by Rita Gabis
Lili Holzman, in Svir, had “the will to live.”
Chaya Palevsky and Yitzhak Arad did not expect to live.
“Death escaped me. I didn’t escape death,” Chaya said.
Before the war, Arad had been utterly consumed by the desire to get to Palestine. Now, once he returned with his sister to Švenčionys from Głębokie (which was no longer safe), it was how to get out of the ghetto. At fourteen he was already a tactician, measuring off distances in his mind, thinking of snow that would allow footsteps to be noticed, taking stock of the Judenrat or Jewish Council—who might help, who might protest.
In the months following Poligon, a small group began to hold meetings in the ghetto. Chaya was the only girl. A boy in the group was in love with her and wanted her with him at all times, and Chaya abided. Wither thou goest, I will go, Ruth said to Naomi in the Hebrew version of the Bible. My Jewish grandmother bestowed it as a nickname upon my mother. “You are my Ruth,” she would say.
But for Chaya, romance was the least of it. Quickly, as the group cohered, she became committed to the formation of a plan, hashed out over many weeks, primarily by the young (with the exception of Chaya’s mother, who was apprised of everything, who, in Chaya’s words, was not only her best friend but “one of us”). So—a few adults, but mostly teenagers who wanted to avenge the dead, regardless of the cost.
But in the beginning, they were stuck. In the beginning they took stock. What was possible, what was not? Could a secret be kept in the ghetto? Who, among those outside the ghetto, might help you or kill you? Dvora Goldhirsh’s best friend in school—a Polish girl—had turned on her in 1941, “never so happy as to see Jewish blood spill.”
Karina Margolis, with the peroxide-blond hair, had a different story.
Her parents, perhaps better informed than most or shrewder than some, understood when they heard through rumor or official announcement about the roundup for Poligon that they would probably be killed or taken to a camp, where their four-year-old Karina would have little chance of survival. They begged a man named Sylkovsky to take Karina and raise her. He agreed. One of the few memories Karina has of her birth parents is of the piano in their house that her mother, who did not work, sometimes played. They seemed to have been well off, so they would have offered whatever they could on behalf of their only child.
Sylkovsky grew frightened. It was hard to disguise a little Jewish girl. Perhaps the fact of the slaughter at Poligon terrorized him. First the Jews—who would be next? He decided he couldn’t keep the child. It was simply impossible. He began asking, discreetly, this person and that person—take the girl, I beg you. But one after another, those he asked refused until finally, Anna and Piotr Miksta at 112 Strunaicha Street said yes. They’d just lost a twenty-year-old son to war. They opened their hearts to Karina.
“What did you make of your life then?” I asked her.
I had called her at her home in Moscow from New York City.
“I missed my dolls and my toys,” she said matter-of-factly, and then told me that under the watch of Anna and Piotr (Mom and Dad to her for a long time), despite the fact that she was a child and that her life before them was a near blank, she was aware of everything that came after.
Her new mother and father were at constant risk. Inevitably, someone informed on them. Karina was hauled to the police station with Anna Miksta, who was put in a separate room, down a hallway, behind a closed door, out of Karina’s sightline. Karina was five. She was led into a room where a red-haired German officer waited to interrogate her. Perhaps it was Metz (helpful according to some testimony, brutal and a shooter at Poligon according to others). Perhaps Horst Wulff had red hair; I can’t tell from the photographs I have of him.
A female translator, well dressed, well spoken, was in attendance. Was she Rakowska? One source indicates that the translator was from the ghetto, but the way Karina described the skill with which the translator mediated this encounter seems to fit Rakowska. Her métier, after all, was translating for the Germans, for Beck in particular. And in a crisis situation she might be called in to assist elsewhere, might actually have made sure of it, for reasons not yet apparent when I interviewed the grown Karina.
Crammed into the office with the translator, the officer, and the girl under scutiny were all the women of the Švenčionys ghetto of childbearing age. Rachel, Hana, Ester, Mira, Genia, Riva, Frieda, face after face, hands nervously pulling at the fabric of a shawl or chafed and white and still.
The German began his interrogation abruptly. He wasn’t going to slip a sweet to the girl to disarm her. He wasn’t going to pat her on the head and instruct the translator to reassure her.
He tipped his head or motioned with a large hand toward the cluster of women sitting and standing, some in near rags, others wearing the well-made clothes of their former lives: a blouse, a dress, a sweater that had not yet been bartered away. “Look at them. Look,” he commanded the blond Jewish/Catholic girl. The translator quickly translated his German into Polish. Did she know it was a lie—this girl, her Polish “mother” down the hall? She must have known. The informer had some sort of proof, others to confirm his story. But then, it was a time of informers, a consumer enterprise that brought every liar, every local with a private jealousy or old wretched grudge, every man or woman hungry enough and/or mean enough or frightened enough, to the buyer’s table.
The women’s faces were turned to the floor. Some wept. At least a few had known Karina’s mother or father or both before the couple were summoned away from their piano, their only comfort the fact that their daughter was, they hoped, safe. Which meant that they had lost her, that they were lost.
“Which one is your mama?” The German officer made it clear that the women from the ghetto must show their faces to the child, all headscarves off, no shifting behind someone taller.
The translator repeated the officer’s words again in Polish for the Jewish girl. Który z nich jest twoja mama? Perhaps she used her hands, pointed to the women, touched her own chest, a hand laid atop her blouse where underneath her own heart beat. He means Mama, who you love, who is in your heart.
“My mama is in the other room,” Karina replied in Polish without stumbling.
How thick the air must have been. I’ve seen the old offices at the police station in Švenčionys; the industrial gray, only new then, constructed for occasions like this one.
“Look at them,” the German screamed in his frustration. He pointed at the women summoned without forewarning, their lives resting on the ability of Karina to withstand the German officer’s threats.
Karina didn’t know Polish well, but her adoptive parents had made the most of the little time they had to teach her a few words about her mama, to drill into her that this was all she must say, whatever question she was asked. So she, who “understood everything,” did. Her only mother was outside the room, down the hallway, in another room. She was terrified to look at the ghetto women crowded together. Among them there might have been a familiar face—a neighbor, an aunt, a family friend, even her real mother—and she might have given them all away. Longing compelled her to risk; she looked. Among the distraught group there was no one she recognized, no mother.
The red-haired German had had enough. He undid the large buckle of his belt, a practiced move—he’d used it before, though perhaps not on his own children.
“Which one is your mama?” As he spoke, he slapped the belt down on the edge of the desk. Maybe a sheaf of papers fell, the uncapped Edelstahl pen rolling off to the floor, fat as a cigar with a sharp tip. He turned to Karina with the belt.
“Mama,” Karina cried.
He grabbed her arm, bent her over for the first blow, but suddenly the translator from the ghetto or Rakowska intervened, began speaking to him quickly, softly. Karina, today, has no idea what the translator said to him, what mollification, what alternative—a better way to find the truth, or perhaps a very carefully worded suggestion of what the little girl might be worth to
her “family.”
The women from the ghetto were there for all of it. The little blond-haired girl was one of them, belonged to them, but she didn’t. She ate bacon and potatoes with Piotr and Anna. She slept outside the ghetto. She’d been baptized at the Catholic church. She would survive, and as an adult she would never be sure of the day or the year in which she was born.
Whatever the translator had said on the day of the German and the belt and the weeping women, relatives of the Mikstas who had a farm gave away a prized cow, and with the Mikstas, put together a huge sum of money in addition to the cow—both impossible to recoup in wartime—and in this way paid off the German officer, the informer, and whoever else could have taken Karina away.
For the moment, Karina was safe. She was allowed to go down the hall and find Mama and go home.
On the phone I asked Karina what she believed accounted for the bravery of Anna and Piotr Mikstas.
She didn’t know. She didn’t even know if she would call it bravery. Maybe they just wanted a child to love them and to love.
YITZHAK ARAD’S SISTER had survived Poligon because a “useful” tailor in Švenčionys claimed her as his daughter. Perhaps it was Yakov Wexler, who knew how to extract information from the German Metz. Or perhaps another tailor, unnamed in a testimony I have, who worked past curfew one night on a vest for a Gentile customer, insisted on finishing the delicate, beautiful fit despite the trouble it could cause for both of them; moving a button, straightening a seam until—perfect—and his client snuck back into the world outside the ghetto through a secret exit between the boards and wire, the tailor’s pride tucked in a package under the frightened man’s arm.
After Poligon, when Arad and his sister returned to the Švenčionys ghetto from Głębokie (which had quickly become too dangerous for them), he noticed first a preponderance of children whose parents were dead in the pit, taken in by those who could manage it or who couldn’t manage it but did it anyway. Among the men and women, instead of utter despair or the blank faces of mourning, there was a resigned workaday attention to life in the moment—as if Poligon had been only a bad dream. No looking back, no looking ahead.
In Israel, at our first meeting, I asked Arad how he felt in those first weeks and months.
Look, we were young, and when you are young you are quite optimistic. And especially when all the time you are active—I have to escape, I have to cross the border, I have—you don’t actually have time. I even asked myself during the war, with the ghetto—did I … was I in a bad mood, did I have the pessimistic approach? No—because all the time I was active. I never had time just to say, okay, what am I going to do? Let’s say, when the Germans came, yes? … all the time, always I had some aim, something to reach, to do …
Behind the couch where he sat there was a large abstract painting, framing a man who was only just now (in an evolution that had nothing to do with my questions) starting to look back, not as a soldier or a scholar but as a man aware of the boy he was and what that boy had lost.
In Warsaw, he said, “There was a choir in the synagogue, and I was singing in the choir. We have now here a choir and I’m singing. Since that time, all my years, I wanted to go back to singing. So now I returned. There’s a Russian saying—‘In the old man is the child.’ ”
He smiled a little, not so much at me as at time. And then we spoke of the past again.
MOSHE GORDON, CHAIRMAN of the Judenrat, is aided by Khayem-Hersh Levin, Dr. Binyomin Taraseysky, the tailor Yankl Wexler—men who have connections in one way or another outside the ghetto, who can speak Lithuanian or German or both, who are thoughtful and pragmatic. A finance committee periodically has to put out the call for candlesticks and bracelets and rubles and marks, a fur hat, a diamond hat pin—anything that can go into the ghetto war chest so that, at a moment’s notice, a crucial bribe or “gift” can be given to Metz or Maciulevičius or Skrabutenas or Kenstavicius or perhaps Puronas—perhaps. For a long time these names, except for Senelis’s, blend together for me; vicious, I keep hearing, thinking; a name from a fairy tale, each individual conflated into one bad man.
A small Jewish police force is established in the ghetto. According to Chaya, one of the ghetto officers is caught raping ghetto children. (Her face collapses in horror, but only for a few seconds—we must press on, and it’s another story, she tells me.) The ghetto inhabitants, living under constant threat of death, are still a spectrum of humanity like any community.
The all-important labor bureau sends workers out as demanded or presents orders to those manning the few workplaces left inside the ghetto. There is a sanitation crew—a difficult task under the cramped conditions, with water often in limited supply. A painting brigade goes out each day from the ghetto. A street brigade keeps the sidewalks clean, shovels snow, chips the ice off the steps of Josef Beck’s office, the post office, the mess hall for the police on Vilenskaya Street. An observant, quiet girl mops the floors in the police station. A few women give themselves to a German or a Lithuanian big shot who, under the right conditions, talks too much. The women offer themselves up and return to the front gate of the ghetto with information and hair that smells of cigarette smoke and a mark of what was taken, what they gave, on a neck or a breast, what they will wash away from between their legs.
Some people work harder than they have ever worked in their lives, as if work will guarantee their lives. Others are lazy. Some are wealthy and lazy, but at least hire proxies to fill their slots. Moshe Gordon works some expensive magic with the authorities, and a horse and cart are allowed in the ghetto, making it so much easier to bring foodstuffs—the rationed allotment and perhaps a black-market sack of flour hidden underneath—through the gate, along Schul Street, in and out of the small lanes that, but for the satellite dishes, to this day remain somewhat of that moment: unpaved, though the original wooden houses were torched at the end of the war, bombed into dust.
Like Yitzhak Arad, the teenager Tuvia Brumberg saws wood in his first job after the ghetto is established. His grandfather’s old house, a felt factory in the basement, lies close to the perimeter of the ghetto. Strangers live in it now, but the factory is still in operation, and after the forest, he’s assigned there for a time. He and some of his coworkers “stay and work late … intentionally sleep outside the ghetto” in case the Lithuanian police and a handful of German officers and gendarmeries (as Yitzhak Arad calls them) are given a middle-of-the-night order to kill off the five hundred or so Jews of the Švenčionys region. The last ones.
Adolph Jurkovenas is the cook at Švenčionys prison. The isolation cell, roughly two meters wide and long, flooded before winter. Now ice waits on the floor for the next prisoner.
To sleep and wake with that fear, to thread a needle, to hold a match to the cigarette of a man who doesn’t speak your language and tomorrow might kill you but tonight wants you, to vomit one morning and realize you’re going to have a belly to hide (one small son already given away to a Lithuanian family for a king’s ransom, and now this), and not simply go mad or surrender to grief or become mute, to read hidden books, sing and survive the worst among you, and find those who will be your teachers, your guides, your better halves, the whole time captive in a captured town, is an existence that requires a verb that hasn’t been invented yet. Or perhaps exists in a language I don’t know.
There is gossip and rumormongering, the washing of socks, the watchers and the one being watched as a woman walks back a little behind the rest of the crew charged with cleaning the public baths, and in her isolation, endures contempt mixed with a bit of wonder because one of those taking note of her progress in the gutter lives in her house now and sleeps in her bed and eats off her plates and has found, in a cupboard, stewed fruit she put up a week before the war began, stone fruit under a paraffin seal, small dissolved suns in sugar syrup slurped and sucked down.
And who is the new woman of the house? I imagine her. She’s Lithuanian, with a son who might be called to the front. She’s overhe
ard the Germans mimic her mother tongue. In autumn, she admires the late-blooming flowers dead people planted in the garden next door. She doesn’t speak to the men who shovel snow from her wrought-iron gate to the curb; she’s just a housewife who goes to church, whose husband is important in some temporary way. It wasn’t her idea, any of it. “War is a beast for sure,” she might say, but she’s grown from it, born in Kaunas or Panevėžys or Trakai. Who knew she’d be gifted with a better life? Though a poor cousin down in Vilnius, married, has just been picked up in a sweep—accused, of all things, of giving sex to soldiers so her family can eat. She’ll speak to her husband about it tonight; they’ll hire a driver if he can’t be spared, he’ll call down to Vilnius without her even asking—that’s the kind of man he is, her husband—and then her cousin will be free. The dumb criminal police should have better things do to. She’ll bring a food parcel and won’t say a word to the rest of the family; money for her cousin to fill the cupboards, to last at least until spring.
1942 mugshot of a Lithuanian woman arrested in Vilnius on the charge of prostitution
CHAPTER 37
* * *
A GAME OF LIFE AND DEATH
Some things I know are true: my Lithuanian grandmother learned to freeze the lice out of her clothing by burying some of what she wore in the snow at night. In the based-on-a-true-story-that-wasn’t-true movie The Way Back, a Gulag inmate who was a Polish cavalry officer also learns this small but crucial part of Gulag hygiene. It’s easier to think of him than it is to think of my mother’s mother: the scarf she tied around her head, her thinly padded jacket.