by Rita Gabis
A boy lay bleeding on the attic floor. His parents were alerted. Dr. Taraseysky was brought to the scene. According to Shimen Bushkanetz and Khaye Ginzberg, interviewed by Leib Koniuchowsky in 1948, Dr. Shabad, a Jewish eye doctor from Vilnius, also arrived. The consensus was that Gershon would live, but the bullet needed to be removed.
In Arad’s account, the bullet was removed by Dr.Taraseysky. Bushkanetz and Ginzberg described events differently:
The doctors were urged to remove the bullet and keep silent … Dr. Taraseysky refused to operate. Shimen Bushkanetz personally heard Dr. Taraseysky proposing that the incident be reported to the head of the criminal police, the Lithuanian Maciulevičius. Bushkanetz proposed … there was no one to be afraid of, and no one in the ghetto knew what happened. Taraseysky responded: “I’m afraid of you!” That meant that [he] was afraid that any Jew might happen to report the incident to the Lithuanians or the Germans.
There was a ghetto resident who was close to Jonas Maciulevičius, had an allegiance to him that could possibly put them all in danger, make the keeping of a secret impossible. Dr. Taraseysky consoled Gershon’s father; his son, via a bribe, would be taken to the local hospital, then returned home after the interrogation at the police station. A story was floated to the powers that be about boys fooling around in an attic, stumbling across a gun, and so on. No one believed it.
Arad wanted to gather his group together, hide Reuven, and at the first opportunity sneak him out of the ghetto with the rest of the group and into the woods. The ghetto elders refused to sanction Arad’s plan of escape; the reprisal would be calamitous. All the arms the group had managed to hide inside the ghetto, where in an event of a German action they could be immediately put to use, now had to be smuggled to a ruined synagogue beyond the wire. Arad’s closest friends faced torture. Gershon Bak’s last words to Arad were “Keep it up, and take revenge.”
“So the two young men went to clean up,” Chaya recalled,
and one of the guns went off and shot Gershon Bak in his throat. He was so scared … in the ghetto in the attic of his aunt’s house. They told him not to go out to the Germans or police and wanted to hide it and went to the Jewish council. And Dr. Taraseysky. He could take out the bullet, but he wasn’t sure and didn’t want to. “No, we have to take him to the hospital outside the ghetto.” I will never forget it. I shudder to think of it. They tortured him so much. The nails. The fingers. In the door. “Is there a group?” “Is he a partisan?” Mozart in the background. Squeezed the fingers in the door. Both of them, he couldn’t talk, the other one who was shot … he could, but he made believe he couldn’t talk. They never gave out. They said they went up into the attic to look for clothing and it happened that they found a gun and they didn’t know how to handle it. And after torturing both of them so much they killed them.
There were twenty people living in our house, in every room six, seven people … In the middle of the night my mother and my sister Rachel put a lot of dirt in two big water pails and put the bullets [we were hiding] in the dirt in the buckets and took them out of the ghetto to a burned house so no one would find them.
Sonderbehandelt on the boys’ arrest cards meant “special handling” by the Lithuanian police. The quiet, industrious Jewish worker who pushed her mop down the hallways of the police station was there when Reuven Miadziolski was dragged past her, bloody, swollen. He managed a whisper in Yiddish: “We will not reveal a single name.”
IT WAS A spring for killing. Not that that was unusual anymore. It’s the logic of war, the logic of slavery. War does not devolve into peace. Murder’s aftermath is ruin. And who knows what is set in motion, how one killing alters something we can’t quite see or touch or hear. My grandfather would have been at work during the few days the boys were tortured at the police station, a quick motorcycle ride from Gedmino. He lives a few streets away from Josef Beck, Gebietskommissar of the Švenčionys region. Spring, even a cold spring of fits and starts and more snow and boys tortured and killed, along with a Jewish girl named Sorele Levin, a young woman whose only crime was refusing work duty; he can race around, now that the roads are clear, in his motorcycle with the sidecar. He can ride it to a meeting at Beck’s, though Beck’s is a brief walk from his house and a waste of petrol. Still, it’s something to be seen revving a motor, arriving in style; it feels powerful. It feels like freedom. Perhaps he’ll simply wave at the assembled group and gun it on by, just because he can.
Josef Beck’s office window
HORSE MOBILIZATION
People tell about a German, a Lithuanian, and a few officials who recently went through the villages confiscating livestock and haven’t come back to this day.
—Diary entry of Herman Kruk in the Vilna ghetto, May 20, 1942
A LITTLE MORE THAN a month after the killing of Miadziolski and Bak and Levin, on the morning of May 19, Josef Beck, his deputy, Walter Gruhl, and Schneider/Schmidt (one source has him as Beck’s replacement, another as a new commandant for a nearby Soviet POW camp), along with the translator Rakowska, set off on the road to Ignalina. They were going to commandeer local horses. More and more horses were dying, and since horses pulled the panje wagons, they were an absolute necessity in the supply chain to the north, as well as the regional fortifications. There are dozens of versions of what happened on that road.
A simple, unadorned version is this: Markov’s small band is informed about the requisition trip for horses and hides in the brush, not far from Švenčionys. They spot the Opel and toss a grenade—it lands in the middle of the undercarriage of the car and explodes. The blast throws Rakowska, bloody and unconscious, from the vehicle. Beck, Gruhl, and Schneider/Schmidt (the unlucky replacement) are immediately dragged from the burning vehicle and shot. Their genitals are hacked off. Caps worn by ground troops in the Polish army are thrown down next to each dead German, though neither Markov nor his men are part of the Polish Home Army. Rakowska’s eyes flutter open; she’s shocked to see Markov, who she taught with at the folkshul before the war, standing over her. With cuts on her forehead, her stockings ripped, a gash in one leg, she walks, dazed, back to town to police headquarters to report the ambush. She is immediately arrested and placed down in solitary, where, since spring has arrived, the plank floor is a dirty flood. Her apartment is searched. She is interrogated and interrogated again.
Immediately, a list of suspect local Poles is produced by the Lithuanian authorities, including my grandfather. A hunt for Poles from the entire region ensues, some on the list my grandfather will soon hold in his hand in the prison yard, some not even Polish (like the man who stammered out the Lithuanian version of Rakowska’s name to his interviewer, David Boder, after the war), but just there in the sight line of the hunters who worked quickly and asked few questions of those they encountered on paths and roads and fields.
My grandfather is with Maciulevičius and Gestapo from Vilnius at the scene of the crime. A bloody, grotesque mess, a taunt—the mutilation meant to humiliate: You think you’re all powerful, you think your balls are so big. Look at this.
Word of the killings traveled quickly, and Poles began to hide. “You’re on the list,” someone would tell a frightened man he ran into in front of the Catholic church in Švenčionys. Maybe someone from the police, maybe a Lithuanian partisan who for whatever reason leaked information—money, or a crush on the pretty daughter of a man about to be dragged out of his house while his wife takes refuge in the dank well in the back, where raspberries grow in summer.
I HADN’T PLANNED on going to Poland but in New York, in the spring of 2013, I met my friend who led our Odyssey reading group (years ago now) for a quick coffee at a rather sterile café in the sprawling Time Warner Center—a fancy mall that always makes me feel like a tourist. The indoor café seemed like it could be anywhere. I felt rootless. I wanted to stay home.
We talked about my research.
“Of course you’re going to Poland,” he said, blowing on the foam of his cappuccino. It wasn�
�t really a question.
“Of course,” I said, on autopilot. Our time was too brief to lay out my latest intentions: continued research at the Holocaust Museum, translating and studying more than two dozen testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation.
The reprisals for the killing of Beck had taken place in the Švenčionys region. I’d already inquired when I was there about local descendants of those killed, or elderly friends who might remember them. I’d come up empty except for Teresa Krinickaja’s account of her best friend’s mother hiding in terror in the family well. Beyond that, there had been a brief exchange in front of the Jewish cemetery in Švenčionys. On the road right outside the green, among uncut grasses, in a breeze I can hear now in the mic when I replay the few moments, a woman holding an empty cardboard box—Jadwiga Rakoska, born in 1943—told us that her sister had been an eyewitness to the exhumation of the Poles shot in the Jewish cemetery after Markov’s ambush. Her sister had fainted dead away. There were Soviet “doctors”—perhaps forensic workers. The stench of cadaverine and putrescine (the names of the proteins sound like their odors) after the top layer of dirt was shoveled away was overwhelming. A few more words, and then, as we were walking into the cemetery, a friendly warning from Jadwiga to look out for ticks—they were especially bad this year.
A FEW DAYS after coffee with my friend, I realized I had to go to Poland. I hadn’t tried hard enough. I’d mixed up my frustration at how little I initially had been able to find with defeat. Maybe descendants had moved from Švenčionys to Poland after the war. It stood to reason that wartime archives in Poland would have a greater depth of material about the killings—wouldn’t they?
My entire search was beset by the inexplicable, the disappeared. Mirele Rein. A list from the Lithuanian archives of names and addresses of Švenčionys Poles, the list dated several weeks prior to the attack on Beck—men and women my grandfather wanted brought to the police station, his signature on the bottom, little check marks next to a dozen of the names. Why? Elena Las and the fate of Icek Bres, one of the three men my grandfather “released” from the Todt forestry camp; it went on and on.
I did go to Poland, but in the end, it was in Lithuania where I met descendants of those killed during the Beck reprisals. In preparation for the Poland trip I’d contacted Johanna Berendt, a smart young Warsaw-based journalist who did initial research and made inquires for me. It was she who found contact information for Vaclav Vilkoit, with his excellent overview of the minority Polish population in Lithuania. The people I ended up interviewing were in Vilnius—each a fifteen or twenty minute trip from my hotel.
CHAPTER 39
* * *
ANTON LAVRINOVICH
AUGUST 12, 2013
He has the slightly grizzled look of an old soldier: working hands, a shyness that makes his smile at first seem like the embarrassed smile of a schoolboy who, though he knows the answer, hates being called upon. He only lives in his Vilnius apartment (today taken over by the heat wave) part time; otherwise he is in Adutiškis, one of several small towns in the Švenčionys district. He was born in the village of Gudeli in Belarus in 1930, eighteen miles or so from Švenčionys.
He was nine years old in 1939 when war broke out; Adutiškis, the birthplace of his mother, was still a Polish territory. He is third in line in a large family, has a twin; his father was a teacher at the elementary school. His mother, Veronica, was his father’s student, sixteen years younger than the teacher she would marry. (Veronica’s own mother was a janitress at the school at the time.)
His memories of the German arrival in their area are sharp, in part because the family home, on a high hill, was used for the German telegraphist—with communication equipment that had to be powered manually.
They were carrying cannons with horses, and they put immediately this communication person [in the house] to use the power engine, and they unharnessed their horses—and it was actually the oats which were planted next to our house where they let the horses eat the oats. My mom came out and said, “What are you doing!” and they said, “It’s war.” She did not know yet what that meant. When the Germans came in 1941, Russian schools were closed, and a Lithuanian school was opened.
He recalls working the handles of the telegraph machine for the Germans. Were they nice to you? I ask. “It was not a very big animosity; there was not big fighting.” Our talk turned to the Jewish population in town.
In ’39 there was a Jewish school. When Bolsheviks came, schools were connected and the Jewish school was closed. I would not say they were different [his new Jewish classmates], but there were many people who were talented. Math—I remember there was a girl whose name was Gritskea. It was me, also, who was not—like—stupid. We were competing to see who would get the right answers on our homework.
When the Germans came in ’41, there was a ghetto in Adutiškis. It was one street that was separated where Jewish houses and Jewish stores were. Everybody moved to this one street. And in September they were forced to bring the carts and wagons and everybody was put on them—like old people, women, and children were put onto the carts and wagons, and they were brought into Švenčionėliai, where the barracks were. It was a—like Poligon before. From the whole region, they were all brought over there, and they were all murdered unfortunately. The ones who were able to walk, they marched on foot.
He was not allowed to go down the hill from his house to the ghetto, nor did he witness the carts and people marching. His parents would not speak of what had happened. The local authorities were now Lithuanian, and in town, after Poligon, people would speak about the murder of the Jews—“a bad feeling in the town, the houses empty.”
I ask if he can describe himself as a boy. I’m sitting on what serves as his bed. The open door to a small balcony refuses the breeze from outside. He’s embarrassed again, smiles.
“I was as everybody, nothing special.” Then adds, “We had very strong ties between ourselves in our family.” (Six children, one named Yanuck, who died in 1932.)
As soon as I bring up the subject of the Lithuanian authorities, he begins to speak about the Beck reprisals, starting with what is most painful for his family.
My father [Kleofas Lavrinovich] was killed in ’42. He was like a hostage, because on the eighteenth of May, Gebietskommissar Beck, he was on his way to Ignalina from Švenčionys. It’s fourteen kilometers. The Belarus partisans came, and Beck was killed. Yes, a translator was with them; she was not killed, she was local. And it was the order after that—five hundred people should be shot. And “local authorities—please, whoever you know, please collect everybody.” And on the nineteenth or the twentieth, at night, at two in the morning, in our house, there was Dewejkis, the policeman, vice chairman of the police, and Kuczinskas. He was the local nationalist. He had been a student of my father. He knew him very well. Algis Kuczinskas. He was approximately ten years older than I, so he was born around 1920.
They were collected—the men. Thirty-three from Adutiškis. And even women were collected. It was in all the towns around Švenčionys. In many of the other places, the women were not gathered, but over here, the women were collected. The nationalists of Adutiškis—they somehow figured out that they should collect the women as well. The family of Bravolski—it was father, two sons, and two daughters living in one house, and the daughter-in-law. All these six people—they were all collected. Only mom was left behind, the old lady and one grandchild who was one year old.
I ask if he had any idea of how, in his town, the list of who was to be taken was created.
It was just the meeting of the local activists. And they put together the list. The people who compiled the list, they knew everybody’s address. [This was crucial in every roundup. Many testimonies make the point that only a local could identify the ethnicity of another local—a Pole instantly knew who was a Jew. A Lithuanian could spot a Pole a mile away. Germans, particularly in the rural areas, ceded to local authorities considerable, if ultimately limited, power because of
their need for this most basic information.] They mostly collected the local intelligentsia; teachers, the clerics, people who were working at the main offices; they were all told they would be taken to Švenčionys.
Could he describe the moments when his father prepared to leave in accordance with his ex-student’s demand?
He did not wake up the children who were asleep. He kissed those who were not asleep. And my mom is asking Kuczinskas, “You are taking him away, will he be back?” And Kuczinskas said, “Of course he will come back—it’s not like the Bolsheviks; they took people and sent them to Siberia.” My mother prepared breakfast for my father. My father took off his wedding ring and watch. It was his watch since he started out in St. Petersburg. He said, “I will probably not need that.”
Hear it? The sound the ring makes when set down on the table by the dish of half-eaten food prepared in the middle of the night. The twelve-year-old son’s eyes follow his father’s movements as he takes off the watch that perhaps, on special occasions, when Anton was younger and still climbed onto his father’s lap, he was allowed to wear for a few minutes—put it to his ear. There—his father’s time.
And then his father held his wife, and perhaps kissed again the top of his son Anton’s head, and was gone.
[By morning] the rumors started to—the rumors that these people will be shot this day, and the rest of the families shot the other day. And the shooters came—a special group. The Einsatz [short for Einsatzgruppen, the killing squad], they were Lithuanian. It was called the Kuczinskas regiment. When they saw the women, they wouldn’t take them, they let the women go home. The mother of Kuczinskas sent someone to my mother to tell her she should go to Kuczinskas and beg him to let her husband go free. So Mom took the youngest child in her hands and she took the youngest twins along and she ran to the elders’ office. She ran and she passed the church. Burokas was standing over there at the office; he was a guard, a farmer, a partisan. He wouldn’t let her inside, so she ran to the church, she went inside and started to cry in the church. She fell onto her knees. It was the time of the special May prayers, every day at six o’clock the prayers started in church. It was then that the men were taken to the truck and they shot them just at the outskirts [of town]. When the people were praying, they started to shoot.