by Rita Gabis
She was a meticulous, intelligent woman; she must have quickly learned to find the right burial ground outside her barracks, one less likely to be spotted and pilfered by a fellow inmate. In the Siberian winter, a strange conversion: 40 below is the same in Celsius or Fahrenheit. Each night she dug a grave for the rags wrapped around her delicate feet. Each morning saw a resurrection in the barracks while women’s clothing thawed and stank. Outside, there were dozens of small burrows in the snow, littered with dead insects—fat with the blood of my grandmother and her fellow prisoners, the tenacious little claws at the end of each of their six legs hanging on to nothing but the winter dawn.
Snow was a stopgap measure; the lice were never-ending. Still, it was something. I wonder if she thought of her children in those frozen moments outside at night, after her food allotment was measured against the work she and her barrack mates had done. Motherhood brings with it routine, and in her old life she must have gathered the clothing of her son and two daughters—pants and dresses and blouses and shirts alive with the scent of them—and decided what to scrub clean with the board that night or the next morning before her work at the library. Or maybe one day a week was washing day. Maybe she forced her children from her mind entirely, or found that amnesia torture had brought on during her time in Lubyanka periodically returned, until coughing and thin in her bunk, all she could remember before sleep was the sound of the broad saw she and another woman took to the fir tree, the cut smelling of turpentine. If you chewed a small chip and spit a bit of pulp in your hand, you could rub it on an itchy lice trail and let the camphor in the wood give you a few seconds of relief from the need to pick and scratch.
ANOTHER THING I know is that on February 6, 1942, my grandfather interrogated Kazimeras Czeplinski, a seventy-one-year-old Polish resident of Nowo-Święciany, about the whereabouts of his son Zigmuntas in regard to an act of sabotage at the railroad. (Senelis on the same date ordered his other son, Juozas, to be held in the Švenčionys jail; he hadn’t been able to find Zigmuntas.) Among the family members who lived with Czeplinski, he listed his wife Jozefa, son Zigmuntas, daughter Kamile, and an “orphan child,” Jonas Gabis, who was twelve years old. Gabis is not an altogether uncommon name in Lithuania, but Nowo-Święciany is not far from Belarus, where the Jewish Gabises on my father’s side of the family were from. My grandfather wasn’t interested in the orphan child; where he came from, who his parents were, or how they had been killed. He was conducting a sweep: pulling in men and women, Polish and Lithuanian, to question them about the mining of a train and to prove his mettle as an investigator in one of the first significant partisan attacks in the area.
I wonder about that orphan child with my family name—a name spoken in the presence of my grandfather, almost as if a whisper of the future had presented itself to him. According to my grandfather’s interrogation of Czeplinski as it was recorded by his secretary, Czeplinski could barely keep track of how many children he had. He was nervous—probably for his son, who my grandfather, at least temporarily, was interested in as a suspect. But maybe he had even more reason to worry—a small riddle I’ll never solve. Gabis. Today, in the United States, the a is long as in “hay,” although Czeplinski might have pronounced it differently. For centuries surnames for the Ashkenazi were like the Lithuanian names of the months—they weren’t fixed. A man might keep his father’s name and tack on a surname after a nearby river or a town or a mountain or a profession and then change jobs and change his name. Aunt Shirley, my father’s sister, told me that once the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer explained to her that Gabis, as a patronymic, was from the Hebrew for Gabriel. But there is a more modest derivation: Gabis from gabbai, one who assists at synagogue or perhaps oversees the upkeep of the local cemetery or, in the event of fire, heads the collection effort for those whose houses burned down.
IN THE ŠVENČIONYS ghetto (“twenty to thirty small wooden houses,” recalled Yitzhak Arad at our first meeting) the whisper of a future came primarily to the young. The ghetto elders had to organize ghetto life around the demands of each day, split between a belief that work and bribery would keep the ghetto functioning and an awareness that it was all temporary—even with the Germans’ miscalculation about the quick, glorious victory they now knew would not be theirs. (“I would give up God and my own Humanity for a piece of bread,” wrote the young German soldier Willy Reese from the frozen, undersupplied eastern front.) A longer war meant an ongoing need for felt boots, panje supply wagons drawn by one or two horses, seats for motorized military vehicles, wheel rims, barbed wire, furs remade into soldiers’ coats in Kalis, a labor camp adjacent to the Vilna ghetto … But at some point it would all end, a candle burned down to a dark stub of nothing. There would be no victory over the Seleucids, no Hanukkah miracle with a light that defies diminishment.
On a freezing morning in early February 1942, a hastily assembled work detail of a dozen or so men, most of them teenagers, walked through the gate of the Švenčionys ghetto, the small cluster of wooden houses falling away while they trudged in the street, as required by restrictions initially laid down locally by my grandfather’s cohort Mykolas Kukutis. From the sidewalk, their Lithuanian guards barked into the quiet: “Faster,” a curse delivered, the prod of a stick or rifle butt. In the street, Itzhak Rudnitzky/Yitzhak Arad, Moshe Shutan, Arad’s friend Gershon Bak, and the others went as they were directed. The Jewish cemetery loomed. Was today the day they were going to be shot? Arad wondered.
Švenčionys Jewish Cemetery, 2014
This was how it happened: men called for work, men vanishing. He began gauging any exit. If he were to run, would it be down Ignalina? Gedmino, past my grandfather’s house? The cemetery was now a kill zone, winter snow piled up, a field on one side of the tumbled stones.
It was going to happen this morning. His sister Rachel would find out. The shot in the back of the neck, a nick in his spine if he ran fast enough. The blue sky broke open, daybreak to daylight. The group was ushered past the cemetery. To another death? They were moving farther and farther away from the ghetto.
There were several munitions dumps in Švenčionys. The same Gudonis who helped lead the Jews to slaughter at Poligon worked as a guard for a time at one of them, “at the end of Godutishkaya [Godutish] Street by the milk factory.” He was one of three police officers who rotated in three shifts to protect the stocks of ammunition and confiscated weapons.
Several other storehouses were loaded with Red Army functional or busted (purposefully in some cases, so the Germans couldn’t make use of them) revolvers and rifles and machine guns and grenades, as well as more arms the locals had been required to turn over. The mess needed sorting, fixing if possible, cleaning. The DP machine gun with a round magazine—I saw scores of them in the old Soviet war movies that played at my first hotel in Vilnius—was light, but liable to break down. Stick grenades were jumbled alongside otrezankas, a version of the sawed-off shotgun favored by bank robbers and bootleggers during Prohibition in the United States. The wooden buildings were originally part of the Soviet infrastructure before the Germans came in; now a small crew of older (and thus possibly less rabid) Germans who had seen action in the first war kept watch on the dim interiors of metal, dust, and cold.
Arad and Tuvia Brumberg and Chaya Porus and her brother Itzik and Gershon Bak and Reuven Miadziolski and Shaul Michelson had heard the future whisper something they couldn’t quite make out, know only that it wasn’t, if they could help it, month after month of handing over “gifts” or slave labor until one day they were locked in the old synagogue, windows smashed and benzene poured in.
At Poligon the ground was littered with rags, caps, headscarves of family and friends. Frost heaves opened the earth. Nearby farmers must have dreaded the coming spring, a thaw and washouts that would carry bones into the rye and flax fields. They had crop quotas the local “headmen” handed down from the Germans—unmet the last half of the summer of ’41 and after the fall harvest of the same year. And now spri
ng would mean corpses of Jews showing up like a nightmare, Jews who had a way of wreaking havoc, even dead Jews, even the Jews who were your friends.
THE LITTLE CONVOY stopped in front of the large Soviet barracks. A German older than the oldest boy’s father, his eyes still crusty with sleep, fumbled a little with the locks while the Lithuanian police moved off. The doors swung open. The teenage boys who dreamed of sports and Palestine, who knew how to sing, how to bind a book, how to make a pair of boots, walked into their future.
In an interview in 1996, Tuvia Brumberg said, “Now I will tell you that those eighteen-year-old boys would leave [the warehouse] with gun parts under their coats. And I was one of them.”
Arad wrote: “I tried not to let either the Germans or the Jews see the impact this abundance had on me, knowing that in matters involving life and death, one must be aware of Jews too.” Not everyone in the group could play the part of the moment—one word, one gesture or telling look, and it would be over.
Late in the workday, their guard followed his superior out the door, just for a moment. The hours had been uneventful—a quick cigarette maybe, a few words together that the Jewish boys inside shouldn’t hear. They had been diligent, quiet; and anyway, who but a trained soldier would be brazen enough to shove a sawed-off shotgun into his pants, under his shirt, and then quickly put on his jacket?
The workday spent, the corporal ordered the crew to line up in front of the barracks, light snow in the yard crunching under their heels like stale kichlach, the sweet cookie of dreams, of that other life that didn’t belong to them anymore. Would it happen? Would the corporal give the order to the soldier at hand to take them back to the ghetto, but then “Warten,” wait—some equation slowly taking shape in his mind, guns + Jews. And almost as an afterthought, touch the tip of his Karabiner to Arad’s jacket, say with intent but without urgency “Ausziehen,” or simply “Aus,” and watch as Arad, his face gone flat and empty, slipped off his jacket, let it fall to the ground. The rifle wasn’t so good with distant targets, but a teenage boy at close range—poof. Or torture to start with, as this was thievery of the first order. Chief of criminal police Maciulevičius would call the chief of security police, my grandfather. What would happen next—it didn’t pay to think of it. Arad could only wait. His friends, who knew what the jacket hid, looked ahead, frozen, impassive.
It didn’t happen. The Karabiner remained slung over the corporal’s shoulder. He was pleased with their work, ordered them back to the ghetto under German guard, told them they would be returning. They retraced their steps, Orion a fixed searchlight, the constellation a scattered battalion in the indigo sky—in service of whose fate, impossible to know. The one Lithuanian guard at the ghetto gate, lower on the food chain than the German, waved them along.
Arad, the smallest among them, brought the first stolen weapon across the threshold, hid it in the family home in the room that had been his grandparents’, before a shooter took them down at Poligon.
CHAPTER 38
* * *
MISTAKES
As Chaya remembers it, the oldest member of the budding resistance group in the ghetto had been a student of Fedka (Fyodor) Markov before the war. Markov, a Russian Communist, had been the mayor of Švenčionys during the Soviet occupation as well as a history teacher at the Jewish secular folkshul. Alexander Bogen, a survivor of the ghetto, described him as handsome and blond and tall.
Now he was in the Naroch forest, where Polish kings once took their hunting parties; a forest of alder and swamps, oak and pine, the huge lake where, after winter, long-lived eels slithered out of the mud. Markov was just beginning to fight the Germans in single acts of sabotage with a small band of fellow partisans—the train investigation my grandfather was conducting.
Markov’s ex-student spoke to the group about joining him and fighting. More weaponry had to be collected. A reconnaissance team would have to sneak out and come back. Guns were useless without ammunition—they had a few bullets, but most of the boys (and Chaya) couldn’t shoot yet. Unlike my uncle Roy, none of them had had fathers who hunted and fished and trapped. Their fathers had been readers or cantors. They had managed small factories or run apothecaries. They played the violin. Even if they were not “religious,” they observed Shabbos, made sure to invite someone without a family for Friday dinner, went to synagogue.
The group had to wade through every angle of every possible plan; any choice they made would affect the rest of the ghetto. Was it better to stay and fight in the event of an action against the entire ghetto? If they took to the woods, what kind of retribution would their families—or for that matter, everyone still alive in the few blocks and lanes left to them—face? A gun stowed under a floorboard in a cramped storeroom endangered everyone. Was it fair? What did “fair” mean, as the food supply shrank and the “gifts” purchased less, the demands for them unending?
IN JUNE OF 2013 I sat with Yitzhak Arad in Ramat Gan, in the same large common room where we had met the year before. He spoke of Markov, and the young group he was part of in the ghetto.
Markov was a small team at that time. Ten, fifteen people, no more. The Soviet partisan movement was still very weak in the area. It was a game of life and death. At that time, we were aware that our fate was to be killed. We definitely thought that. Germans aren’t going to leave. Yes, we took all the money from the Judenrat [to purchase more weapons] by pressure and threats … In my research I justify the policy of the Judenrat to prolong life in the ghetto, as long as they could. People believed that an uprising in the ghetto did not offer survival.
He reminded me that he had written the first half of his book about the Švenčionys ghetto and his life as a partisan when he was only nineteen. As soon as he landed, illegally, on the shores of Palestine, he wrote it straight through, until the next chapter of his life took him over. Again I found myself watching his hands; delicate, even elegant. In the struggle for Israeli independence, he had served in the Palmach, an underground army of expert fighters, demolition specialists, bomber pilots, supply convoys that took heavy casualties.
He coughed a little from the dry air. He often spoke like a teacher to me. Images—sensory particulars of his own past—did not come easily to him, unlike Lili Holzman and Chaya Palevsky, though his scholarly work is both erudite and gripping. He was a military man, had been at the head of Yad Vashem for many years.
Suddenly he changed topic. “I had a terrible thought the other day.”
He looked at me, his face holding the surprise of the moment in the recent past when the terrible thought had come.
“The forest was only open for young people like myself. To be honest today, it’s good that my parents remained in Warsaw. If they had come, I would have stayed with them. In Švenčionys I couldn’t have taken them into the forest. I’d never thought about it before.”
Tears rimmed his eyes. For once, after all my questions for him and others I’d interviewed, my prodding, my intrusion, the interruptions while I changed memory cards or slipped a new battery into the video cam, chattering so the thread of the conversation wouldn’t float away, I couldn’t speak.
“It’s not a terrible thought,” I finally said. My words sounded stupid, though I meant them. I should wrap it up, I thought. His reflections seemed private, spoken to me only because I happened to be there.
My stepdaughter was with me, taking photos. Irit Pazner Garshowitz, my keen, compassionate researcher and translator in Israel, went for water. It was a hot day. Desert wind had hit Israel. The taste stayed in my mouth, chalk and sand—the Khamsin wind that slammed open the long unlatched windows of my hotel room, thrashed the orange trees in the courtyard below, then disappeared at night—an uninvited guest I somehow missed when the stars came out. A last question. Could he describe his two closest friends in the ghetto, Gerson Bak and Reuven Miadziolski?
“I can see them now; Reuven was a sportsman. Gershon had a better sense of humor … a little smaller … both very smart … happy, jo
yous. Youngsters … exactly my age.”
Yitzhak Arad, 2012
It has been said to me that there were no secrets in the ghetto, but in any small community, the closer you are to an event, the more hard knowledge you have of it. In order to stay under the radar, Chaya and Arad and their partners in their embryonic enterprise took precautions. They didn’t often walk through the ghetto together. It was rare that one member of the group would visit another’s house. Ultimately, they became known—they had to in order to succeed, but it was an accident that initially raised their profile. In different testimonies, one person remembered that a boy shot himself in the foot. Someone else declared that the secret group was never a secret to anyone.
Spring of 1942: the time to start mushroom hunting, time for the three-toed woodpecker, whose pecking mimics the sound of a round going off—loud, and then diminishing, then quiet, then starting again, rat-a-tat-tat—so that someone might look up at the sound from a newly thawed garden in the chilly sunshine and remember the powder burn on the right hand, the heat of the chamber.
According to Yitzhak Arad, late in the day on April 13, Chaya’s brother, Itzik Porus, came to Arad’s house in the ghetto, violating the group’s dictum that they keep their distance except for clandestine meetings. Something had happened, something so bad the group code had to be forsaken.
In the attic of one of the empty buildings outside the ghetto, three of their group members, David Yochai, Reuven Miadziolski, and Gershon Bak, were sewing makeshift holsters for guns they had risked their lives to collect, for their soon-to-come life outside of the ghetto in the forest. Reuven Miadziolski did what boys do; for one second, gun in hand, he was aiming at a German or Lithuanian partisan. He brandished the gun at Gershon Bak, and it went off. The bullet caught Gershon in the throat.