by Rita Gabis
I slouched over my coffee. Pulled out a notebook and pen. If anyone looked at me, I didn’t want to look lost. In a café with a notebook you can stare for hours at the progress of a day out the window: the plum sky losing itself in the false dark of Manhattan between the Bobst Library and student housing and the Citibank.
I rarely think of my heart surgery, but I thought of it then; I thought of the cab with the broken air conditioning on the way home from the hospital, the heat wave that lasted and lasted (Tammuz—Hebrew for the month that spills over from June into July). Outside the hospital, everyone seemed to move in slow motion. People bunched up at the crosswalks; an old woman with her handy cart, a new doctor in scrubs (was he all of sixteen?), a woman with gleaming chestnut-colored skin crossing the street in gorgeous lime high heels. Strollers stalled at the red light; a mother—her cheeks wide and flushed—fanning midsummer from her baby’s hidden face.
A handful of days earlier I’d woken at dawn, startled from a dream, and gone into A-fib. Members of my surgeon’s team on call needled vial after vial of different medications into my IV to try to restore my heart’s normal rhythm. As the moments dragged on, a nurse got the crash cart ready. My gown was opened, the pacing wires threaded into the zone of my chest straightened out as if for a new sewing project my stepdaughter had concocted. Finally, some combination of drugs worked.
Out the cab window I sent a silent message to every person I saw: take care of your heart.
At the café, I thought of my girlhood, as if it were an object outside of time; an apricot the sun hasn’t given enough hours to—hard, round—inviolable when I imagine it that way. I thought of the lives before my life—my grandfather in wartime, Uncle Roy as a child, figuring out the logistics of Švenčionys when he returned late in his life for a visit—here is the church, here is the corner where men with their salvaged Mosin rifles took away other men—and then the noise. It happens over and over. When he arrives in Švenčionys in his sixties, he won’t go near the small local shooting site, can’t even look in that direction, it appears he remembers the most, even if he never spoke of it. But he’s gone now; he can’t wrap me up in a massive hug. I can’t ask him what his father told him about the war.
During my trip to Lithuania, I made a follow-up visit with Arunas Bubnys and had told him about the desecrated Jewish cemetery in Švenčionys. He had quite rightly commented that cemeteries are vandalized all the time—and that it is a municipal problem, one “the West” magnifies into a symbol of ongoing anti-Semitism. I’m not a historian. When he had said “the West,” I felt like he had been talking about me.
I remembered the beautiful, pristine Catholic cemetery in Švenčionys. I remembered the birdsong breaking the stillness and the overgrown grass in the Jewish cemetery. The cigarette cartons and liquor bottles, the coil of shit. Someone had taken a heavy, blunt instrument to the gravestone Lili Holzman had paid for and arranged from Israel, to be placed there in memory of her father; the granite was only partially shattered, broken lines running in diagonals past the engraved face of her father, with his glasses on, in the soft light of the summer day. Whoever performed that act of destruction was nameless. Maybe was drunk. Maybe did it on a dare. But knew there would be no repercussions, no local police knocking on the doors in the houses across from the cemetery to ask if they’d seen some of the boys from town on their way in or out. A matter for the town, at any rate, and don’t all towns have their lost bored, disenchanted youth?
IN 1926 A thirteen-year-old Lithuanian boy, Edvardis Genaitis, apprenticed at the Jew Shamuil Broyd’s bakery in Novo-Švenčionys (Švenčionėliai, in Lithuanian). He had grown up in nearby Terpezhys, a village ten miles north of Švenčionys, in a peasant family that owned one cow, one horse, and a small portion of land. (Similar to what Senelis’s father, Kazimieras, had been able to accumulate in his truncated lifetime.) He went to four years of elementary school—but only partial years; he had to take time off to graze other peasants’ cattle to help support his family.
Under Broyd’s tutelage, Genaitis went from apprentice to master cake maker, learning first how to keep the sour starter alive, to work the rye dough that clung to his hands like gum, how to turn and knead and turn and knead. How the resting dough at a certain point felt under the palm like the new belly of a pregnant woman.
Shamuil Broyd must have seen something in Genaitis, if he was going through the trouble of training him: an appetite for learning, or maybe just an appetite, just hunger. For Genaitis, to go from herding neighbors’ cows to learning a trade was a leap forward. He worked at Shamuil Broyd’s bakery for nine years. Nine years of passing by the sounds and smells of Friday nights in a certain quarter of the railroad town a handful of miles from Švenčionys. The white tablecloths. The two candles. Did Alta Broyd cover her eyes when she recited the blessing over the candles? Did Shamuil explain the clear Friday-night soup of the poor to Genaitis? The noodles and meat and schmaltz and egg scent of the braided bread that might, after nine years, have permeated his dreams.
In March 1935 Genaitis entered the Polish army (his village was located in Polish territory), and after Poland’s defeat he returned to Lithuania, where he was interned briefly at Polonga (Palanga) on the Baltic coast. When the Red Army began its incursion into Lithuania in 1940, Genaitis was released and went to work at a bakery by the Švenčionėliai railroad and then finally as the secretary of the Švenčionėliai police. According to his postwar testimony to the KGB, he initially went into hiding in Švenčionėliai when the Red Army fled the German advance. But when his wife reported to him that men he knew from the police station were walking the streets of Švenčionėliai without fear, he emerged.
Two local policemen—friends—told him to take his Walther pistol and report to the Lithuanian White Guerrilla (white band) headquarters. In fact, according to his testimony, they walked him there in case he had second thoughts—which makes me think, if the testimony is true, that perhaps he was a man uneasy about what was occurring in his town. There, suddenly, the sons of farmers, teachers, railroad workers, carpenters, tannery workers, and ordinary police acquired extraordinary power. They could search dwellings and drag men out of their homes. They could pick a pistol from a weapons cache and walk the dirt street with it stuck in their belts.
At headquarters, he’s smacked on the head for some report he wrote up about one of the men present. He’s thrown into a basement jail at 50 Vilenskaya Street in Švenčionėliai and urged to join the white bands to secure his release. He’s not a stupid man. In ’43, when the Germans begin dragging Lithuanians into their army, he forges a Polish passport for himself and changes his date of birth so he can avoid service. When the same “friends” who had escorted him to headquarters tell him his luck will change if he joins up with the rest of them, he understands what unlucky means. He signs up, and so in late June of ’41, he becomes one of those who conducted searches and seizures.
Again, according to his testimony, his tenure is brief. He claims it ends right before a group of local Jewish men, young and old, are rounded up and shot on July 22. The men, roughly fifty of them, are told they are going to work “on a phone line”—even though many are taken out of their homes barefoot or in their underwear. They are taken to the same headquarters where Ginaitis signed up for his brief service, only on this day, two SS men are there with paperwork, and the men are asked to sign on a line on a page where one of the SS points and commands “Unterschreiben”—sign. One of the white bands in attendance translates or mimics the signing of a name on a paper written in a language none of the Jewish men could read, a paper that Yankl Velvl Shvartz, “head bookkeeper of the Jewish community bank before the war,” warned them all was not a work agreement, not a missive about a phone line or some kind of census or an agreement that their wages would be sent to their families; it was a paper that meant their death.
Stuck for hours in the basement jail, the men are brought upstairs in groups of sixteen, led out into the light that, for
a moment, causes them to blink or their eyes to water a little. They are made to sit low in an open truck so they won’t be seen, a truck driven perhaps by Bronius Cieciura, who often did the transport in this interim time, from jail or capture point to execution site. The truck bumps and scrapes gears into a thin forest; the men are forced out of the truck at gunpoint and shot where a grave has already been dug. Among them is the baker’s son, Hirash Broyd, eighteen now and working for his father, a boy who has grown up around Genaitis. Grown up around the man who speaks a different language and whose legs must have seemed, when Hirash was a child, impossibly long—so perhaps when it was permitted he sat on a stool to watch the master cake maker at work, perhaps even creamed the butter or helped spread the poppy-seed paste between layers.
The reason a record of this slaughter survives is that Fayve Khayet was with one of the groups of men to be executed, a group that included the town’s Hasidic butcher and Shloyme Volfson. As the men stand in line, waiting for the white bands to shoot, the Hasidic butcher cries, “Shma Yisroel.” He runs one way, and Shloyme Volfson runs another, both drawing mortal fire in the hope that someone will get away. Shots aimed for Khayet miss him, and he runs without looking back.
It’s an event that would have been talked about by the shooters; a hunt would be organized for Khayet. Perhaps the family of Volfson and the butcher would be targeted for “revenge.” And Genaitis—what did he think when he heard that the boy, now a young man, who grew up around the wooden boxes of flour and sugar and rye and jams Genaitis boiled down, the boy who was tasked with going after the raspberries and came back to the bakery kitchen with his hands stained and scratched, was dead in a pit in the thin woods a mile from the town center?
I was not surprised when I read about the Hasidic butcher and Volfson inviting death to save others. The idea of the passivity of the Jews had always made me feel stupid; I’d never believed it, never understood it, never found confirmation of it in the books I read or the stories I was told. Perhaps I have a different definition of action and resistance. A boy who will become Yitzhak Arad watches his older sister read a letter from home, a home that is burning. His parents plead with him to return, suggest that an escape route is in the offing, a chance to be together in a new place with a new life. Perhaps he studies his father’s handwriting on the envelope and thinks of his father’s voice, the blisters on his hands from trench digging before the German blitz began. He’s observed the goings-on about him; he draws on his intuitive powers; he separates his longing, the terrible hunger he has to see his mother and father, for that which at fourteen seems the best decision to make. Even thinking of this exhausts me; the effort required to save your life and the life of your sister by, for a while at least, remaining where you are, away from the family you love.
AND GENAITIS? DID he warn Shamuil Broyd, his wife, Alta, and Zalmen, the other son? Did he pass the empty bakery and wonder where they’d gone?
In his testimony Edvardas (aka Shoostik) Genaitis describes a date in early July—he can’t quite remember it with exactness—when he and several other white bands/white guerrillas were ordered by a Captain Kurpis to conduct searches among Jewish people in the więzienie (shed; my Russian translator first thought the word was Ksenzi—perhaps a last name—but she suggested it might be a misspelling of a Polish word for shed, and so it seems it could be). There, according to Genaitis, “We confiscated a lot of money, watches, golden rings, and other valuables, which were handed over to the headquarters.”
I looked through the documents I had for events in July in Švenčionėliai/Novo-Švenčionys. I could not find any other record of this confiscation. Practically speaking, it would have been a waste to round up fifty or so Jewish men from Švenčionėliai or recent refugees from Poland and not, first, relieve them of their material wealth before killing them. Does this mean Hirash Broyd was among them? I don’t know.
So much of this narrative is speculative. The service dates Genaitis gives could be factual or convenient. Did Genaitis see Hirash Broyd during the confiscation process? Did the shed trap the musky odor of fear as the men gathered there were robbed without explanation or warning?
What I do know is that Edvardas Shoostik Genaitis worked for nine years in the bakery of Shamuil Broyd. What I do know is that Hirash Broyd was gunned down on the twenty-second of July. The same day the bravery of the Hasidic butcher and of Shloyme Wolfson (who had a bad arm—perhaps it was broken as a boy, perhaps he was born that way) saved Fayve Khayet, bravery that should be marked with a plaque at the killing site, should be recorded in Lithuanian and Polish and Russian and English and Hebrew in the kind of multilingual audio guide the Metropolitan Museum uses, so that I or you or the descendants of the Wolfson family or the family of the butcher or the grandsons and great-grandsons of Edvardas Genaitis can stand where the trees have matured somewhere in the unmarked vicinity of this particular shooting and imagine themselves coming barefoot off the truck, outmanned and weaponless, about to run into oblivion, in the heart of their final summer, without the German reconnaissance planes that will later fly over Poligon, without one of the German military PK (Propagandakompanie) photographers or filmographers capturing their images.
No Germans at all were present. They had left with their signed documents, of which multiple copies would be made, stamped TOP SECRET, one copy making its way to Horst Wulff, the Gebietskommissar of the Vilnius region, who, among other powers, had the authority to determine in difficult cases who was a Jew and who wasn’t.
(Yitzhak Arad, in his first interview, said that as a boy in Warsaw, when the city was overrun and he had to wear the Jewish star for the first time, he felt only pride.)
BOTH CHAYA PALEVSKY and Lili Holzman remember Horst Wulff at Poligon, not by name but by deed. He was born on October 28, 1907, in Mulheim, the same year Hitler’s mother Klara died of breast cancer despite the best efforts of her Jewish doctor.
Wulff grew up in a city on a river and at twenty-three joined the Nazi Party. Before he married and began fathering four children—one a son who died young—he worked undercover at the Hotel Terminus on the rue Saint-Lazare in Paris.
For a time I confuse his Hotel Terminus with the hotel by the same name in Lyon, where in the 1940s the Gestapo settled in and Klaus Barbie tortured, among many others, the famous French resistance fighter Jean Moulin. I draw senseless parallels between a younger man whose pathology is just beginning to reveal itself in the early 1930s and that of Barbie, who liked to stroke a small cat before torturing his captives. The time I waste teaches me something; raw cruelty is less frightening if it can be set in a frame. Perhaps that’s why, for a time, certain theorists proposed all sorts of connections between the death of Hitler’s mother under the watch of a Jewish doctor and the ideology Hitler cleaved to.
Wulff’s cover name is Ollritz. He’s also the Nazi Party’s representative for propaganda in Paris, where the fascist right is a willing audience. The hotel is a perfect place to practice being someone else, to monitor conversations while he pretends to follow the waiters and the commis débarrasseur, who clears plates and smells faintly of the lemon juice he uses on his hands to cleanse them of work.
All sorts of people come to the hotel. Wulff takes in lectures at the Sorbonne—maybe he hears Marie Curie lecture right before her death. He’s smart and stupid. He cooks the books later at Ordensburg Krössinsee, a large educational facility for young Nazi recruits—still new when Wulff arrives in ’36, a huge place of dramatic angles and sharp points. He commandeers his butcher brother to write up fake receipts so he can skim from the supply budget. Perhaps while still at the Hotel Terminus, he develops a fondness for quantities of expensive wine that he continues to indulge in to excess. Imposing at roughly six feet, he becomes mean and threatening when questioned. He writes a letter during a court case brought against him for thievery. It is a partial confession and also an enumeration of all he has done for the party.
With all this, Theodor Adrian von Renteln, the gen
eral commissar of Lithuania, talks Wulff up for his appointment there: “He is a good comrade, always ready to help and modest … can give a good aural presentation … in economically difficult areas … complicated with regard to different peoples located there … balanced judgment, skill and special readiness for duty.”
By mid-August 1941 Wulff orders that all the Jews in the Vilnius region be confined. There are several meetings leading up to Poligon. He attends a meeting in September, according to one source, with all the heads of the county. That logically would include police chiefs like my grandfather and also the white band/partisan leaders in Švenčionėliai—but I’ve not been able to find a record of who was at the meeting or where it took place.
A letter is also written to the area police chiefs from District Police Chief Januškevičius, who instructs them to gather the Jewish population for removal to Poligon and to collect their belongings once they are taken away. It’s a vast operation. It requires local participation. Wulff shows up at Poligon at a crucial moment, but before that moment, much has been accomplished.
FROM A JULY 2, 1941, memorandum by Reinhard Heydrich to top-level SS and police officials:
All the following are to be executed:
Officials of the Commintern (together with professional Communist politicians in general); top- and medium-level officials and radical lower-level officials of the Party. Central committee and district and sub-district committees;