A Guest at the Shooters' Banquet

by Rita Gabis

  People crying out. We were holding each other … If we had separated we wouldn’t have been able to find each other. Maybe someone had a candle or lit a match but this is how it went all night long. We all knew that no good was coming. We thought they would pour lighter fluid and burn us.

  Like Vaclav, she asked me a question: “Why did the Lithuanians hate the Jews so much?” Then she answered it. Yes, perhaps there was jealousy, but even long before, even when all this was Russia, there was a slogan: “Kill a Jew, save Russia.” She called Polish her mother tongue and explained that for her, Żyd, the Polish word for Jew, had never been an insult, just a common respectful identifier. Only in the Lithuanian tongue and in the mouth of the Germans did this change.

  The morning light comes and we are still alive and doors are open. We can walk out but surrounding the land is barbed wire and we can walk but only to this wire. And it was the end of September, a beautiful summer day, and children being children—they were playing.

  Lili spoke about looking around and slowly realizing the scope of their entrapment, not one shack, but several. Not three thousand from Święciany, but thousands more, from all over. Friends and relatives started finding one another, calling out. The bread cart trundled and bumped along the uneven road, and it was announced that people could line up for a ration. The bread was sent from those Jews still left in Święciany. With the bread, a little hope. “Maybe it was a game or a trick and they would take us back.”

  A few pots were passed around. (One brought by Chaya’s mother.) Potatoes, grains, a bit of rice for the children.

  There were one or two water spigots outside of the barracks. Lines for water were long; there was quarreling, exhaustion, terror, confusion. Vasser. And every day they let a few people leave; a little shack where guards strip-searched them before they were allowed to go. (Most only to be subjected to another roundup, then brought back.)

  I have to praise myself. My mother was, at this point, in a state of despair, but I was fifteen and my mind wouldn’t rest—how could we get out of here? After about a week local Lithuanians would come and take some people to work … again hopes were raised. I told my mother: we don’t have a father who is going to come for us … so we are going to have to do something on our own.

  I asked her where she had come by her ferocity. She said she couldn’t answer me. She didn’t know. She had lived a sheltered life, she said. She’d never had to fight for anything.

  SO SHE WATCHES. She looks around. She sees that in the strip-search shack there is a man carrying out body searches (visited upon Chaya and her sister) who was a dental patient of her mother’s. The man’s name is Urbonas. She approaches him.

  “Mister, do you remember my mother took care of your teeth?”

  “What do you want?” he asks sharply, impatiently. (His hours are long, and the work is, well, taxing. The shacks stink of confusion and the smoke of small fires everywhere.)

  “Let us go,” Lili says.

  She thinks he will push her away but he considers. “What will you give me?”

  She offers up her gold watch, a watch of unusual quality, and he says no, not enough. She goes to her mother, who takes off her diamond engagement ring. She returns to Urbonas, who pockets the ring in the same place where the gold watch now shines inside the green fabric of his uniform. He tells them to stand in the line of people who are lucky enough to have family bribe them out or have the means to bribe themselves out, or have suddenly been claimed as “useful.”

  So there is a gap in the barbed wire; an egress without mines. Before they go there, Lili tells her mother to explain to the white band in charge of the exit line that she has four children, so the cousin and the neighbor’s son can come out with them.

  At fifteen, she is in charge. Her mother does as she asks. Incredibly, they are among the lucky ones. The line is moving, but in a few moments or a half hour or a second or two, everything stops.

  Among the noise of thousands of people the engine of the Opel Admiral with the canvas top rolled back can’t be heard, but people can see it. A car has arrived. Orders are shouted. All the Jews must gather near the car to hear Horst Wulff give a speech. He stands on the back seat for his “good aural presentation.” A back seat someone, perhaps he himself, will wipe off before he sits down again. It’s the fifth day of his birthday month, October. Maybe he’ll be lifted in a chair, glass in hand, and sung to by his underlings. Maybe he’ll feel old at thirty-five.

  He’s standing there and gives the Heil Hitler and says, “Jews, we want to save your lives, we’re not the ones who want to hurt you. We want to save you but you have to pay us. I’ll be back in two hours and you need to gather a quarter of a million marks.”

  People believed it. My mother was the first to convince everyone to give because she believed. I remember her sitting on the ground, a big bucket in front of her. She called out “Jews, Jews, whatever you have throw in here.” I saw people throw things in the bucket. They thought they were buying back their lives. This was years before Auschwitz and crematoriums. They themselves [the Germans] didn’t know what they were going to do.

  In the Frankfurt airport, I’d stopped the video. I was back in the long, dark apartment, talking on the phone with Jonathan Boyarin, Konischowsky’s translator, about the difference between the living moment and the look back; history that has the luxury to organize, make assumptions, analyze.

  Lili remembered a friend from school who was there, a girl who thought she was smarter, worldly in a way people like Lili and her mother were not, as they gave up their rings and furs and shoes and hats and rubles and marks and bracelets. More worldly than those who could only unroll their socks and twist a wedding ring off or unbutton a shirt and throw that in the bucket for want of something of more value.

  “In my girdle I’ve sewn some money, so I’m not giving anything,” the girl said.

  A girdle she would later have to unhook or untie in the cold air and leave on the ground beside her.

  IN EXACTLY TWO hours Wulff comes back. Buckets and buckets have been filled.

  “Jews worked their entire lives for these valuables,” Lili said.

  And it was then, truly for the first time, that I saw the pain in her face as she recalled the swift dismantling of all a man and a woman could build or dream of one day building. A small store. An education for a daughter. Passage away, to another, better place. Or maybe the dream was more meager; one night a real Shabbos dinner, the means to fix a roof full of holes, money to pay farmers enough to load up a cart with potatoes and cabbages that could be driven down to Vilna to sell at city prices.

  Wulff stands up again in the car. “I thank you. You have brought even more than I asked for and I will fulfill my promise.”

  (Other testimonies give different versions of his words, but this is Lili’s recollection.)

  Did she remember his face?

  No. Only that he drove off, and everyone was certain he would fulfill his promise.

  Wulff sits back. His driver commandeers him free of the haggard crowd. An announcement is made. The lines that had been lines before began again, the lines for water, the line for exit, the strip-search line. Lili, her mother, her grandmother, her sister and cousin and the neighbor’s son, clamber into a cart that is waiting for just such an occasion—she doesn’t remember what the driver charged them—and leave Poligon behind.

  When he was interrogated by the KGB after the war, Urbonas, who was a senior policeman in Švenčionys, spoke of his skill as a mechanic. “When there was no driver available I would drive the motorcar for the chief of police; he was armed and I was not … The day of the shooting I was on duty and had to stay by the phone in police headquarters of Švenčionys.”

  One witness testified about Urbonas: “Once I saw a Jewish woman, and she was carrying a dress. He arrested her and took the dress away from her. He was carrying a gun.”

  I think about that phone he was very busy manning during the shooting at Poligon. The phon
e for the policemen who were not high enough in rank to have a secretary take and make their calls, a secretary like the woman who ran between my grandfather’s office and the office of the Chief of Border Police—a man who is still vague to me. A ghost with a name: Jonas Maciulevičius.

  CHAPTER 30

  * * *

  ELENA STANKEVIČIENĖ NÉE GAGIS

  AUGUST 8, 2013

  She is eighty-nine. Polish. Her husband is very ill, but she has agreed to speak with us. Her son, whose house in Platumai is large and cool and surrounded by green, stands near and once in a while helps her remember. She has glasses on, two small braids of her white-and-gray hair drawn back from her face, braids that make her look much younger as she talks.

  It was a terrible time. It’s very hard for the human being to survive this. It was in Sodo Street, very close. In the street of Sodo. They were driven through our street. In the morning. We had the soldiers staying with us. The people who were shooters stayed in our house. They came and said that they will kill the Jews. Lithuanian. Six of them. They did not ask permission. Scary to have them stay. My mom was a widow. She was asking, if you occupy this home of ours, where will I put my children? [Elena and two older brothers.] She was asking them to close the door. No, they ate elsewhere. They went to live with the neighbors, left our house. No, in this town they were not drunk. On the other side of the river there was a burrow and my brother was very inquisitive. And he lay down on his stomach and he was curious to see what was going on. And he reported to Mom: “Mom, you don’t know what terrible things are happening over there.” Three rows. Children. Women and men. And they were asking them, pleading … “What did we do to you?” … and then [the reply], “You will see what you did to us.” It was Poligon over there. And they were driven over there. And my older brother came and he said to my Mom, “Let us go to some village farther away because we will not survive what’s going on, it’s impossible.” And the younger of my brothers said the whole barrel of vodka is over there and a ladle. They were drinking and shooting. Pits prepared already. Everything was prepared. It’s very impossible to tell. I’d walked through there before … all men were digging the pit. My brothers hid so they wouldn’t have to dig. Normal person would not be able to suffer this whole scene. From Novo Švenčionys and Švenčionys the shooters. It was all prepared. My mom put some towels on our heads so we wouldn’t hear the shooting. We heard anyway. It was the shouting of the children. “What did we do to you?” It was terrible. My mother’s name was Ana, and in Poligon where the [Polish] soldiers earlier stayed and afterward they left and when we needed firewood we collected the firewood there because in our family we have a lack of men. It was the Zeimana the river and it was a bridge and it was the forestry department behind the bridge and he [from the forestry department] tells us, “Ana, leave this firewood, look how many people are coming, throw away this wood,” and we threw it away. And it was the forestry department. And we hid ourselves. And we lay down and we saw all of them marching by. My brother was a worker in Ignalina. He was forced to bring someone from there in a cart. He did not want to go but there was an order. When it was over, the shooting, it’s impossible to tell, and my brother told to me, and I told him, “Janek, please go and eat, you did not eat for two days.” “If you would see it, you would not eat for the whole month,” he said. “They were brought by car, it was a woman who just delivered the newborn baby and they took the child and they threw the child.” It’s impossible to tell. Not far from the Zeimana, a little frozen in October, I told my friend Wanda, and the brother of Wanda was very bold and he took some boys with him and they crawled on their bellies and they came back all in blood. The blood seeping out. God forbid. Terrible. They had their own shops. They were very good. They were very nice people. It was Olga. We had a cow and Olga was very nice. And she asked my mom to bring the milk and my mom used to bring to her the milk. It was Easter and she asked my mom, “Mrs. Ana, why do you come to me to buy the flour and the sugar? We are like sisters. I am widow, you are widow. Whatever you need, please take. I trust you, you are an honest person.” She gave us three kilos of flour and sugar. My mom gave her whatever she needed from dairy products. What has kept my faith? I can’t tell you. It’s impossible to tell. Impossible.

  CHAPTER 31

  * * *

  BUCKET

  AUGUST 6, 2013

  As soon as Viktorija—my young translator and assistant, back with us again—Rose, and I sit down with Vanda Pukėnienė in her small living room, Vanda moves her large palms across her eyes. It’s wilted and hot outside, a bit cooler inside, but we are all sweating, so I can’t tell if the palms are for tears or sweat. She was born in 1937 and now, at seventy-six, has a strong face that at first glance is not beautiful, but becomes beautiful. Like Lili and Yitzhak Arad and Chaya, she moves her hands while she talks.

  Her father was warned that the Germans were coming, war was coming, so he “was putting everything out from the house and hiding it in a dugout under the lilac tree.” Vanda, so young, was worried where they would sleep.

  Vanda throws her hands over her shoulders. “One side of the Zeimana River, Russians, on the other, Germans … cross-shooting.”

  Her family had a small flock of three geese. Two sat on their egg clutches. Germans fried the third goose in her family’s kitchen. “The whole city burned. Novo Švenčionys. Because when we went to another village we could see the smoke. Dad commented on it.”

  Her father worked on the railway but left before the Germans arrived to avoid conscription. As the German front moved and the Russian army retreated, he moved his family—Vanda, the only child, and her mother, Veronica Usiene—from one small village to another. From their barn, she watched the German army push through—perhaps those who had stopped for a time in Švenčionys before they shouldered their gear and drove north.

  Vanda’s dress in some small way matches the gray/silver pattern of her wallpaper. She has on black stockings—I wonder if she put on the dress and stockings for the occasion of our meeting. Her arms and face are tanned.

  I lived on the other side of the [Zeimana] River. It used to be our land there and we came to dig the potatoes. All the Jews were collected in the barracks near the lake [where the river pools and widens]. My father plowed the field so we were going to collect the potatoes and I came with him and there was someone who came on a white horse. He spoke German and gave us the order: “Disappear, leave for home.” Three hundred meters from our house was the ditch for killing the Jews. And the trees were all young. We saw people gathered. Young pine trees, now they are bigger.

  From the city, men came to make the pit and afterward … Thank god my father was not digging or covering … no one from our village … we were hiding.

  And within one or two days, we got the Jewish girl. [Her eyes fill, she wipes them.] She embraced my mom and started to cry. How she embraced my mom. My mom was short and very dark. The girl was taller than my mom and also dark. It was toward evening.

  Father prepared strong straw, the kind usually used for a roof, and hid her behind the straw in our barn. Our neighbor warned, “Don’t hide anybody because if you will be found, you will be shot.” I remember her. I brought to her food. Mama gave her babushka and her own dress … potatoes, milk, eggs … She spoke Lithuanian language. Yes, she was beautiful. To me. She used to kiss me when I was giving to her from the bucket. We went to dig potatoes and we prepared the food and when I went to the hiding place in the barn she was gone. Probably she crossed the river or someone took her … no one knew. She probably left herself so she would not be found and my mom was very often remembering her, before she died my mom was wondering what happened to her. [Now Vanda is openly weeping.] We were afraid of our neighbor. We did not have a good neighbor. My mother’s name was Veronica Usiene. She had pity on people; she was compassionate. Before she died … she was asking the question … what happened to this girl?

  And sitting across from Vanda, thinking of how close her house
was to the pit, of Mirele Rein, who was beautiful and spoke perfect Lithuanian, I briefly interrupt her story and tell her about the girl a Lithuanian policeman hid under a pile of brush during the shooting. I ask her if she remembers the name of the girl they sheltered. No.

  “Do you have a picture of her?” Vanda asks, intently.

  The question, which is logical—I know a girl’s name, after all, a version of her story—makes me think of the hours I’ve spent online, the people I’ve e-mailed about Mirele Rein, the absence of an image of her hands, her face. I haven’t spent enough hours. I’m sure there are contacts I’ve missed, a follow-up query I’ve neglected. A chasm. All the Reins were beautiful.

  “No, I don’t,” I say.

  Vanda’s face falls a little. She’s stalwart; her disappointment is greater than she lets on.

  I ask her if she could perhaps draw a likeness, but she shakes her head. She can’t draw.

  Then she gives a mini history of the pit at Poligon—those who came to dig for gold teeth, and the dirt piled around the corpses fell down. And much later, in the 1950s, a lot of people came to the area from Leningrad for vacation because the area was so quiet and so beautiful, and then the authorities covered it with a mound. But earlier, when Vanda was eleven years old or so …

  Afterwards, I was a cow girl … I herded cows. I was with the cows and the cows came over to the ditch and I couldn’t control them. The cows were crying, shouting, screaming, mooing … they found bones and kept pawing the ground, digging, and I couldn’t call them back. [She moves her hands in the air as if they are hooves working the earth.] I couldn’t control them, I took one cow back, but the other cow would go. I never went there again. We were so frightened during the shooting, we thought we would be killed too. Jews were forced to dig the pit bigger. We heard talk of it. They were making it longer and people who were alive were falling down. In our closest milieu we did not know these people who were anti-Semitic. We were all … the Jewish people stayed with us after the war, they were very nice. When we went to church it was all Jewish shops on the way. The Jews invited my father by name and he would say, “I do not have the money,” and they would give him credit. I remember a pharmacy in a Jewish house, Kaltenai Street, there were a lot of Jewish shops … I remember the different scents.