by Rita Gabis
There was just a small window in the hiding place in the barn. I would take the bucket in the morning and evening so no one would see. Pancakes. Here is my mom, short as a fence, going with a bucket. For my mother, the bucket had a lot of sentiment.
CHAPTER 32
* * *
DEVIL’S AUCTION
We sit on a side porch. A strand of flypaper buzzes from the ceiling. There is the smell of a cat. The poet Zenon Tumalovič, ninety-one years old, holds a green notebook. Behind him, a red geranium adds its blaze to the August afternoon. To his left, his wife Jadyga sits and often contributes, elaborates. Jadyga is Polish. Zenon’s father was Lithuanian, his mother Polish. Vaclav Vilkoit—our initial contact who made these interviews possible, President of the Union of the Poles in Švenčionėliai—is with us this time, but frequently goes into the shade of the house to take a call or make a call.
I ask Zenon Tumalovič about his green notebook. I can see pages and pages of handwriting, some smaller, some larger. Poems? No. He is writing out all the wars of the world and their dead, “all the millions of people, the ones who were suffering; the Jews, the Poles, the Germans who didn’t want to fight, the wars in North America, the wars from ancient times.”
We have friends and they were forced to dig, young men, Norbert Uzela (he died already). He told how it was … not everyone was killed immediately. It was cries and movement of hands, terrible. We were afraid too. They were absolutely innocent. The ones who were shooters had a sign of a corpse, a skull on their uniforms, and bones. Šhaulists. Everything was organized beforehand. It was the ditch, local people were forced to dig in the evening before. People in the town knew. The ones who dug told to their families. They explained to everybody. And they knew that the Jews were over there. And it was the local people who were covering the ditches, a function like some people were bringing the dirt, others were putting in corpses, like a conveyor. And they were putting lime on.
I was born in January of 1923. I was nineteen. When they were over with shooting all the shooters went to Švenčionys and they were singing Lithuanian songs … they were very joyful. They were drunk beforehand. In Švenčionys there was a big long table in the open air with food, like a holiday. The mood was supported by the orchestra. They got drunker. They took from the orchestra two men with beards, old believers, Russians. They took them away, and they were found killed as well. And the people buried them. It was a duty for them to shoot. They signed that they will shoot. It was a service. But the two people from the orchestra—instinct.
Over here there were two wooden synagogues and these were used as warehouses. All the belongings of the Jews were put over there, and afterward there was a sale, an auction. “Who would give these marks, who would give more. I’m partisan, I’m not standing in line.” It was like euphoria. I saw it. People were very excited. It was after the killings, so everyone knew. Later they figured out that the best things were already taken. Cicenas was in charge. The clothes, the dress, he would give the price, and they were selling. Underwear. Some people were very upset that there was nothing good. There were war shortages so people wanted what they could get. When the Jews were taken from their homes, they carried suitcases. Suitcases were left, so people went to look for them. People from the villages used to come. Children used to sneak over to Poligon. One Polish man told me sometimes they would find a coin. Villagers who found suitcases were hiding them. I do not know. I do not care. When the Jews were killed … some people would go and dig and find the gold … near the houses.
Tumalovič’s face and the face of his wife blend together: both thin, scrappy, like two birds, two ancient storks. When he talks about the two synagogues where the auctions were held, he gestures beyond the screen, where a field runs between small houses and some scrub and working land. Wooden synagogues. Sweat runs into my eyes—I can see it: the press of the crowd for a pair of socks, poverty shoes with the front soles flapping open, in want of stitching, in want of the feet of their original owner.
When I rise to leave, Tumalovič offers me his green notebook; his record of horror, his list of what it is to be human. Something is lost in translation; since I’m writing a book, it seems he thinks I can take his list into the world with me. I don’t take it, and I’m not sure if he didn’t want me to just sit with it for a while and go through the pages, different wars and names separated by a line pressed hard into the paper—his project, his burden. His, still.
IN A POLISH testimony, Maria Korecka, born in 1931 in Nowo-Święciany, remembered, “I think it was September when they began to shoot them. People came to us to listen to this, because in our house you could hear everything better.”
In a KGB interrogation Petras Gudonis, a Lithuanian white band from the Datynyany area about two and a half miles from Švenčionėliai, describes how he heard about Poligon: “We wished to earn money, so we decided to go there.”
For sixteen marks and seventeen pfennigs he guarded the crammed barracks and moved groups to the killing site. “After one group was shot we would replace it with another group. They would make Jews take off their outer clothes by the trench and then push people.” Along with his pay he got from the auction “a scarf, three or four sets of underwear, a bench and a trough for [a] piglet.”
CHAPTER 33
* * *
LUCKY BIRD
We stop in Švenčionys, en route back to Vilnius. Vaclav has gone his own way in his car. The town green, strewn in large uneven patches with shade, seems like a placeholder, a stage set, a made-up town center—the real one in a vanished autumn with dust flying up from the road and wandering dogs and cats barking or mewing their hunger beside doorsteps, next to a vacancy in a wooden side wall where a window had been knocked out as soon as the carts began to take away those who would have set the bowl of milk out, the plate of scraps. I try to imagine a long table laid out in the open, try to imagine an orchestra, the noise of it rising into the night, the strings and singing and shouting. I can’t. Zenon is a poet; it’s in his nature to make things up: two musicians with beards, a white tablecloth.
I can believe that the night before the shooting, the men and then the women and children were put in separate barracks. I can believe that the few Germans on hand were not simply there to film and photograph, for various reasons, the two-day slaughter, but to send down the command to begin and provide trucks and give the directive that fifty people at a time be brought a certain way beyond the barbed wire, through the sparse woods, and then, at a turn in the dirt road, forced out of the trucks and ushered to the sideline of the pit. I can believe that the shooters were stone drunk and cigarette butts littered each man’s perimeter and that they positioned themselves so many feet apart to spare their eardrums during the firing. I believe that between one set of fifty wounded or dead and another set, a piss had to be taken—and why not aim right there at the mess in front of you—and that infants were swung by their legs against the tree, toddlers too, because a bullet would pass too quickly through such a small, dense mass with two eyes and two hands and ribs and elbows and fingernails and the heart of all the cosmic matter that accrues inside the very young and slowly ebbs out of the very old. But I can’t believe there was a party on this very town green with food and drink and the local authorities, the shooters, police, my grandfather, eating and singing and feeling the liquor burn the back of their throats, their breath a distillery. I can’t believe anyone could be that full and that empty.
It’s late in the day. Even so, beyond the green, summer remains a long, bright, hot stretch across near-empty streets. I had wanted to see if the sidur was still upside down in the museum, but the museum was closed. “Topsy-turvy,” Lili had said about the town she and her mother and grandmother and sister returned to.
IT WAS NEAR dark when Chaya Palevsky and her family made it back to their house on Schul Street and saw, through a window, a faint light. Poles? Peasants? Germans? They didn’t know. They didn’t know anything anymore. Chaya’s father tried the
front door, his door—it wouldn’t open. He made his way to the side of the house, where the basement window with the small latch could be opened. Chaya’s brother, who had been away in New Zealand and returned to the empty family home, was hiding in the deep, dark basement with two friends. He’d left a candle lit upstairs to alert would-be looters that someone was inside, would hear the split of wood from a broken doorframe, the sound of broken glass.
When Chaya’s brother heard noises at the front door, he hoisted himself out through the basement window to confront, from the back end, the intruder. It was his father, who took his son into his arms. That night the whole family slept together on the basement floor, held one another in the refuge of the moment, of their luck.
In the hired cart, Lili and her family arrived back in Švenčionys at dusk and went to the area designated as the ghetto, though not sealed completely off yet. They knocked on the door of a house, and a woman who in an earlier time, when the Swirskis still had use their wealthier relatives’ car and Romanavsky, their attentive driver, might have seen them passing as she trudged by with a basket or bundle, let them into her home and, in her new, elevated stature as one of the “useful Jews,” pointed to a very small corner on the floor where they could sleep.
In the morning, Germans and Lithuanians announced that everyone in the ad hoc ghetto should send a family representative to the synagogue at such and such an hour with their papers.
“No, you can’t go,” Lili insisted to her mother, who was a professional woman, who was used to talking to people of importance, allowing them the opportunity to reconsider, pressing her agenda. “If you go, they’ll take you right back to the woods. We don’t have any papers.”
Again, Lili’s mind was working. They had to get to Świr, in Belarus, where a grandfather lived; Świr with its mountain and old houses and the smell of the lake and the sound of a pebble thrown at a tin roof, down a cobbled street. A walk through the center of Švenčionys was impossible. Police were milling about. A neighbor might recognize them, and in exchange for a bit of food or money—or just because the Swirkis had had it good once, had lorded over so many, hadn’t they now?—turn them in.
Lili led her mother and younger sister through the back fields that abutted the Kuna River (a stream, really) to a house on Ignalina Street with a pharmacy in front, run by a Gentile family friend, Mr. Symansky. He was afraid to take them in, but he did, showed them where to lie down in his bedroom between the bed and the window.
“I knew,” Lili said, “there was no hospital or pharmacy in Świr.” Which meant that someone from Świr or nearby might have cause to come into the shop for medicine, something from the dispensary. (Before the roundup to Poligon, all Jewish doctors and pharmacists had been told, when they were forbidden to continue working, to carefully label their supplies and leave them, each amber bottle of powder, each liquid vial, each tub of salve. Symansky had little competition, so his own pharmacy would be well trafficked.)
Lili told the pharmacist Symansky to ask whoever came into the shop where they were from, but in the end it was she who asked when a farmer wearing a rough gray greatcoat walked through the storefront. He was Belorussian, from Świr. He knew her grandfather. His daughter was in the hospital, back through the main street of Švenčionys and off a side street where his cart and horse waited for him, waited to clatter off again and head away from the strange town, go home, and be fed. It was midday. Because the farmer was fetching his daughter, he would only take one other passenger. It was decided that Lili would go—better that Lili’s little sister have her mother with her. Lili would go, and her grandfather would send someone from Świr to collect the rest of the family. Symansky was not happy with the plan, afraid of getting caught hiding Lili’s mother and sister, but he agreed. He had given them food and drink. He treated them well, Lili said.
The farmer brought one of his big coats, and Lili put it on. Her head was swathed in scarves so no one would recognize her. They walked from the pharmacy to the hospital, walked through the middle of town near the police station and the ghetto and the Catholic church, past the street where my grandfather lived. The farmer slung his arm about her, and when they got to the wagon he put her in the back and covered her with straw, then went up two flights in the hospital and brought his daughter down and laid her next to Lili and covered her also with straw.
“It was dusk by then,” Lili remembered. “I heard the birds calling and thought each of those birds are luckier than I am.”
She made it to Świr. Her grandfather at first didn’t recognize her in the bundle of felt and wool. He sent a cart back for her mother and sister. They had all left the open ghetto in Švenčionys just as the boards were being hammered into place and the barbed wire uncoiled. A half hour later, they would have been stuck there, behind the spiked fence on the northwest side of the town.
IN THE PARTISAN Yitzhak Arad described how the night before the Poligon roundup, his sister, Rachel, had returned from a German work detail and urged him to leave for Byelorussia with other Švenčionys Jews who knew by the sight of armed Lithuanians and Germans amassing in town, knew from rumors and outright warnings, that trouble was coming. No one could imagine the exact nature of the trouble ahead, but Arad, with a group of his friends, did his sister’s bidding. Rachel remained behind with their extended family. She had work. Perhaps she imagined, since they had been targeted before, that the men and boys of the Jewish community were in greater peril than the women.
Days later, Arad would find himself listening, in Głębokie, Byelorussia, to a girl who had escaped Poligon and hidden with a Polish family. As she described the massacre he took in her words with horror, “in my mind’s eye I saw my sister walking quietly to the pit … my two grandmothers … my grandfather … aunts, uncles, cousins … beautiful Bebe with the two blonde braids whom I had loved with such youthful ardor … mowed down.”
Though he believed his sister to be among the dead, she had in fact left Švenčionys to come find him in Głębokie; two young people running beside a sled in the snow, crossing a frozen river, still alive in October of 1941, now about to head into another winter.
TWO DAYS AFTER Chaya’s family—the irreplaceable felt-factory workers—returned to Švenčionys, they heard what had happened to those they left behind at Poligon, what would have happened to them. A peasant told them, “It was like a big bloody mountain moving and you could hear the crying inside the mound.”
IV
CHAPTER 34
* * *
BAD MAN/GOOD MAN
I’m exhausted. Glad for the quiet the next morning in the large, bright breakfast room of the new hotel in Vilnius where I’m staying this trip: a big lobby with glossy floors and carefully placed sofas to sink into. No vague smell of cigarette smoke in the hallways, just tasteful new carpeting, a soundless large elevator. I’m about to take my first bite of thin, sweet pancakes when two men amble over to the table at my near left. A floor-to-ceiling tinted window mirrors the three of us, reveals the quiet street—someone checking a map in the sun and already sweating in a suit; a girl in shorts making time on a hefty bicycle.
The men catch my eye because they are not Eastern European, and even more than that, have the middle-aged look of the American Midwest—a paunch, pullover knits or a checked button-down shirt, not quite leisure wear and definitely not for a business meeting, a bald patch, a bit of a sunburn. No wedding rings. I can’t imagine what’s landed them in Vilnius, Lithuania. They’re speaking English. When they talk, I listen, and—out of habit, prurient curiosity, a way of avoiding the documents I’ve brought downstairs—I open my laptop and transcribe.
“What does it feel like when it cycles?”
“It happens so fast.”
“Lasers …”
“The cigar thing.”
“It’s a whole separate expertise … I subscribe to … and the rifle thing …”
“It’s a whole lifetime of …”
“Are they arms sellers?”
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“Guns with lasers.”
“It’s not like I’m on a SWAT team.”
“Breaking it down is simple.”
“Yeah, you didn’t need any special rules.”
“Nothing more frustrating than break a gun down and it won’t shoot. I had the darnedest time when I first broke down the model 1900. Put the slide back down, and I thought, what the hell am I doing?”
“Gotta give it to Glock … a simple one … even a blind man could do that.”
“Amateurs who go out on the range … fifty-cal sniper rifle shooting at a target two hundred and fifty yards away. Cinder blocks … boom … richochet tore off his earmuff … didn’t kill him, but you can imagine …”