s potatoes, if you were rich and could buy from the black market, you could avoid the empty stores.)
When I pulled the passport photo of my aunt out of the small padded mailer she’d kept it in for me, her face struck me as familiar, beyond the grown Aunt Karina I’d recently spent time with again. In the rickety wooden cabinet in my study, I took out an old photograph from my own childhood, one that for many years I couldn’t look at. Now the girl I was looks back at the girl Aunt Karina was: the shock in her young face, the wariness in mine; that’s our family legacy. I felt it in Švenčionys—stifling in the soft beauty of kitchen gardens and thick grass. A silence, an absence.
BY THE TIME Aunt Karina’s passport photo was taken, her mother had already left a transit camp in western Siberia (today, Novosibirsk)—endless swamp, then another destination point, another camp after that. No one told Aunt Karina where her mother had gone. Perhaps she asked my mother. Silence, because my mother had no answer for her, silence that becomes its own habit, its own poison.
I felt myself pushing against it in New York. Every week or so, more translated material was coming from Anastasia. I was a student again; and just as I was in my student days, I constantly diverged. I found myself late at night stumbling on to dubious websites with swastikas in the header that nonetheless quite often contained detailed information about tank maneuvers and other aspects of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of ’41. (Battles were discussed with an odd familiarity—I never waded far enough into the sign-up process to find out what else was obsessively chewed over among members who identified themselves with German military insignias and, every once in a while, a thumbnail photo of a bulldog or a tiger.) My father once described my reading habits as a “vacuum cleaner”—I collected anything in my path.
Over and over, I watched and listened to a video of a musician I’d made on our last day in Vilnius, right outside our hotel, across the street near an ATM of a recently defunct bank. In the sunlight the young boy played a cymbaly, a hammer dulcimer, the traditional Belarusian music so beautiful it seemed to heal the air around it.
Late autumn colored my study window, quick brilliant dusks over rooftops in the distance, the trees of Riverside Park gone deep rose and brown-gold. The image, in the testimony given by Khone Zak, of the woman with her paralyzed husband on her back faded a little. Now, walking in the chilly streets, it was Rose’s unruly brown hair I saw, her purposeful stride quickly past a row of ailanthus trees. I followed her for a block once, almost called out to her. Then, like my father, not her.
I watched footage of KGB postwar show trials I’d gotten on disc during one long afternoon Rose and I spent at the Department of Image and Sound Documents at the Lithuania Central State Archives. The day was hot, the room where we met the archivist close and a bit rank. A table littered with books, a kind of take-home library donated by staff for other staff, gave away the reading habits of at least a few of the archivists. Some of the books were about film and society, film and history, but others were series about secret kingdoms and drawn-out battles in lands with long, fanciful names where heroes and heroines gifted with extraordinary power fought valiantly or betrayed one another or vanished, never to return.
The grainy clips of trials of “Fascist collaborators” that might have included my grandfather had he not fled the country were like advertisements for the new Soviet regime. Amid the grim faces in the prisoners’ box were empty seats with placards carrying the names of those under indictment but who had gone into hiding.
The archivist—diligent, friendly, deep dark half-moons under his eyes (he liked to read into the night, I surmised)—had a Tolkienesque screen saver on his large desktop, hills and castles, magic and dragons. While he searched files for what we were after, I glanced at the current read he’d downloaded on the screen, the book his distraction during a long, rather uneventful day. Over his broad, rounded shoulder, a small portion of dialogue: “My son, you carri
ed that dagger for months. I believe we dug every trace of it out of you, but if we missed even the smallest speck it could be fatal.”
(I scribbled the dialogue on a torn-out day from the archivist’s desk calendar, saved for scrap paper. “Spalis 20, 2011.” October, from the Lithuanian word spaliai, or flax shives, after the breaking and scutching during the harvest—it’s over now, for the most part, in the new Lithuania of cheap imports and small independent farmers priced out of their livelihoods.)
The son and the poisoned dagger would make me think of Artūras Karalis, a man stained by the place and business of his day. His belief in the danger of memory had stayed with me. The October of Poligon—my grandfather; he hadn’t helped Mirele Rein, but according to my mother and her sister had let dozens of others out of the Švenčionys jail in 1943. Was it true? A lie? I had pieces, mentions, hints, and contradictions. At one point my mother called and said to me, “I don’t care what the truth is; it all hurts.”
IN A CROWDED café near NYU, where I did my graduate work, I met with a Polish writer whose books, like the translated work of Arunas Bubnys, I’d read many times. Travel marked him. Each expression—a half smile, a studied interest, a laugh—raised a half dozen new angles of worry and love and regret and boredom and surprise across his face, all private. His large eyes looked tired.
“If you’re lost, you know you’re getting someplace,” he said.
He wore a kind of trench coat/overcoat and was politely interested in my questions and also clearly eager to escape—back to his own work perhaps, or to some stretch of quiet at the end of the day. I felt stupid for contacting him and immediately forgot all the questions I’d wanted to ask. I thanked him as quickly as I could and wished him well and good-bye and good luck with your latest project. I promised myself this was the last person I would meet in order to try to find the next archive to tap, the next book to open, the next route to more clarity about Senelis.