A Guest at the Shooters' Banquet

by Rita Gabis

  They pause. One digs into an omelet; the man nearest to me focuses on his over-easy eggs—yellow centers leaking onto a toast wedge.

  “… custom gun that guy uses is made in Texas.”

  “How does he get it here?”

  “I don’t know …”

  “How’s his English?”

  “Pretty good …”

  “If they’re gonna be tight with their information …”

  “That’s we … all guys are interested in that … one guy had a Walther P5. Shortened barrel. Wrapped in a rag … in his pants … I had a guy in Costa Rica telling me … wanna make this guy your best friend …”

  “What’s very hot to them? It’s a hundred and four in Fairview, Texas.”

  THE WALTHER P5 is a semiautomatic, a safer and lighter handgun than, for example, the workhorse of World War II, the Walther P38—its parts made at Walther’s factory in Neuengamme, the sprawling work/death camp on the Elbe River outside Hamburg proper, whose prison population included a large quotient of Soviet POWs, some destined to be gassed with Zyklon-B.

  I suspect my breakfast mates, defense trainers of some sort or another, are charged with expanding the skill set of the young Lithuanian military. They need it, given the maneuvers I saw last summer on June 14, when they paraded in front of Gulag survivors on the green in front of the KGB Museum. Not that the honor guard wasn’t crisp and proud and in step, but they all seemed thin and so young, too young. In the pictures I have, my grandfather seems older than those boys; certainly more of life had come at him by the time he began his studies at the military academy in Kaunas. There, one of his classmates was Jacob Gens, destined to become the Jewish head of the Vilna ghetto.

  The men next to me have nothing to do with World War II. Nothing to do, most likely, with the closed U.S. black ops site functional after the invasion of Iraq but shut down for a long time now; a gated compound with blocked-up windows just off the Vilnius Highway on the way to Švenčionys. But their gun talk, potholed with gaps when I couldn’t catch a word or phrase, gave me a slightly sick feeling. There will always be, somewhere in the world, people comparing more lethal versions of a Nagent to a Walther, or lovingly dismantling, cleaning, and reassembling a Glock 42, or furtively, in an effort to stay alive, scanning a weapons cache under guard, as Yitzhak Arad would do after he and his sister Rachel returned to Švenčionys from Głębokie. And my search for my wartime grandfather—wasn’t it more or less like listening to a potholed conversation, spying on the past when the past wasn’t looking, trying to fill in gaps that would forever remain blank?

  It was 104 in Fairview, Texas. It was hot on the curb when I went out into the blast of the sun in front of the hotel where Petras and Rose were waiting. We were off to meet, once again, with Arunas Bubnys, the director of research at the Genocide and Resistance Research Center. The summer before, I showed him a letter I’d found in the archives written by my grandfather to one of his subordinates. Arunas had actually quoted it at length in the important compilation The Ghettos of Oshmyany, Svir, Švenčionys Regions; Lists of Prisoners, published by the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum, without assigning an author to the letter. (Signatures on archival documents are often hard to decipher.)

  Security Police

  Švenčionys Region

  CHIEF [of Police]

  February 24, 1942

  No. 250

  Sir:

  Under the orders of the German government, Jews must live in ghettos in closed neighborhoods and can only leave the confines of the ghetto with special permission, further, there is a food ration set for them and they are forbidden to purchase privately, the movement [activity?] in the ghettos is regulated. But in Švenčionys Jews follow none of this, the ghetto is not closed, Jews freely walk wherever they like, and it happens that Jews flood [government] agencies with all sorts of requests.

  On the street they walk on the sidewalks, they buy food from speculators and so on. Furthermore, the Jews who are given to agencies as workers and specialists are used for personal matters, for example, [female] Jews stand in line with other citizens to buy their boss one or another item. It even happens that agencies and [private] enterprises transport a Jew to other Lithuanian cities as an irreplaceable specialist, but the specialist Jews in making some item for someone demand as much as they like from citizens including even food items, and nowhere are the norms established for them adhered to. Jews make fine use of this and have already begun spreading different rumors and terrorizing people.

  This sort of imprisonment of Jews is intolerable and I request that the Commander take the appropriate measures.

  Senior officer Pranas Puronas

  P. Puronas

  It was winter when I’d had the letter translated. As with the selection of the doomed men from the Švenčionys prison yard described by Iozas Breeris, in which my grandfather, with other authorities, calls out names from a list and indicates who is to go back to his cell and who is to die, my first thought was that someone had made him write it. The letter is about hunger and the black market (how dare the Jews buy off the best or the last or anything, when the whole country needs a good meal?) and bribery and the gap between centralized German orders and borderland “negotiations”—a trade, for instance: half a life’s savings to get out of a work detail with a sadist who beats you, for a job at the Tatar tannery instead.

  The letter is about need, about wanting more than wartime poverty or anytime poverty—even if the more is only a pair of underwear or a corset with ripped stitching because someone (senior police, or burgomaster, chief) was the first to look over and take note of the extra padding in the bodice, thread a girl forgot to nip off with scissors or her teeth after a knot was made, after the money was safe inside the intimate garment she could not envision being commanded to part with.

  The German historian Joachim Tauber added more context when I met with him in Berlin, helped me to look at who had power, even slight advantages of power, who was needed, who was in conflict with whom:

  Early on, the Nazi hard liners had the upper hand; always freak groups of players on the German side. Then there was a Jewish Civil Administration, they used the Jewish workers—they got money from them. The Jews worked better than the Polish and Lithuanians. They were better educated. Lithuanians drank. The Jews did not. These groups interacted. You always have to look at the specific region—who was strong? Who were the local forces, were there many ideologically motivated guys?

  After meeting with Dr. Tauber, I looked again at Chaya Palevsky’s sketch of the Švenčionys ghetto. There exists a more precise schematic, but because she was there, her drawing, with the roils of barbed wire and the darker circles and scrawls of the gate, brings to mind her effort at the table outside her kitchen, her large eyes, the movement of her pen across paper. When I look at her drawing, I see her young, on one of the winter streets, with her gray-haired father, her younger brother who she has by the hand. I see Yitzhak Arad and his closest friends, Gershon and Rueven. I see the unofficial “black gate” where, when conditions allowed it, black-market trading went on between the ghetto inmates, and the peasants and townspeople. Sometimes gifts were passed through, or an offering was made to a Lithuanian policeman who happened to observe a transaction and was duty bound to report it. The latter most likely an ongoing arrangement, renegotiated when the police rotation changed.

  Before he made his way to the Švenčionys ghetto, Shlomo Ichiltzik described how he tried to hide from a Lithuanian policeman he recognized on a street in Widze, Poland (now part of Belarus, about thirty miles from Švenčionys). The policeman had been friendly with his grandmother, and Ichiltzik himself used to play volleyball with him before the war, but it was 1942 now, and even a dead Jew hauled to the local police station could fetch a bounty. For all the eighteen-year-old Ichiltzik knew, he would be spotted and killed. Instead the policeman, riding on his horse, caught his eye—“Shlomka, do you know me?”—and threw him a pack of cigarettes.

  Lat
er, at a Todt work camp (Todt was a German company that went from garnering huge military contracts to full absorption into the Reich) in Švenčionėliai, a friend from school (under Russian rule, Jews and non-Jews had been in school together) brought him food and one day handed her guitar over the fence as a gift. Ichiltzik was building rail for track to be laid in Russia. The workday was punishing, but with the gift of the guitar, he remembered “no matter how tired or broken we were, we would have nightly sing-alongs.”

  Yitzhak Arad, in one of our interviews, said that without the aid of non-Jews in Lithuania, no one would have survived. For more than two decades at Yad Vashem, he signed off on the certificates for those listed as Righteous Among the Nations, like the aunt and uncle of Teresa Krinickaja, who took in the small Jewish girl before her parents were killed.

  After I found the letter my grandfather wrote about the ghetto, I discussed it with several friends, most of them Jewish. They separately brought up the same paradigm, and it surprised me: “Well, I don’t know how brave I’d be if my family’s life was at stake or if someone was holding a gun to my head.” A pack of cigarettes. A guitar. A shampoo of peroxide to dye a little girl’s dark hair blond, roof thatching to make a false wall in a barn behind which a beautiful young woman can hide. I tried to explain that especially in the borderland things weren’t that cut and dried. Yes, there were many subtle and brutal ways my grandfather could have been “encouraged” to cooperate or collaborate or participate. In my search for details, for elusive facts about him, I was slowly compiling examples of risk and compassion, small as a potato or large as life.

  This particular letter of his had come to me via e-mail with a large trove of fairly short arrest reports (often paired with release reports) from one of my translators in Lithuania. Maybe Wulff or the Lithuanian head of the Saugumas stationed in Kaunas, Stasys Čenkus, had sent up a missive to Senelis: tighten the reins, crack the whip, look like you’re running a tight ship. Maybe there had been complaints, rumors. Perhaps Čenkus was one of the visitors to the house vaguely recalled by my mother. Perhaps he urged my grandfather to show some muscle, demonstrate allegiance. It was Čenkus, after all, who convinced his German superiors that an independent Saugumas would function better than a security police folded into the Gestapo, without autonomy.

  Before the war, during the Russian takeover, Čenkus had left for Germany where he was trained by the Gestapo. He returned to Lithuania during the German invasion, both a collaborator and a staunch nationalist. Postwar, after a stint in a DP camp like my grandfather and the inexplicable receipt of permanent nonresident status in the United States, he settled in Queens, New York. As his family grew, he became the grandfather of the tennis champion Vitas Gerulaitis, known by sports fans as the Lithuanian Lion. In 1980, angry at a call by linesman Lee Gould, Gerulaitis suggested to a journalist that Gould be burned to death in a crematorium. The profoundly gifted and much beloved athlete died young in a freak accident involving carbon monoxide. Had he lived, he might have looked back over his shoulder at some point with the perspective age affords and wondered why certain outbursts came easily to him. He was quoted after his attack on Gould as saying that some of his best friends were Jews. When I read about this, it reminded me not so much of Aunt Karina standing in my mother’s kitchen and saying of Senelis, “But he had Jewish friends, so go figure,” but of myself, of the years in which I adopted the family habit of asking no questions, and by not asking, accepting a certain version of the past, making it my own.

  “A GENUINE NATIONALIST hates everyone,” Arunas Bubnys said during our first meeting, when we were looking at Senelis’s letter about the ghetto and talking about Lithuanian collaboration. Later that same trip, rumbling along in the van with Petras, Rose, and me, Viktorija took one of my notebooks and in it wrote, “Lietuviai džiaugiasi, kai kaimyno namai dega”—which she translated as “A Lithuanian is only happy [or celebrates] when his neighbor’s house is burning down.” She wanted to leave the country as soon as possible. Lithuanians were insular. They hated everyone, and they hated themselves. (Ah, the absolutes of the young, I thought then—as if I wasn’t full of my own absolutes.)

  I had known my grandfather as a joyful man, but what did I really know? By the time of my second trip to Lithuania, his reprimand to his subordinates about the liberties taken by the Švenčionys Jews seemed no longer just an expression of duty but a snapshot of his own mindset. I didn’t know yet whether he had been at Poligon, but he wrote about the small population of Jews left in the town where he lived as if they were already dead, as if they were abstractions made real only by the restrictions ultimately meant to kill them.

  The more I read the letter, the more I hated him. “On the street they walk on the sidewalks.” I wasn’t even sure this was true. The ghetto had tightened up in the winter of ’42. Was there an understory, a subplot, here? A bribe meant for him that went to someone else? A black-market source he used, tapped out by wealthy Jews able to send proxies to buy goods or, by some risky enterprise, purchase them without a proxy, at great risk, to be lugged back to the ghetto, past the police who would have to be bribed, and smuggled in through a break in the boards and wire?

  The paltry wartime food ration for non-Jews included 125 grams of sugar a week, 1,750 of bread, 200 of flour, 400 of meat, 125 of lard, and 150 of grits. But for the Jews, the weekly ration shrank to 875 grams of bread, 100 of flour, and 75 of grits or grain. No sugar. It was a bad harvest year in Eastern Europe in 1941. Rations for the German army were low. If you were a Jew, a few slices of bread, and there went 200 grams of your allotment. You could not fish or set rabbit traps. You could not go with my grandfather into the woods and take down an elk or a bear, then to the tannery for degreasing or else living with the stink of the hide.

  PERHAPS A MONTH after I read my grandfather’s letter about the liberties taken by the Jews of Švenčionys, another translator sent me another letter, originally written in Lithuanian but translated into German in 1943 so my grandfather’s superiors could read it, and then translated again in 2013 into English for me.

  The day I got the translation, even the pigeons looked cold, pecking around the litter of fast food by the subway exit where I emerged after a day of teaching. Home in New York City, I turned on my computer and saw a new e-mail from my German translator. I didn’t want to look at it. I was sure it would be another damning report, or even if it didn’t mention Senelis, another shooting would be described—a crime over and done with, no redress, only disgust. In the early dark, I felt a little lost. And then I opened the e-mail and downloaded the translation.

  Aleksas Malinauskas, then the local head of the Švenčionys police station, had sent his letter by courier on March 16, 1943. It was a long complaint against several men, but primarily against my grandfather, who was his superior. Malinauskas, a thirty-seven-year-old Lithuanian, had much to say about the way my grandfather and a man named Kukutis—the area’s Lithuanian political leader—had ganged up on him to the point of endangering his life, and even more to say about my grandfather’s disgraceful behavior. To support some of his claims, he included in his diatribe two orders written and signed off on by my grandfather. One gave a Jewish woman, Elena Las, permission to live outside the Švenčionys ghetto. Another order, written up, according to Malinauskas, after their families petitioned my grandfather, changed a work detail for three Jewish men from forest labor in the Todt camp to work in a felt factory, a slaughterhouse, and one other unspecified place in Švenčionys. The order, in effect, released them from the Todt camp.

  My grandfather, who wrote about the self-serving agenda of the defiant Švenčionys Jews, was at the same time brave enough, bold enough, to help them openly. I was stunned. A small, unbidden joy took hold of me. It was such a strange feeling, that joy. It wasn’t intellectual. It took me by surprise. All my early questions came flooding back from the moment, in the café, when my mother had told me Senelis had worked for the Gestapo. Was Senelis good? Was he bad? Was he a killer
? Was he courageous? Didn’t these two orders prove, well … something? And wasn’t that something good?

  “The chair of the ghetto committee, the Jew Gordonas [Gordon], is Puronas’s permanent guest,” Aleksas Malinauskas wrote.

  He drinks with Puronas and hears the news from Moscow in Puronas’s home. Gordonas told me this himself. Puronas also informs Gordonas about the political situation and about the situation at the front. A ‘drinking evening’ was organized by the Labour Department during which Puronas made an anti-German speech. He told me the same evening that I would be put to death by the Lithuanian court if I didn’t change. The head of the Kripo [criminal police] Maciulevičius recently carried out a search of a leather factory and discovered 18 different skins that had been given by Puronas to be tanned. This is the kind of person Puronas, the head of the Sipo [a German abbreviation for “security police”] is. No one has killed me as yet …

  There was my grandfather: stirring things up, drinking, talking war with “the Jew Gordonas,” hoping for war’s end. There was my grandfather—with Elena Las, another name in need of a backstory, who comes to him and for whose sake he defies all the decrees about aiding Jews, openly, with a written order that can be copied and circulated and used against him. (I think of my mother and her sister’s story—“He let a lot of people out of jail, he knew he would be arrested for it.”)

  The Gordonas mentioned in the letter was Moshe Gordon, a butcher by trade and one of the heads of the Švenčionys ghetto who came to my grandfather’s house in 1941 to plead for Mirele Rein’s life.

  Moshe and Basia Gordon

  “A good man,” Chaya Palevsky said of Gordon, and she was not one to generalize about those she knew during her time in the ghetto. “He thought about what was good for the people, not himself.” Long before I’d gotten this latest letter about Senelis, when I was researching the Švenčionys ghetto, I’d found a prewar photograph in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum archives of Gordon and his wife, Basia. I pulled it back up on my desktop and kept it there, looked at it, at Gordon’s face, the set of his mouth, the seriousness of his eyes. During the Poligon roundup he fled with his family to Svir as Lili and her mother and sister had. He returned to the Švenčionys ghetto just before the sequestration of Jews in Svir.