by Rita Gabis
In the dream, the lid was off, and instead of a firefly, a small cartoonish devil with scepter and pointed ears screeched at me as I tried to shove him into a jar he was too big for.
“I hate you I hate you I hate you,” I screamed back as I tried to force the strong, wriggling evil thing into the jar, to contain it.
Then, in the quick shifts peculiar to dreams, I said, instead, “I love you I love you I love you,” and the devil got smaller and even smaller and finally slipped into the jar. He looked pathetic then, closed in under the tight lid, powerless, his evil diminished. The dream didn’t feel like a testament to forgiveness. Did I love my grandfather? Did I want to kill him? I couldn’t answer either question. I was trapped.
A FEW DAYS before Halloween, when the fake devils and ghosts and witches of New York City are shepherded carefully through apartment buildings and three or four blocks of a familiar neighborhood, I went shopping at Fairway, a cramped two-level grocery store on the Upper West Side with an interminably slow freight elevator and small aisles taken up almost entirely by employees restocking shelves from big loads of boxes. The store is a kind of joke in the neighborhood, known for the pushing and shoving and boxes of stock blocking the aisles and a gloves-off shopper mentality; every woman with a stroller, every man with a shopping list on his cell phone, for themselves.
Pumpkins lined the outdoor vegetable stands, tomatoes, oranges so orange they looked fake. Such abundance. In the grocery store near our hotel in Vilnius, the vegetables were tired—old lettuce, potatoes from the year before, a soft onion, but several different kinds of mushrooms.
Inside Fairway, sawdust was littered on a wet spot on the floor near cut up melon in plastic packages. “We ate bread made with sawdust,” I remembered my mother saying, then something about horsemeat.
“A lump of fat,” Aunt Karina had added.
This was in Germany in a border town as they fled the two front lines converging toward the end of the war; fled for my grandfather’s life, their own lives.
I NEEDED SOMETHING on the second floor, and for the first time since I’d shopped there, the freight elevator was empty. The rule in Fairway is: move fast, try not to crash into other people’s carts, and get out as quickly as you can. The heavy metal elevator door was closing when an elderly woman approached, her aide in tow. I put my hand on the door to stop it so they could get in. I didn’t really look at the two women, one very old, the other young, in a familiar home health aide smock.
The old woman gripped my arm. I glanced at her face, then looked again.
“Thank you,” she said.
The folds and creases, the large, penetrating eyes—her face was the Ashkenazi face of my grandmother. It startled me. She looked at me hard, dead on, from the long time of her life. I said something like “No problem” and stood aside so the two could enter. The old woman gripped my arm harder, ten seconds, fifteen seconds, looked at me, looked into me. Maybe this was just something she did. Maybe this was a kind of dementia, for she repeated, “Thank you.” And once again, I said, “You’re welcome,” or “No worries, can I help you in?” I was starting to feel trapped, about to break from her grasp and just get off the damn elevator and take the stairs in the crush of those coming down and those heading up, with canes, with bad legs, with too many other packages.
Finally she let go of my arm and we all went up a flight and then went our separate ways.
What did I buy that day? A squash, garlic, out-of-season blueberries, a jar of Hellman’s? My grandmother Rachel liked to put whipped honey on the cream cheese of her bagel. She smelled of seaweed, of the sun. Her hands, gnarled by arthritis and her unending work on the land around her cottage, were like claws. Often she gripped my arms when I was near and she wanted to make a particular impassioned point—never my hands, always my forearms—and she’d hold on and on.
CHAPTER 28
* * *
THE TRANSLATOR
What is a waste of time? I have no idea. I don’t sleep a lot. Some blogs about heart surgery say this happens after your chest is cracked—your sleep cycle is broken and never resets itself. I don’t care. I like the middle of the night. It’s Tuesday, early spring 2013, a few hours before dawn. I open my laptop to read through more of the scholar David Boder’s interviews with Jews and non-Jews in the strange nowhere/somewhere land of DP camps in Western Europe.
Boder was born in Latvia, reinvented himself—left behind, among other things, his original name, Aron Mendel—and did graduate work in the psychology of language at the University of Chicago, where my father earned his doctorate in political science. Boder borrowed off his life insurance policy to help finance a post–World War II journey to interview an extraordinary number of refugees before they resettled, forgot, or went silent because they wanted to forget. He asked many of them if they would sing a song reminiscent of home for the tape machine. Most of those recordings have disappeared, gone like the people who sang the songs.
A journalist interested in Boder noted that some of the refugees he interviewed found him to be aloof. Perhaps part of that aloofness was a protection against the intimacy of the moment—a song sung by a stranger who has lost most of what composed her life, sitting across from a stern man with a well-trimmed beard who listens but at the same time can’t help thinking of his next appointment, a train time, a certain breathlessness that has started to overtake him when he walks upstairs or quickens his pace on the platform at the Gare du Nord.
A refugee without a last name—Boder puts a “Mr.” in front of his first name, as in “Mr. Joseph”—speaks in Yiddish about a day in Przemyśl, Poland, when all Jews were ordered into the street. Mr. Joseph remained hidden with others in a synagogue. German soldiers poured benzene inside, ignited the fluid with a pistol shot.
Bronė Skudaikienė, Lithuanian, had a milkman husband who was gagged, burned, his face “boiled away” by NKVD and Red Army soldiers who imprisoned him, along with dozens of other men who were then tortured and mutilated in the woods of Rainiai in Lithuania. The massacre is known throughout Lithuania, a manifest tragedy. But when Boder was interviewing Skudaikienė, he was listening to one woman talk about her husband, the husband’s expertise in agronomy, the cabbage the Soviets boiled into a burning compress and then laid upon the mouths of the man she loved and the other captives, engines running in the background to override their screams.
I have to stop reading for a minute, look out our two large living room windows. Three lights are on in the floor-to-ceiling windows of the new apartment building at a diagonal from ours, across West End and Broadway. A huge television gives off an eerie blue aura—someone can’t sleep, or needs company while they’re dreaming.
After my father’s death, on a yellow legal-size pad of paper in his study, I found, among other words in the ancient Greek he was trying to learn, ἱστορία (historia). His minuscule handwriting already looked a little like Greek, so he was a step ahead of the game. But he still didn’t get very far with his language project since, by the time shortly before his death, no new set of reading glasses or hand-held magnifier could help him write or read even a sentence from a page of a book he loved.
I have that piece of my father’s yellow-lined paper. What I’m reading in these transcripts wasn’t yet history when Boder was questioning his interviewees. I’m not sure when “history” begins—only that among the names and events people spoke about to Boder, some are now part of a common lexicon of evil and bravery and everything in between that didn’t exist in 1946. And today, what is “history” in one part of the world is often largely unknown in another, or diminished or distorted. I wish my father were alive and I could talk to him about this. Though we wouldn’t really talk—he would lecture, and I would listen. The cliché is true: what drives us crazy about a person is also, sometimes, what we end up missing the most.
Boder’s transcribed interviews are broken down into various categories. I began using “Language” as my category of choice and first tackled t
he thirty-two Yiddish-to-English transcriptions. Each is powerful in its own right, but of course I was looking for witnesses to events in the Švenčionys region. In an hour I read through the three Lithuanian-to-English transcriptions, Skudaikienė’s among them, then click for the entire list of interviewee names.
Though not included in the list of Lithuanians’ interviews, one name sounds Lithuanian: Vladus Lukosevicius. He speaks to Boder in Russian, but is a Lithuanian from, as best as I can make out, Łyntupy, the town where the Švenčionys German convoy was headed on the day it was ambushed in May 1942.
Before ’42 Vladus Lukosevicius had been conscripted into the Polish army, and he was in a unit outside Warsaw when the Germans overtook the city. But his answers to Boder’s questions are somewhat confusing, and only when he begins talking about the ambush can I make more sense of the events he haltingly relates.
“The translator, Rakauskaite,” Lukosevicius says, as he recalls who was in the ambushed vehicle with the Germans, who died, and who survived. Is it her? Is this the translator my mother remembered in her white nightgown in my study? In Lukosevicius’s account, the translator survives. It must be her. I keep reading. Lukosevicius was caught up in the reprisals immediately afterward, a man in the wrong place at the wrong time—machine guns, bayonets, a group of terrified victims with no prior knowledge of the plan to throw a grenade under the German car. They are dragged from houses, fields, roads, but one among them in the terrified group, a man Lukosevicius doesn’t know, makes a choice, throws himself at a machine gunner as the other shooters rally to the gunner’s side.
“So, I ran away and [stammers] and I myself don’t remember anything how, what …”
It’s hard for him to find words for his blind race away from the bullets. Is there a song for that? A song for the bullets, for the man whose intestines took a clip of rounds while others shot him in the back, took bayonets or knives to his kidneys? And the man’s identity—will I find out who he was along the way?
Rakauskaite—was she Lithuanian? Polish? This is a Lithuanian version of her name, but that doesn’t mean she was Lithuanian. She walks out of a story, out of my mother’s memory. Night is still night outside my window. The skyline hasn’t changed, but I’m changed—shaken by the testimonies I’ve just read and elated that I’ve found the translator’s name, a strange mix. It occurs to me that the German presence in Švenčionys was so small that Rakauskaite might have worked for several officers—maybe worked for them all, not just Beck. I make a note about this on a blue three-by-five card in my own small, crabbed handwriting.
If I knew Polish or Russian or Lithuanian, I would have stumbled across her name months ago.
It doesn’t matter.
Two of the three lights in the other building have gone out, sleep defeating insomnia or loneliness. No one may ever understand what it means to me, this human detail from the paucity of my mother’s memory.
A name; a small bit of vanished music. I’ve found her.
AND THEN, A day or two later, I found her again during yet another read-through of Leib Koniuchowsky’s Švenčionys testimonies in my three-ringed white notebook: Miss Rakowska. She, who I’d wanted to discover so badly, had been there all along.
On that same day, the day of Miss Rakowska, Rose sent me an e-mail: a journalist in Poland had found a contact in Lithuania who knew some eyewitnesses to the Poligon massacre, elderly people who might be willing to spend an hour or two with a woman from the United States.
Rose doesn’t ask if I’ll make the trip, only writes, “Your date of arrival my dear, please give to me.”
And so I do.
CHAPTER 29
* * *
RAILROAD TOWN
LITHUANIA, AUGUST 2013
At the airport, Petras smiled when I walked out of the doors from the few luggage carousels. Rose was in the van. She got out to hug me, her twists and curls of thick hair the same.
“You will go to hotel now and sleep,” she said.
I asked her where we were going to meet our contact.
“We will meet him in the gas station near Švenčionėliai.” As was her way, she spoke deliberately, with a certain elegance that made “gas station” sound like “embassy.” Jetlagged, I wondered for a minute if the man we were going to speak with worked there. He did not.
The next day, to the side of the gas pumps, Vaclav Vilkoit is waiting in his car when we pull up in the van. Stocky, with graying hair, blond eyebrows, capable hands—like my grandfather’s hands—he speaks quickly and thoughtfully. Among other things, he is the elected president of the Union of the Poles in Nowo-Święciany (in Lithuanian, Svenčionėliai) and also the president of the Association of Minorities (or “Kuna,” after the Kuna River in Švenčionys).
Vilkoit has a book in Polish that again links my grandfather to the massacre of local Poles in 1942. My grandfather’s name is misspelled.
I look at it, for a second dissociating, there near a curb and vacant back lot with the smell of fuel in the air. Then feel stupid. Despite all the variations of names I’ve found during my research, it never occurred to me to search for my grandfather’s name with different spellings. I scribble a note to myself, and we all get in the van with Petras. I can’t quite jump to 1942 yet. Vilkoit knows elderly people in Nowo-Święciany (the Polish name) who remember Poligon. He’ll make calls, arrange for meetings on our behalf.
We make several different stops with him before those interviews, the first at the restored Jewish cemetery in Nowo-Święciany. Someone from abroad paid for the restoration, but Vilkoit’s pride in the work done, in the return to some quotient of dignity there, countermands all I’ve heard about the Poles’ hatred of the Jews. There are exceptions to every generality. I’m hoping Senelis will be an exception to the slow accrual of information circling around him. Is he inside the circle or outside? Or, more accurately, just how far inside the circle was he?
The next day will be hot, but today, on this morning, August feels like spring.
Rose, her hair hiding her face, bends down to touch a small tangle of white flowers. “Beautiful,” she says.
The formal wrought-iron fencing, the care given to the grounds, makes me think of the Jewish cemetery in Švenčionys, the broken granite face of Lili Holzman’s father. It makes me want to stay here, just here, among the dead and the mowed green and the tended graves, and stop thinking for a while, stop searching.
Vaclav Vilkoit stands in the middle of it all, and through Rose asks me, “What is the meaning of this life?” He spreads his arms open a bit. The wind picks up.
I ask him to tell me.
“To honor the dead and love the living.”
And just then, in the moment, it seems possible to do this—far from my grandfather’s past and not yet at the houses of those I’ll meet and sit with and talk with, off the main road in Nowo-Święciany, down small arteries, in other near towns.
Nowo-Święciany. The railroad town, Lili Holzman had explained. Which is why, she said, there was a “New” Święciany, because where there are rail lines running to Berlin and Leningrad, there will be people and shops (most of them run, before the war, by Jews). There will be trade and inns and greetings and good-byes.
During my layover in Frankfurt, I watched for the fourth or fifth time the Poligon section of my interview with Lili. The first few times I’d watched the video, I’d misheard the name of her street in Święciany: Pilsutzky instead of the correct Piłsudski (the name of the Polish statesman Józef Piłsudski, who was born in a manor house near, in fact, the borderland where I now sit in the van with Petras and Rose and Vaclav).
Poles and Jews and Russians and Tatars and Lithuanians and Belorussians. Different languages, different foods, different gods, different enmities, but everyone, unless their teeth were rotted out, with molars and wisdom teeth and cavities and a chip, an infection. It was this commonality that ultimately saved the life of Lili and her mother and grandmother and sister and, for a time, a cousin and a nei
ghbor’s son. As we drive away from the small cemetery, I remembered Lili saying, “We were so certain this was our end we didn’t even take our packages off the cart.”
In the packages: Lili’s mother’s dentistry diploma—a prized item, a practical item once it was possible to work again, to live again—as well as food wrapped in cloth and paper, changes of clothing. They left it. The driver of the cart perhaps took it home as extra pay, and once he’d exited the woods rifled through his booty and let the diploma fall, to be shriven back to pulp in the rain about to descend, though more likely anything left in the carts was immediately confiscated by the authorities of the moment, the day.
Like Chaya, Lili had her own version of the place:
A huge shack with no windows but there were openings in this shack. They pushed and pushed and pushed us in and we couldn’t even stand, then people were already going to the bathroom … vasser … people begging and screaming for water. We had spent the day not eating and drinking and we had walked far. Thirsty.
The guards were at all the openings of this huge shack … three thousand people … you couldn’t go out. A corner where a woman gave birth … I don’t know the fate of the child.
I remembered watching her face—wide cheekbones, her red hair, her memory working. I thought, as she spoke, Of course the child must have died, but didn’t say it. And Lili didn’t say it because it could only be deduced; it wasn’t something she actually saw with her own eyes.