by Rita Gabis
Afterward, Anton’s mother was afraid to stay with her children at the family home. No one wanted to give them shelter. Finally a woman named Maria Unton, with three daughters, let them sleep on the floor. There were so many fleas, they were “dreaming about sunrise” so they could leave.
“Did you know what had happened to your father at that time?” I ask.
Anton Lavrinovich, 2013
“I understood that Father was killed, yes, I understood.”
They did not allow us to go and get our father’s body. When they were all killed, one person tried to escape. There was a retired sergeant—they were letting three of them out of the truck and then shooting them in the back. They were let to run, and then the shooters were shooting them in the back. He actually died in the truck—the sergeant. And Józef Polhalski, Kazimierz Dobrowolski, and Stanislaw Nowak; they did not run, they just turned around to them and they said, “You shoot us,” and so they lay together. This is from the words of the people who guarded. And afterward they put dirt on it. Afterward they dig a pit, four meters by two meters, and they were all thrown out and covered with dirt. And it was a plowed field and they actually planted oats so it was not to be noticed where the grave was.
But his mother knew; everyone knew. He gesticulates—a burial mound collapses. “And then it was a kind of pit over there. There was not dirt and it was forbidden to take dirt from the surrounding area. The family members used to bring dirt in the wagons to make this a proper grave.”
“Did the family members have to live with the nationalist partisans who had done this, afterward?” I asked him.
“Yes, we continued to live side by side.”
In 1944, when the Soviets reoccupied, a commission was established to study this particular crime. There was the opening of the grave, and in anticipation of it, family members paid to have coffins made or made the coffins themselves. “But two years passed, and they decomposed, so it was impossible to know who is who. Ludvic Bravorski, he had long white hair so they recognized it’s him. And the others were—they were unable to identify them, so they left it as is. They burned the coffins and they buried the remains.”
We speak briefly about his life after the war. He was a “day worker”—whatever was needed, in the Soviet Army for three years, a shop assistant. Afterward he was elected as a deputy for the local council in the same area where his father was killed.
“In this region it was twenty-two villages, and every village knows it doesn’t matter—all the changes of rule. They all respect me. I’m not ashamed. I was working for all those thirty years.”
Although the documents I have about my grandfather’s role in these reprisal killings place him, thus far, primarily in Švenčionys, he was chief of security police for the entire region. I turn off the video and stand and apologize to Anton Lavrinovich.
CHAPTER 40
* * *
JOSEF BECK
Josef Beck
He is mentioned in the compulsory war diary kept by Hauptmann Klöpfel, stationed in Kaunas. On April 2: “The note I already sent you on Josef Beck and the instruction to him to change the construction of panje cars, farmers’ horse cars from two to one horse.”
April 19, 1942, a month and a day before his death: “Kreislandwirt Beck from Schwentschionys informs that 1,419 pairs of felt boots have been completed and are ready for pickup.” And then an entry on April 20: “Roll call in honor of Hitler’s birthday.” The small German command in Švenčionys would have marked the day just as the Germans in Kaunas did.
Josef Beck was born on September 2, 1910, the second-oldest son in a family of five children. He married into a farming family, but fate dealt him successive blows; his first son, Gerhard Josef, died on the day he was born, and a year later Beck’s wife died after a surgery. The heritage laws of the Reich required him to enter into military service. For a time, before he was called up, he worked shoveling hay in the Hamburg-Hagenbeck zoo. A box of his civilian clothes arrived at his parents’ door, and in June of 1941 he was in Švenčionys.
On October 23, 1941, when he was thirty-one years old, he wrote home to say he had been promoted to Kreislandwirtschaftsführer, the country agricultural/supply official. As the oldest officer in Švenčionys, he was now the commander of the town as well.
The killings in May and early June of 1942 throughout Švenčionys and the surrounding areas after Beck’s assassination were reported in the two main “newspapers” that served as propaganda machines from the first day of the German occupation.
From Ūkininko Patarėjas 21, May 29, 1942 (also appeared in Į Laisvę 120, May 23, 1942):
TWO REICH SOLDIERS COWARDLY SHOT
HARSH MEASURES TAKEN—400 PEOPLE KILLED
KAUNAS, 22 MAY
In the eastern Lithuanian region two Reich soldiers, namely Joseph Beck and Walter Gruhl, were cowardly killed while on an official business trip. Four hundred Communist saboteurs, most of them Poles, were shot in response to this abominable crime.
The crime, committed against German soldiers, who were working on the restoration of regions severely affected by bolshevism, was so brutal and barbarous that it had to be responded to by taking the harshest measures possible. The crime is considered very serious since it was committed by the criminal element in the region, which during the enormous fight on the eastern front was experiencing the benefits of peaceful and creative work …
The Lithuanian nation was given self-government. It also just recently has acquired municipal government in its regions, cities and villages. And this all has happened while the war still goes on. The Reich minister Alfred Rosenberg, during the meeting of general councilors in Kaunas, declared that restoration works will be required to overcome all internal difficulties. “If there is a lot required from the people of the eastern regions, there also has been a great deal more required from the German nation, and for many more years.”
Thus the harsh vindictive measures that had been taken are equivalent to the barbarous character of the murder itself. It can be certain that any crime of similar scope and influence to the peaceful work of others will receive similar unequivocal response. In this regard, the warning has been passed not to confuse nobility with weakness …
THE NEWS OF this foul murder of Reich soldiers in the eastern region of Lithuania, of course, surprised everyone … Terroristic banditry is alien to our nation … It was committed not by one of us, but rather by those provoking elements that aim at disrupting our peace and work, and turning us against our German saviors who rescued us from bolshevism.
We completely understand the harsh measures that the German government took in retribution for this treacherous and low crime … it is not only Germans who should fight against such banditry. It is also a Lithuanian matter.
Through Konrad Beck, one of the family descendants, I learned that the family had never been told about the violent aftermath of Josef Beck’s death. Konrad Beck wrote to me through my researcher in Berlin: “The whole family was very shocked to hear of the massacre killing of all those innocent people as a result of our uncle’s death … It was good and had a healing effect to relive the … past from a distance of almost three generations and to hear that the fate of strangers so far away from each other seems to be tied so closely by the historic events.”
I had imagined the Reich would have wanted the family to know the scale upon which Beck was avenged—a perverse matter of honor. It shocked me that from 1942 on, no one in Beck’s family had any knowledge of the nod the Germans gave to the Lithuanians in and around Švenčionys, using the occasion of Beck’s death to pay back the Poles who had once been the majority in the region and who, so many years ago, had stolen Vilnius in World War I. (I was shocked, even though I myself had only recently learned about my grandfather in the Švenčionys prison yard with the infamous list in his hand—the varying accounts of numbers of victims; ten, twenty, fifty-four, thirty-five—and that was just in Švenčionys proper.)
But then again, th
e Reich was obsessed with posterity. The killing of noncombatants had to be blamed on locals or burned and ground down into nothingness, into a poorly kept secret. As for Konrad Beck, who had studied history and German philosophy—his uncle and my grandfather probably drank together and ate together at least a handful of times, and of course, there were other occasions, less innocuous, when their paths might have crossed.
Whoever he had been in the intimate scheme of his own life, Beck came to be different things to the different constituencies of Švenčionys. To the Poles, he had been something of an ally, tamping down Lithuanian aggression against them. (His death would unleash the same.) The Polish/Lithuanian problem bedeviled the Germans constantly, only because it interfered with a reliable, cohesive work force. For the Jews, Beck was a German who had been at Poligon. Perhaps he was one of those, as Vincas Sausitis suggested, who tried his hand with his pistol, caught up in the alcohol vapor and scent of blood, a boss who never put his name down on the pay sheet because it was sport after all, as far as he was concerned—or perhaps not. Testimony also places his second-in-command, Walter Gruhl, at Poligon. Of my grandfather’s whereabouts during those few weeks of the Poligon massacre, I was still unsure. I had a suspicion, though, that if Beck made a point not to be present on at least one day at the crowded barracks or by the pit dug in a single night even with the troublesome rain, Senelis, almost twenty years Beck’s senior, would have thought him weak. He would have known from the outset that Beck wasn’t military material—just a farmer with grief in his heart, sent up north of Vilnius to be a cog in the supply chain, nothing more.
CHAPTER 41
* * *
ILLEANA IRAFEVA
AUGUST 13, 2013
She was born December 15, 1942. A lovely (red hair, delicate cheekbones), thoughtful woman, she points to an old photograph framed on the wall of her apartment in Vilnius: a picture of her father wearing the uniform of a Polish soldier. Pieter Kulesh, formal, eyes straight ahead in the photograph, was born in 1910; her mother, Usefa, was born in 1913 in a small village in the Švenčionys district. She was pregnant with Illeana when her husband was killed, and when Illeana was roughly five years old, she told her how her father had been murdered.
They knew about it. [Beck’s killing.] My father was working on the railroad, so he said, “I am innocent, I didn’t do anything.” And he was taken from the bed during the night. My mother knew who came for him; she knew everybody in the village. Somebody once came from America for her to identify him. It was in the court, he was brought over here, she identified. It was during the Soviet time. It was an announcement that if you know something, if you remember, please come and identify him. She knew all of them.
She returns to the story of her father’s disappearance.
They were inviting him, as if for an interrogation. He quietly dressed and he went. Whoever was found at home—the men—everyone was taken out. My father was not Polish. We’re all Belarus people. Nobody made any difference whether you are Belarusian or you are Polish. Many, many Jews were killed over there. The Jews also lived over there. My mom knew all of them.
Mom was actually telling that they were—when they [her father and others] were marched, their killers would say, “We will kill you, we will kill you.” The place where they were all gathered—nobody was allowed to go there. It was wartime. My mom and all my uncles would say that they were not afraid of Germans, only Lithuanians. They were asking for vodka. They were drinking all the time, the Germans. And the Lithuanians were all in the forest.
They knew where the bodies were. This they knew. Guards were over there and nobody was allowed to go. They lay like that several days and afterward the Germans forced somebody to dig up the pit, and they put everybody there.
She shows me a photograph taken by someone who risked his or her life, who snuck out in the bitter end of dusk to make a quick record of the carnage, to prove that it happened.
During this time, one woman, she actually stole the body of her husband and she buried him in the courtyard of her house. And she was betrayed, and she was forced to dig him out and to bring him back. The priests—they were actually watching and they were killed also, on the road from Švenčionys to Švenčionėliai. [Vaclav Vilkoit and I had gone to the priest’s graves in Švenčionėliai several days earlier.] It did not make any difference. They wanted to kill any man in the radius of twelve kilometers from the place where Beck was killed.
I ask Illeana if her mother was aware that the Germans had ordered the killings. She says that her mother believed the Germans “allowed” the killing, but the “order”—the decision as to who should be killed—was made by locals. Illeana also remembers talk of Beck being a very cruel man, which was why he was killed.
As our conversation continues, it turns out that all three of her father’s brothers were partisans with Markov’s brigade. One, Sergei Kulesh, was killed “in the first days of the war as a Communist youth by the white bands.” Boris and Alexander Kulesh, her other uncles, were with Markov during the attack on Beck.
“Is this perhaps the reason your father was taken?” I ask.
She doesn’t think so, doesn’t think her uncles’ connection to Markov was known. And then she corrects one of several versions of Beck’s killing: the road was mined, there was no grenade. Markov and his men mined the road and then ran away. She asks me about my research: “But you probably know that the people who were killers, they were turned into heroes. They were not pure fighters for freedom; it was cruelty, and cruelty causes cruelty.”
Her mother continued to live among those who had killed her husband, frightened all the time, giving aid to Illeana’s uncles in Markov’s brigade. Of her father, her mother often spoke to Illeana of his kindness. He had a good heart.
“I never knew him, my children never knew their grandfather. But people say that my youngest, the one who plays the piano, he looks exactly like him.”
THE ŠVENČIONYS POLICEMEN who were interrogated by the KGB after the war and speak of my grandfather all say that only ten to twenty men were taken away by car that May in 1942, after my grandfather culled them from the list he held.
In Zdzisław Chlewiński’s book Groza i Prześladowanie Polaków i Żydów na Wileńszczyźnie (Terror and Persecution of Poles and Jews of Wilno), he lists thirty-seven Švenčionys victims. The numbers of those killed in the entire region range from four hundred to over a thousand.
In Švenčionys, Alfons Romanowski was a printer; Julian Sierociński, a teacher—of what, the list doesn’t say. (Recently my mother recalled that the father of the family of Poles who lived in the other half of their house on Gedmino until the time of the Beck reprisals, when they disappeared, was a piano teacher.) Czesław Dubowski was a clerk. Stiepan Markow was the seventy-year-old grandfather of the partisan Fydor Markow(v). Michał Walulewicz had at one time been deputy mayor of the town. Among those marched or driven to the Jewish cemetery to be shot, two women were pulled from the group by Germans on the scene; one of the women was a German officer’s paramour, and she fled with him to Germany when the Soviets returned to take over “Ostland.”
Three of those shot, hands bound behind them, bodies beaten, were Jews from the ghetto who had worked industriously for Beck. (Perhaps, if one worked hard for a German in command, your chances might be better for food, information, or even your life.) Khayem Sheytl was one of Beck’s drivers. Dovid Ginzburg was an electrician. Gurvitz, who on Chlewiński’s list is identified as a shopkeeper, shined Beck’s shoes, ran errands, fetched his jacket, helped the cook, watered the garden. These men died simply because their work duty had been at Beck’s office and house.
CHAPTER 42
* * *
WORK
In 1943, my grandfather will be arrested. His wife, my Babita, will be moved to yet another Siberian camp, near the Ural Mountains, where she’ll come upon a field of peonies that spread out before her and her fellow prisoners on a work detail. When they bend down to the large half-open bloom
s—the unexpected profluence of beauty—the flowers will have no scent, as if the perfume has been stolen.
But before these events—after the killing of Beck and those murdered because of his killing—work continued. Work was a requirement of war, it was the penance of the prisoner; sometimes it killed you, other times it could save your life.
IN NEARBY SVIR—now home, at least temporarily, for Lili, her sister Khanale, her mother, and their extended family—the Germans ordered all young people to leave for an undisclosed work site at a Todt camp. From the ghetto, Lili’s grandfather convinced a farmer to hide her, but when her grandfather was thrown in the ghetto prison because Lili couldn’t be found, she—with her best friend Nihamah, who would be by her side for the war’s duration and aftermath—joined the transport to the camp.