A Guest at the Shooters' Banquet

by Rita Gabis

  Week after week, I reread the long complaint written by Malinauskas. Much of it was a harangue that had to do with prewar political leanings and Malinauskas’s transfer from a police job in Utena, Lithuania, an hour’s drive northwest of Švenčionys, because he was not a Smetona supporter (Smetona, recipient of one of Senelis’s letters about a wish to return to active duty, and more importantly, the nationalist dictator who fled the country in 1940).

  Utena, as noted in the International Jewish Cemetery Project, was the oldest Jewish settlement in Lithuania. An Einsatzgruppen report from August 29, 1941, details the shooting of 1,460 Jewish children there, in addition to hundreds of men and women—part of the context of the place Aleksas Malinauskas is compelled, by his superiors, to leave. The accountings from the Einsatz report of Utena are, of course, not mentioned in his diatribe, his list of personal humiliations. Why would they be? Yet, these narrative gaps, certainly not confined to one letter written by a man with a grudge against my grandfather, seem more than just evidence of the fact that people are often concerned with the small dramas of their own lives and not much else.

  The woods smell of blood; the town of Utena (Utyan, in Yiddish), where you just lost your job, is missing two thousand residents. You accept and perhaps participated in their disappearance. They appear only as a suggestion, in the way—in the letter you send off to the German authorities about Puronas—you stress how faithfully you have upheld the German cause.

  Maybe the truth about that which is “unspeakable” is simply that it is not spoken of but left out, unmentioned, or encoded. Like the vague signage at the turnoff to Poligon.

  WHEN HE ARRIVES in Švenčionys, all of Malinauskas’s old bosses from Utena, all members of the fledgling Union of Lithuanian Freedom Fighters (the beginnings of a coalition against the German occupation, but not necessarily against the extermination of the Jews) come to stay at my grandfather’s house, and Malinauskas is shut out. His old bosses and his new bosses see him as a lackey for the Germans, a man who can’t be trusted, a man who might report bribes or try to upend the local Lithuanian power structure, such as it is, for some personal gain.

  From this point on, Puronas and the district chief Kukutis, who is a supporter of Smetona and persecuted Germans in Memel, began to persecute me. I felt that many people were avoiding me for fear I would report them to the Germans … Puronas warned his deputy Garla to be wary …

  Then Garla warns someone else, and so on, and so forth.

  Moshe Gordon would eventually lose his life in the Klooga concentration camp in Estonia. His wife would be shot to death at Ponary. Those nights by the radio, the drinking and singing at my grandfather’s house on Gedmino, didn’t save them.

  Over time, I started to read the Malinauskas letter differently. My grandfather’s job in Švenčionys was intelligence. It would have behooved him to engage with the head of the ghetto, see what a little drink might bring forth, share a hatred of the devilish Germans; they’ve made a mess of things, haven’t they? In early 1943, anti-German partisan activity in the woods of the borderlands was becoming more organized, more lethal. My grandfather’s job was to investigate sabotage and ferret out information. If he got to have a few rounds of drinks in the meantime, and sing and rail against the Germans, all the better. I wondered—if there were any truth to the letter—what Moshe Gordon brought to my grandfather’s table. What request and what payment? Perhaps he shared with my grandfather a tidbit of information, useless, really, or utterly misleading, about partisans afoot in the woods. Or maybe he worked my grandfather for war news with the hope that ghetto news would slip out. The order to shut down the ghetto could come at anytime, and then what? Everyone was desperate to know: would the remaining Jews be transfered to another ghetto, a work camp, or would they be slaughtered?

  As for Elena Las, she either bribed him or was his lover or both—a different kind of exchange. I have no proof. It’s a hunch. She might have been eighty years old, for all I know. Still I followed my hunch, right into Arunas’s office, with Malinauskas’s letter and Viktorija to translate for me.

  It’s cool in Arunas’s office. In his plaid shirt and wire-rimmed glasses, he immediately goes about the business of trying to be helpful. The letter is long, as are most diatribes sent to the superior of someone you’d like to get rid of. I try to tell Arunas he doesn’t have to trouble himself with the translation, I already know what the letter says; but he carefully translates the German into Lithuanian for Viktorija, and she repeats it in English to me.

  Finally, when we reach the part about the radio and drinking, Arunas smiles and Viktorkija smiles, and we are all laughing a little. It’s funny, kind of. But it’s not.

  We talk about the permission my grandfather gave to Elena Las, and also the work release, perfunctory, without detail, for the three men.

  Translated into German by my grandfather’s secretary, the document about Elena Las gives her formal permission, from my grandfather, to live outside the Švenčionys ghetto. The other document requests the three men named below be allowed to leave the Todt labor camp. Two of them, Motel Gotkin and Ilel/Gilel Šulheferis/Šulgeifer, appear in a 1942 census of the Švenčionys ghetto with their family members. I have not been able to find Icek Bres, the third, in any ghetto census or victim database.

  “Certainly it would have been enough to get him arrested,” Arunas said. “It would have been taken very seriously. He was supposed to be doing the opposite—enforcing the incarceration of the Jews, not letting them go free.”

  He asks if he can make copies of what I’ve showed him. After he steps out of the high-ceilinged room, with its books and desks and the cabinet where the internal wartime directory with my grandfather’s phone number is locked away, I think about my grandfather’s arrest. Could the Las permission and the work releases be the reason for his incarceration? “He was gone so long,” my mother had said. But the record from Lukiškės prison indicates ten days’ imprisonment only—a small punishment for a serious infraction. Once released, he went back to work for the Saugumas under the Germans in the city of Panevėžys. Ten days. It didn’t add up.

  Arunas returned and mused a bit more about the letter. “It’s very unusual to see this—someone in a position of authority taking a risk like this.”

  I tell him I’m having trouble finding any specific leads about Elena Las. I haven’t found any trace of her yet in the Lithuanian archives. Four people with the last name Las are in the 1942 Vornyany ghetto census: a father, a mother, and two young sons. The father works at a felt factory; the mother is at home in the ghetto with her sons. Have they paid to keep Elena Las outside the ghetto in Švenčionys? Does she even know them?

  Arunas mentions a particular area of Poland where my search might be more fruitful. While we talk, I wonder … did she come to my grandfather with a bundle of marks wrapped in a scarf? Did he see her walking out of the ghetto on a work detail—beautiful, tall? Make an inquiry? I pull myself back to the present.

  When I mention that I’m heading for Poland next, and then to Berlin and London, Arunas gives me another lead.

  “Have you come across the name Vincas Sausitis?”

  I haven’t.

  “There was a long criminal case in Poland against Jonas Maciulevičius. Many of those who testified were in the Švenčionys region during the war. Some of the testimony was very incriminating in regard to Sausitis. He’d been tried once in Lithuania and done some prison time, but he was tried again on the basis of material that came to light from the Maciulevičius case in Poland and given a capital sentence. There might be material in the case files in Poland about your grandfather.”

  Jonas Maciulevičius was in Švenčionys during the same time as my grandfather, but I’m confused. Why would a Lithuanian collaborator be tried in Poland? It’s someone else, I think, not the Maciulevičius mentioned in Malinauskas’s indictment of my grandfather. Not the Maciulevičius whose office was across the hall from Senelis’s and who was the head of Criminal
Police. Somehow I can’t quite take in what Arunas is saying. Fatigue makes me stupid, but part of my confusion comes from the not infrequent occurrence in the testimonies I’ve read of the same surname cropping up.

  It all seems like a long shot, but I ask him how to get access to the file.

  “You need to contact the IPN,” he says.

  He explains that IPN is the Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, or Institute for National Remembrance, in Poland. The case file will be in their archives. I scribble IPN in my notebook next to the names Vincas Sausitis and Jonas Maciulevičius. Right before I thank Arunas for his time, I mention I’ve heard that after the killings at Poligon, there was a banquet in Švenčionys for the shooters.

  I wait for him to give me a slightly exasperated, tired shake of his head. He is meticulous in his work, and so much in testimonies and even official documents of war is false, must be carefully examined. Who is remembering the memory? What, in the official document, is officially kept opaque?

  “It was quite common for there to be”—he pauses, looking for a word—“parties afterward for those who participated. It happened in many places.” His face is flat, readable and unreadable at the same time. A rather slight, gentle man, he is not the person you would expect to find trudging through the violence of his country’s past.

  Zenon, the angry poet, in the heat with his book of war, was he right after all? If so, where exactly was the table laid in Švenčionys, in late fall of ’41? Who came with the shooters; who stumbled through a door or across the town green and shouted a request to the orchestra, sat down in a sprawl or casually took a seat, not yet blind drunk but eyeing the food? Who reached for a hunk of bread and the platter of herring swimming in cream as the music began?

  It was one of those dishes, at our Lithuanian family dinners, I always thought I liked until the first salty bite. It didn’t matter. Senelis, Uncle Roy—anyone at the table would give me a hug, push the tin of cookies my way, bend over the milky fish on my abandoned plate.

  CHAPTER 35

  * * *

  SHOOTER

  On a wooden table at the Lithuanian Special Archives close to my hotel, Viktorija, Rose, and I open up the file on Vincas Sausitis, the man Arunas mentioned. He was retried in Lithuania for his collaboration with the Germans, partially on the basis of the court case in Poland against Jonas Maciulevičius, who was indeed, it turns out, one of the men my grandfather worked closely with in Švenčionys. Free for twenty-two years after doing his time in a Gulag labor camp for collaborating with the fascists, Sausitis was in prison again. In the statement he wrote after his capital sentence was pronounced, he railed about his superiors. They were shooters, just as he was; they organized it all. (My grandfather?) Why weren’t they in jail? Why were they all free? He spent most of his time as a shooter at Ponary, but testimony at his trial placed him at Poligon as well.

  He claimed to have killed only ten people in total and to have actively aided others who were imprisoned, of every nationality, whenever he could—passing messages, sending letters. He had to make his own shoes when he was a boy. He didn’t want to be sent to the German front. He was uneducated, unwise to the ways of war and cities. He didn’t know what he was getting himself into.

  “If someone tried to run away, I would have no choice but to shoot him, otherwise the fascists would say I let him go on purpose.”

  The man who ran the lunchtime food concession during the Poligon massacre (food for the shooters was provided near the train station in Švenčionėliai) didn’t remember seeing Sausitis among the thirty-odd shooters who arrived bloody and hungry and sometimes drunk before going back for the rest of their day’s work. But at least two other shooters—one sentenced right after the war—were with him at Poligon, and placed him at the pit with his army gun.

  The file holds letters he received during his incarceration. I touch the envelopes. The old paper is rough. There are children, a wife. I go back to a section of the statement Sausitis wrote to the court after his sentencing: there weren’t many “runners” at the pits at Ponary; one “young and strong Jewish guy tried to run and a guard shot him in both legs.” I close the file.

  CHAPTER 36

  * * *

  INSIDE/OUTSIDE

  When Lili’s grandfather sends a man with a cart back to Švenčionys, Lili’s mother and little sister are not at the pharmacy. Fearful of being discovered, Symansky, the pharmacist, with the help of a nurse, has moved Lili’s mother to the isolation ward in the hospital. Lili’s sister Khanale is in a regular ward, wearing a cross, instructed not to let a word of Yiddish come out of her mouth—no Ikh hob moyre, “I’m afraid,” to a kind face ministering to the small, sick girl. Symansky fetches them at the hospital, and they travel by cart, as Lili had done, back to Belarus, where the German presence is established but the incarceration of the Jews has not yet begun.

  At the grandfather’s large house, Lili’s mother has somehow managed to hold on to her dentistry case, her knowledge of dentum, the pulp, cementum, the remarkable practical intelligence of her eldest daughter in the terrifying crush at Poligony, her late husband’s absorbed concentration in the lab, the razor-sharp loss of her first love, after which she might have believed no one else would be taken from her again. Now she’s got her hands on a drill, a foot-pedaled drill or an agonizingly (for the patient) slow electric, but a drill, nonetheless. She has curved and straight extraction forceps, Novocain (invented by a German scientist), probes, and filler. There is no dentist in Svir; she makes her case to the German authorities.

  Yes, she may open a clinic. She separates her patients; a German soldier doesn’t wait his turn while a Jewish man comes upstairs with a swollen cheek over an infected back molar. Most of her business comes from Belorussian farmers and their wives and children, and locals from town—grateful not to have to bounce for miles in a cart, a rag tied around their heads, a tooth gone pulpy overnight, pain like a nail hammering from gum line to forehead.

  All this in a war: her town dead, her future rotting out around her. First the yellow star, next a small ghetto is erected around Rybnaya Street with the smell of the lake, Shkolnaya Street, the wooden synagogue.

  Because of her clinic, she and her daughters are allowed to live outside the rather flimsy barricade, but Lili’s grandfather and aunt and uncle are incarcerated. Lili and her sister and mother bring them food. The clinic does well, and since money is essentially worthless, pay comes in foodstuffs; a chicken, eggs, milk, cheese, flour that Lili’s aunt works into warm loaves before she is rounded up and taken away.

  When a German comes for an extraction, Lili has to hold the man’s large, sweaty head as still as she can, holding him as if she is older than fourteen, as if she has been trained as a dental assistant, as if he is not the enemy who now groans and thrashes as her mother twists the forceps. Each time her mother calls her to help, she’s certain the soldier will bolt from the chair and attack her, strike her down because of the bloody mess her mother has made of his mouth. It doesn’t happen. They’re a team, mother and daughter, responsible now for the younger daughter/sister and for the rest of the family trapped in the ghetto.

  When the large house is requisitioned and they are forced to move to a small two-room house—one room for the clinic, one for their lives—Lili cooks her mother lunch on the little stove—beans and carrots, white beans that keep their shape while the sugary carrots break down. It’s their favorite dish. A bit offered perhaps to Dominika, their landlady—hair a mess, a large woman who has let herself go but is glad for the rent and puts in a version of a boiler so they can have hot water for a bath, a luxury they can’t share with the rest of their family.

  Yes, they knew what was happening in Švenčionys, knew about the ghetto that Chaya described as she drew its boundaries and the center of town—the part that was inside the ghetto, the part that was outside the ghetto—using the Yiddish gas for street. Cloister Gas, Łyntupy Gas. Chaya talked while she sketched:

  The ghetto is near
the center of town, on one side of the church … two synagogues … here were some houses … mostly brick. Here, this was like an entrance to the city and from here … different kinds of lanes and around the lanes there were houses, a little river and near the river was the gate. In the back of the synagogues is already the marketplace and all the stores around it. The marketplace was beautiful with trees around and grass, and here were the big stores … two, three stories high. [Chaya laughs at her drawing.] The street of Vilnius is large, very modern. Sventsian was a very cultural city. So much to tell … so much what’s going on. After Poligony we knew that our time will be up because little by little they were killing everyone.

  At a certain point I asked my mother, as I asked everyone I met who had been young in the Švenčionys region during the war, what her hopes as a child had been. Did she have a dream? An aspiration? My mother looked at me, her face a veil not so much of bitterness but of surprise at the ignorance of my question. “I wanted the war to end,” she said. She wanted food. She even wanted her parents back together, fighting again. The sack of potatoes from the farmer just over the Latvian border dumped near the stove, her mother’s familiar pull on three strands of her hair worked into a perfect braid—Babita’s small victory, a little order imposed upon the dissolute, smelly, wild beauty of life and her oldest child. Would this predilection for order save my grandmother in the camps, or get her beaten into the snow like a stiff heap of rags? Impossible to know.