by Rita Gabis
Peoples commissars; Jews in Party and State employment, and other radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, inciters, etc.).
Then just under two and a half months later, this report from the Einsatzgruppen, death squads composed mainly of SS, local collaborators, German security police, and members of the Security Service: “The principal targets of execution by the Einsatzkommandos will be: … Jews in general …”
Ads begin to appear in newspapers for translators and secretaries.
Most of the Germans speak no Lithuanian, and the Lithuanians, if they speak German, will—if they are like my grandfather—use that to their advantage. The black-market marmalade discovered in the wagon of so-and-so should be inventoried and immediately transported to Gebietskommissar Beck’s place. Heil Hitler! My grandfather nods vigorously to whoever gives the order and tells his deputy Garla to divide a portion of the booty between Garla, himself, and perhaps others he works with—Breeris and Jonas Maciulevičius—and deliver the rest to the resident German in command, Beck, and his subcommand, Gruhl, forthwith. The Germans may have occupied the country, but without the Lithuanians to translate and operate, they can’t confine, control, or kill with expediency.
Among those who rely on Lithuanians is one Joachim Hamann. He worked in a drugstore after high school (not as a pharmacist, as some initial sources I looked at implied, but as a stock boy, a clerk). A rather unpromising start to a career trajectory that, with the opportunity of war, placed him at the head of the Rolkommando, a killing unit composed of roughly eight to ten Germans, approximately thirty Lithuanians who were regulars in his detachment, and large numbers of different locals who joined his squad for pay when Hamann or his subordinates arrived in town for a job.
Joachim Hamann
As part of his training, in September 1940 Hamann studies with fellow SS security police recruits at the Einsatzgruppen Training Center at Pretzsch, near Schönebeck, Germany, on the banks of the Elbe River. There the training is less about physical endurance than about the need to undo the aberration that created the Untermenschen. Hamann literally parachutes into this new part of his career. He’s a man unafraid of heights, a man who had done at least six jumps, belly to the faraway ground, arms and legs out, a Fallschirmjäger—a parachuting jäger (hunter), a man who looks too young for the work he is about to take on.
But before the meetings in September, before the roundup, there are the rumors Arad spoke of. There are attempts to please the Germans and Lithuanians, to impress upon the German Metz (mentioned early on in the Koniuchowsky testimonies) or Gruzdis or my grandfather that one is very good with shoe repair, the building of fences, the slathering on of soap before a shave. Fear is as viral as rumors; every day a humiliation, a killing.
Ruvin Chekinsky is tasked with cleaning out the public toilets (for Gentile use only). His bosses demand that he use his bare hands, but he refuses; he’s seventeen after all, the age of refusals. Would they let him use a cloth and water? They’ll kill him, they thunder, gather the firing squad. They stab at him with something sharp; the testimony I have about this event calls the sharp object an awl—but what would a tool for leatherwork be doing in the hands of German soldiers? Did they shit in the toilets first, and then call him in to clean? After he’s bleeding, they relent. He can use a cloth and water. Even bleeding from his hand or wrist, he accomplishes his job. The detail of the awl nags at me; in each testimony, KGB interrogation or otherwise, I look for embellishments or vagaries, especially if the event didn’t happen to the person describing it. Awl, an old word; āla in the antique high German. A photo of the gear a German foot soldier carries is illuminating; the men take little factories with them—needles, thread, scissors, awls—a kit for each soldier in case a shoe needed to be fixed, a jacket mended, a wound inflicted, quickly, without the waste of a bullet, for sport.
At home, Chekinsky’s wounds are dressed, perhaps by his mother, Pesia, or his father, Yitzhak. The iodine stings as they wrap the wounds tight. He’s quiet, won’t talk even to his brother, won’t take food. A day passes, a night. The wounds crust over, but something has happened to him. He can’t dress himself. He can’t touch his body with his hands, can’t put food to his mouth or be touched. Disgust and rage reach so far down inside his teenage life, nothing his parents say soothes him. He smells like German shit. There is stale urine in his soup. Even with the disinfectant, he gets blood poisoning, but he isn’t sick enough to die before Poligon. So perhaps he is in a fever when they take him in the cart. Perhaps red welts of infection run from his wounds up his arms. His face flushed with heat. All he wants is to smell nothing, to not be touched, to find his old self somewhere, on Schul Street, singing with his brother.
BY THAT TIME in Švenčionys the commandant of the field police had arrived on his way to the front: “a very decent German from Vienna,” some who survived Poligon pronounced him. He professed his lack of allegiance to the Nazi doctrine, had dire predictions for the Jews, though he didn’t enumerate them. Things would be bad. Better if they had all fled in time to the Soviet Union. Perhaps he found out about the toilet-cleaning escapade and disciplined those involved. Maybe, in the preparation for the heavy fighting, before the mud and outrageous winter conditions became part of his nightmares, he heard about a squabble, inquired—Well, did you kill the boy?—and let it go. Maybe he looked in his small shaving mirror and saw that his honor would be his first personal casualty in the war theater; then, perhaps, his death.
Perhaps he gathered those involved and tried to shame them, saw, among the various genuflections, acknowledgments of command chain, personal allegiance, even awe—a look exchanged among them. These boys with fathers broken down by previous war, the aftermath of profiteers, wheelbarrow money—marks printed on one side to save money, the cost of your omelet jumping from the first rancid bite to the next, cocaine and shame and then the crash in the United States that pulled the rug out again. A price must be paid for the cliché of the loaf of bread that sold for two hundred billion marks in 1923, for the overcrowding in the Berlin barn quarter; the Eastern European refugees, poor, needy, in a country sick of need. Jews control and ruin the world, but they also are the poor scum of the world.
This is what the commander (whose name I have not been able to find) sees in the faces he surveys; a schoolboy’s flawed equation. And it’s all around him, in this lovely country—the bombed rail lines out of sight, the field poppies at their peak; aguonų laukas—a local pointed out to him in a drive down a road of fields dotted with the soft red riot of flowers. He’s surprised he’s remembered the name for the flower; he’s forgotten everything about the man who pronounced it for him except for the man’s hand gesturing from the half-track (half car, half military vehicle) backloaded, able to head off-road to explore the woods or fields on the way to Švenčionėliai or Łyntupy or Ignalina.
And at any rate, field commanders of Army Group North and Army Group Centre were not to be bothered with trivialities. The designations of army groups will change; commanders will be reassigned, promoted, sustain injuries, die. Those who traveled through the lake country on their way to the front or who were stationed for a time among captives and beetroot farmers and black marketeers and white bands will pass a man in uniform in the street, pushing fifty, the cigarette he holds dwarfed by his large hand. A destination on his mind, apparent in the determined way my grandfather moves, the end of the cigarette mashed between his large thumb and index finger, and then tossed to the dusty curb.
Old door to Švenčionys police station and prison
In mid July 1941, the labor divisions … became clearer. Political investigations, house searches, and detentions … were now, without exception, under the authority of the Lithuanian Criminal Police and Security Police [Saugumas].
—Cristoph Dieckmann
Q. Did you never receive a report on the shooting of Jews?
A. I did not receive a report on the shooting of Jews. I once heard a rumor of it.
—Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, Nuremberg Trials
THE SCHOOLS ARE, of course, shut down—for the Jews. In the fall, my mother will go to a one-room Lithuanian school.
In my favorite children’s book, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, a young girl named Meg, her small brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin travel through time to rescue Meg and Charles Wallace’s father, a scientist, from an entity known as IT. IT is not a person. IT is a brain gone mad with evil and power. Ultimately, with help from various quarters, IT is defeated.
I think of the Jewish children in Švenčionys with their bikes, perhaps Chaya’s youngest brother or Lili Holzman’s little sister—of the parents who had to explain to their children that their bikes must be given up (a bike a child has perhaps named as if it’s a horse, pedals it fast to the lake with friends, parks it in front of the Jewish School where Fyodor Markov—soon to be an important part of the town’s war story—worked, hired as a result of a campaign by the parents’ school committee). A bike a boy wheels slowly, a bit unwillingly, to Nakhum Taraseysky’s pharmacy on an errand instead of out to play.
The bike must be given away to the police, the authorities, the Germans, someone other than you. IT wants your bicycle. IT means hushed conversations your parents have when they don’t see you outside the door.
In Švenčionys, as in many other Lithuanian towns, there is a story of the “great fire” (often several fires, several stories; towns had been vulnerable to fire through the centuries because of the preponderance of wooden dwellings and shops). The “great fire” in Švenčionys devoured the buildings around the square, the swift, infernal heat of it like a fallen sun right near the community baths. But the lost town was rebuilt again. As in A Wrinkle in Time, the story of the fire is one a child might recognize as destruction and loss, followed by a community effort that allowed for repair, for the town to live again, to be whole again. But now no one is predicting when IT will depart, when the Lithuanians or the Germans will leave, when the town will be as it was. Your family home has been requisitioned, and you are not allowed to walk by it, or look in the window of your old bedroom.
On September 19, the Pole Valerish Lukaozewicz is arrested for being a Communist, and then killed on the second of October. Edward Miktas, from Švenčionys, thirty-one years old, who has a gun (illegal, as he’s not a white band or police) and is also allegedly a thief, is also killed on the second of October. IT is eating time. People are dying, and you are forced to stay in the house. Even the cat can’t go out.
Iozas Breeris, warden of the prison, a forty-four-year-old Lithuanian man, who worked before the war, as Senelis had, in a rural outpost as chief of border police becomes, in the second week of July, one of various police chiefs in Švenčionys—head of “Švenčionys District Police,” in his own words. He testifies after the war to the KGB that among his early duties was the return of material goods and land the Soviets had taken from the wealthier peasants and doled out to the poorest farmers of the region. In addition, nationalized businesses could become private enterprises again, though they were configured to serve the war effort. He also mentions court verdicts (there was no court), the arrest of civilians, and their transport to other prisons. The investigation of “robberies and murders.” But it all happened so long ago, details are hard to remember.
In addition there is the confiscation of radios and bicycles. This is one of the men who worked, in part, under the jurisdiction of my grandfather.
Forty-seven-year-old Ionas Kurpis (who had, like Senelis, been in the Lithuanian reserves) was the leader of the white bands in Švenčionėliai during the time of Poligon, and so was acting, in the fall of 1941, on orders that came down the command chain of which Senelis was a part. (Unless my grandfather was out hunting, as he liked to do. Unless he’d been called, in the fall of ’41, down to Vilnius. Unless he’d taken his small son on an extended fishing trip or was laid up in bed with scarlet fever, nursed by his sister, whose heavy tread announced the arrival of tea with, of course, a little whiskey in it.) Unless.
IT IS KURPIS who organizes and supervises the digging of the pit at Poligon. Kurpis with a pistol and a military uniform; no reserves for him anymore. He likes moonshine, is from one of the several small villages outside of Švenčionėliai, Buivydžiai. It’s dark when he shows Vitold Savkovsky the perimeters of the ditch that is to be dug. A Lithuanian army officer is with Kurpis. The ditch behind the Zeimena River is vast. Another digger/witness says there was a “technician” on hand—someone to mark the width and length, to eye the land and gauge bodies and pit size. The digging went on all night. It was raining. (Rain pelted the barracks roofs where the captive thousands waited, thirsty, cold.)
The men, three hundred or so of them, had to dig into brush at least three meters deep. The problem with rain, steady fall rain, is that it fills up the hollow you’ve made in the ground, so you’re standing in water as you lift the mud out. And lift it out again. In the bushes, Vlad Ankyanets testified, there were approximately thirty policemen milling around, ten to fifteen local Lithuanians (white bands), and two Germans. The diggers had been ordered to show up at the Švenčionėliai magistrate’s at 9:00 P.M. with shovels the magistrate’s secretary had thrust into their hands at their own doorstep. Ankyanets and the other diggers were “lined up in groups of four” and went across a bridge over the Zeimiani River to the site where the pit needed to be made ready by morning.
Pavel Petkeevic remembered a town meeting in Švenčionėliai after the shovels were handed out. The “secretary of the town council with the involvement of the German authorities” announced to those who had been gathered “from jobs and farms” that Poles, Lithuanians, and Russians all had to be Lithuanian now. Jews had to be exterminated.
CHAPTER 27
* * *
DEVIL IN A GLASS JAR
Gedmino Nr. 11, my grandfather’s address; I finally discovered it in a 1942 German census of Švenčionys.
I wish I could bend time the way Madeleine L’Engle made it seem possible in her book. Senelis isn’t in the elder care facility in Kansas. The dementia hasn’t set in. He’s not buried under the open Midwestern sky. The questions I have are more detailed than they were a year ago, and perhaps less bifurcated. Were you enemy or hero? No, that’s not the way I think of him anymore. I want to ask him about certain names: Beck and Wulff, of course. But others, too. The Polish translator my mother remembers—he must have heard of her, maybe knew her, would know her name. Mirele Rein. I won’t accuse him. I won’t shut him down. I’ll say, “There was a girl who spoke perfect Lithuanian.” Pause, add, “She was beautiful.”
He’s tough, my grandfather, even with all his sweetness and smacks of kisses on my cheeks. The best I’ll be able to do is look at his face for the tell: Does he look down? Does he shift in his chair? The historian Christoph Dieckmann notes that almost every movement of the Germans in Lithuania can be traced through records kept, scrupulous reports that document, minute by minute, who was where when, what they were doing, documents that were carbon-copied ten, fifteen times, sent to the Ostland command and back to Germany to all the various departments whose job it was to issue a status report and perhaps make another copy of a copy and send it to someone else. Or if the document or circular was top secret, burn it, or consign it straight away to a lockbox to which only a few possessed a key.
But there are no such records in the micro world of Švenčionys and Švenčionėliai. There are memories, histories, burned-down houses, a dinner in the one café in town held after a funeral, the soup I ate (made in the same way, I wagered, since the café opened decades ago) in a cordoned-off part of the small restaurant, where I put the potatoes aside and Rose took them, shaking her head. It’s a good potato. What’s wrong with you?
I have four hundred pages of archival material from different sources. Each tells a different narrative, a different truth or half-truth, a different lie. There is a set of thin files in the Lithuanian archives, created
by the KGB for those who escaped Lithuania at the end of the war, those, like Senelis, for whom an investigation would be a waste of time. (Though you could torment his family members; send his brother and his family, for instance, to a work camp in Siberia.) I have to create my own record of him, my own file, my own murder book, the cold trail, a dead end at every turn. It’s impossible not to try. Impossible in a way I don’t understand.
I WATCHED, AGAIN and again, my interviews with Lili Holzman and Yitzhak Arad. After my first interview with Arad, he introduced me to some of his friends at his residence, saying something like, “The Jewish side and the Catholic side of you fought it out, and the Jewish side won.” Then he laughed and gave me a brief hug. “It doesn’t matter.”
At one moment, in my interview with Lili Holzman, when she was talking about the Lithuanian guards and their hatred of the Jews, she said to me, not in apology but as a statement of fact, “At least half of you is that, part of that country.”
The more I read about the history of Lithuania, so I could place my grandfather in some kind of context, the more I felt complicit in something—as if trying to understand a place where the Poligons of this world exist was in itself a way of looking for rationalizations. I didn’t have the distance of an academician. As glad as I’d been to leave Lithuania, the music of the language stayed in my head. Laba diena. Aš alkanas. I wasn’t reading The History of the Jews my father had given me. I fell asleep over books about empires and small nations.
One night I dreamed that I held a glass jar, the kind with a lid that I punched holes in when I was a girl up-island at my grandmother Rachel’s on Martha’s Vineyard. Barefoot in the mossy grass, in the dark lit up with the short-lived sparks meant to attract the female firefly to the male, I tried to catch a lightning bug or two for my jar. I stuffed some grass into the bottom, but of course the firefly—destined ordinarily to live three or four days—would glimmer out in less than a day in my jar. I felt both cheated and destructive. When the firefly died, it became just an ordinary bug, and I was the one who’d killed it.