by Rita Gabis
“What seemed like a tragedy—that they were going to take me and send me somewhere, to work somewhere unknown—in the end, and I’ll tell you the story, this was my winning card. This was the way I stayed alive.” Her eyes flash.
She’s resolute, a little triumphant, when she tells me this on one of two long afternoons in Israel in June of 2013—my second visit to the country and to her cool house, where photographs from her travels, newspapers, and books mark her as a woman engaged with the world. Irit is with us, as is my stepdaughter. As usual, there are cakes on the table and offers of juice.
Lili is both welcoming and workmanlike; we have a lot of ground to cover. On the first day, after several hours, she says Enough. It’s exhausting and painful, this story. She sees us out; the next afternoon, nothing of her fatigue will be in evidence. She is only slightly frailer than the year before; a sprained ankle, a cane.
Her grandfather was released from jail, and shortly after, Lili and Nihama and the other young Jewish residents of Svir walked for many hours to a depot, then rode a long way in regular train cars back to Lithuania. The Todt camp living quarters were in Žiežmariai (not far from Kovno), in an old wooden synagogue. There were bunks with straw: girls and women downstairs, men upstairs.
On Sundays the women washed their clothes in the nearby mikveh, then sat on the ground and picked the lice out of the waistbands and seams and collars—“We were covered with lice,” Lili said. Unless the water was hot enough, simply washing the clothes did nothing to get rid of the infestation.
When she returned to Žiežmariai several years ago, the synagogue had become a tourist site. She paid a dollar or two to walk again through the dilapidated quarters where, when she was incarcerated, as luck would have it, an older German commander “was okay.” They nicknamed him Hezeriker—“hoarse,” in Yiddish—for his rough voice. He gave them their work assignment: to pave a road.
My job, along with some of the others, was to use a big hammer to break rocks into gravel. They didn’t have any gravel, so we had to make it and then spread it. After that a machine would come by and flatten it out. I don’t think there was cement. It was very hard work, very hard.
One German, older, a foreman, liked me and said in German—I was redheaded, really, I had flaming red hair [she laughs at the memory]—he said, “The girl with the red hair is the best.”
Unsteady carts on a track, carts not meant to carry a group of young women and men, transported them partway to their work each day. One day the cart Lili was in tipped over, and when she fell, her head hit a rock; the scar remains on her scalp today.
The foreman—suddenly she remembers his name, Miller—
kept saying, “The girl with the red hair is dead. She’s dead.” They took care of me. There were no antibiotics. They sewed it up, but it was oozing infection so they had to even take me to a German clinic. It was several months before the gash healed. Then back to building the road, each day of work, each day closer to finishing the ten-kilometer road, we were terrified. As more of the gravel was flattened, with each kilometer, we wondered if we would be killed at the end, when there was no more road left.
It was a good road. We did a good job. When we were done, we thought, We’re not necessary anymore. But as you can see, they didn’t kill us.
Even though she is sitting across the table from me, it takes me a moment to register the fact of her survival when the road was done. Her story has lodged an image—an instant nightmare—in my mind: the end of the road, those who spread the gravel dead in a nearby newly dug pit.
In the winter of ’43, an epidemic of typhus broke out, and we lay there in the hay and the filth. No medicine, only Gordonovich, the doctor, would walk around and take everyone’s temperature, which reached 42 Celsius [over 107 degrees Fahrenheit]—as high as it could reach. So he would take your temperature and say, “Full”—the thermometer has gone all the way up.
The lice created a typhus epidemic in the camps and ghettos, the same disease that was the scourge of Napolean’s army, traces of the infection found in the tooth pulp of bodies uncovered in Vilnius in just the last decade.
The lice infects once the unbearable itching starts and the stricken human host starts scratching, breaking the epidermal barrier; it’s not the lice itself, but their feces, infected with a strain of the Rickettsia bacterium, that causes illness. The first time I scrolled through the captured German records at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, I found document after document noting the presence or absence of illness in the ghettos; kept, of course, not for the benefit of the prisoners but because of the Germans’ fear of Fleckfieber.
Žiežmariai Synagogue that served as the Todt barracks
We felt we needed to hide the epidemic from the Germans, so they wouldn’t destroy the barracks and kill us all. Afterward, we were crawling to work. The illness did something to our brains. We were very—[she tries to think of how to explain it]—we were not the same. One girl was impacted so badly that when we would go out to work, she would lift up her dress and walk around; she wasn’t in control of what she was doing. The high temperature had given her some sort of encephalitis or something. And through it all, for food, we got a slice of bread before work. If you could bear not to eat it all at once, you would try and divide it and then have it during the day. In the middle of the day, they would come with a plate of very watery soup that was really flour and water.
The illness with the raging fever, without any antibiotics to treat it, while she was subsisting on starvation rations—supplemented from time to time by packages from Svir—did not damage Lili permanently. She notes her own soundness of mind—all the translation work she still does, the acuity of her memory.
From the head of the camp we learned that the smaller ghettos were being liquidated. Hezeriker said, “Make me a list of family members that you have left and I will try and bring them here.” So you see, what seemed to be a tragedy worked out to be a good thing.
TYPHUS ALSO STRUCK the ghetto in Švenčionys. During that time, my own mother suffered a long, bad bout of jaundice, one possible manifestation of the illness; perhaps she, outside the wood and wire, was also infected.
In October 1942 the ghetto in Vidzh (Yiddish; Widze, Polish)—part of Poland as Švenčionys had been, and then, in 1939, Belorussian until the Germans, with their “Ostland,” ceded it to Lithuania—had been liquidated. Upward of a thousand former residents of the Vidzh ghetto traveled the thirty-eight miles to the few, already crowded blocks of the Švenčionys ghetto. Hundreds of Vidzh residents were crammed into the old synagogue, now airless and fetid. Dwellings that had barely contained the Švenčionys Jews became incubators for disease. The small ghetto medical staff, managed to a large extent by Dr. Taraseysky, couldn’t begin to keep the epidemic at bay. This was at a time when the Reichskommissariat Ostland, led in Lithuania (Litauen in German) by Theodor von Renteln, was reconsidering what, from the beginning, had been a controversial policy: retaining a labor force of Jews rather than finishing them all off in the pits and/or deporting them to camps outside Lithuania.
In short order, Chaya Palevsky was working with her sister Rachel in a secret hospital behind a false wall in a house in the ghetto. Yitzhak Arad, sustained in part after the death of his two friends by his older sister Rachel’s love, continued to make plans with the determined band of soon-to-be partisans. The Narocz forests waited.
(In Great Britain, in 1843, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge published a volume of the Penny Cyclopaedia in which the Narocz appeared: “East of Wilna, the climate … more temperate than … north, but the winters, though short, are very cold; the spring is long and humid; the autumn and summer wet and foggy.” A few paragraphs later: “These Jews, wherever they insert themselves, are a scourge.” A century after the type was set—the same deep snow, the enmity of much of the local population, and a new element: discrimination from non-Jewish partisans who had already established bases in the woods. No end of ways to break t
he hearts of the young who wanted to avenge the deaths of those they loved, the young who at every turn were forced to discover new strategies for survival.)
ACCORDING TO TESTIMONY in the Koniuchowsky record of the time, Yankl Levin and his painting brigade, after their own long day of work outside the ghetto, grabbed tin, wood, glass—anything that could be used to extend a small house or make a shack livable for the influx from Vidzh. The Sventsian Judenrat contacted the Vilna ghetto administration as typhus infection rates soared. A medical team from Vilna, where the ghetto was large enough to have more infrastructure and also more resources, arrived and helped strategize. Instructions were given; the painting brigade jerry-rigged a disinfection station to stem the spread of disease.
Every effort related to the typhus outbreak, including ministering to the sick, had to be kept from the Lithuanian and German authorities. Life had to appear as normal as possible. When secrecy failed, a bribe was presented to whoever threatened to spread the news that inside the ghetto, scores of people lay in fever sweats. If you could, you went to work, a jacket covering the pink and then dark spots and blotches on your arms, on your neck underneath your scarf. Somehow Levin managed to bring “a 200-liter boiler from town” and set it up in a quickly renovated smithy. There, with a stone oven and water, the impromptu disinfector “was heated to exactly 120 degrees centigrade.”
After a stop at the bathing station, people put their lice-ridden clothes, their blankets, their scarves and socks, inside the hot disinfector. Every day a team went to each ghetto residence to see who had been infected, who was well. This was a war inside another war. Most of those on the front line got sick themselves, got better, kept soldiering through.
OUTSIDE THE GHETTO, Markov’s partisan band grew larger and more active. Patrols along the Švenčionėliai rail line increased. The police were given schematics for mining trains and roads so they would know better what to look for, hidden in barns and under false floors of those in league with the partisans: melinite, fuses, blasting caps or traces left behind in hastily abandoned forest digs, wire, a bit of yellow powder. Locals complained of robberies—a cow, a chicken, bread, milk, a rifle, blankets, homebrew—asked for or taken at gun- or knifepoint. The Germans tried to frame the fight against “banditry” as a Lithuanian cause, but the war dragged on. The hope of Lithuanian independence gone, animus toward the Germans increased.
What was my grandfather doing in the fall of 1942?
He was riding his motorcycle and sending his “agents” into the countryside to see who had noticed something odd about a neighbor; who, for a drink or a few cents, had a story to tell. He was hunting. He was dictating reports for the Germans he loathed. He conducted sweeps like the one that brought in the elderly father of the orphan “Jonas Gabis.” Those who harbored a Jew had to answer to him (ironic, of course, given the privileges he’d extended). Interrogations were frequent. Just as in the sizable cities of Lithuania (Kaunas, Vilnius) and in Germany itself, war brought with it a culture of informants, self-appointed spies. It was a liar’s holiday, bribes greasing clean hands and dirty hands. Senelis let some prisoners go, sent some prisoners down to Lukiškės in Vilnius, to the Gestapo, to death or a labor camp or—infrequently, when officials in Vilnius found there was no case—to freedom.
Blackmarketeering, making and selling moonshine, stealing, carrying an unauthorized weapon, murdering (in an unofficial capacity), were crimes that fell under the purview of the criminal police, the Kripo, not my grandfather’s security police (the Sipo or SD). But law and order was a fiction. Right in front of the Švenčionys Catholic church, fifteen hundred people lived in a cage.
In Lublin, Poland, a man who was born in Švenčionys, Romuald-Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel, told me that the placement of the ghetto was deliberate, meant to force the Jews who “killed Christ” to look out, from their confinement, at the holy structure that survived defilement.
After my meeting with Weksler-Waszkinel, before packing my bags for Germany and London, I followed a suggestion from my fixer in Poland, Maciej Bulanda, and looked up the backstory of a family who had lost the man of their house in the Švenčionys killings after the murder of Beck.
Zofia Walulewicz, with her deaf daughter, hid a young Jewish girl after Michał Walulewicz, Zofia’s husband, was called out of the lineup by my grandfather at the Švenčionys prison and killed. Like Anna and Piotr Miksta, they joined the ranks of Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations.
But there is, as Chaya Palevsky would say, another story within this story. Michał and Zofia Walulewicz’s son Zdzisław played the drums, and at nineteen was asked to perform in the small orchestra at the Švenčionys Kasino for the banquet after the Poligon killings. With him was a thirty-one-year-old piano player, Alosza Żaniewicz-Podaszewny (was he the piano teacher on Gedmino my mother remembered?). At some point in the evening, the two musicians were dragged out of the Kasino and killed because they didn’t drink and were overheard speaking Polish instead of Lithuanian.
The Kasino (pictured on page 119) was at the corner of Jadkowa and Vilenskaya Streets. Lithuanian officials were in attendance as well as the Šauliai, members of the Rifleman’s Union. My grandfather fell into both categories, as did his fellow police chiefs.
Yet another banquet was held at the Kasino after the killings of May 20, to celebrate the death of the local Poles. The story Zenon Tumalovič, the poet with his notebook of war, told me is gaining heft, dimension, as is his rage at all of it.
When there were no banquets, no birthday parties, there was always a card game, always liquor—a welcome stopover after a day at the office, or on an evening when your older sister was a nag. A place to drink, a place to sing—even without musical accompaniment.
MY POLISH FIXER, Maciej Bulanda, with his father, designed the mezuzah mounted at the entrance of the stunning new Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, on the site of what was once the central thoroughfare of the Warsaw ghetto. Maciej had been a critical member of the museum team from the ground up. I contacted him just when he had a stretch of time to join me in my research. With the aid of the Polish journalist Johanna Berendt, he cleared up, after a visit and some phone calls to the Warsaw branch of the Institute of National Remembrance—Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation (IPN), my uncertainties concerning Jonas Maciulevičius.
The Jonas Maciulevičius whose office was across the hall from my grandfather’s in the old, now defunct part of the Švenčionys police station and jail was, in fact, the same Maciulevičius Arunas Bubnys had told me about. He was extradited from France to Poland after the war and tried there as a war criminal because of the killings of Polish noncombatants after Beck’s death, as well as other acts deemed to be genocide by the Polish Supreme Court.
At the IPN archive in Gdansk, Maciulevičius’s prosecutorial case file filled ten volumes. As soon as permission came through, and Maciej’s studies allowed it (he was starting graduate school in London in the fall), we agreed that he would go to Gdansk and get copies of anything about my grandfather in the ten volumes. There might be nothing in the volumes, or perhaps only a mention of Senelis’s name. The massive file had only an elementary index, so it was impossible to get a cursory sense of the contents beforehand.
Jonas Maciulevičius
I WAS HITTING the three-year mark in my search. My deficit in terms of languages—not to mention the destruction, right at the war’s end, of German documents and Lithuanian security police records—left me not exactly hopeful, but I was resolute. Where was the film the Germans took at Poligon? In what vault, in whose attic or home safe in Germany? I made inquiries when I was in Berlin, without success. I hoped that in the images of the shootings there might be glimpses of the ones in charge, “the ones giving the orders”—those Vincas Sausitis pointed a finger at. Men who didn’t bother to put their names on a pay list, who took a shot after a certain amount of vodka, or because camaraderie and a demonstration of authority demanded it.
&
nbsp; Through my researcher and now friend in Berlin, Almut Schoenfield, I stumbled upon a curator in possession of hundreds of photo albums of German soldiers. Did one of them contain snapshots of Poligon or of the Švenčionys ghetto?
Several weeks later in London, I got access to the same collection, in the process of being digitized.
A pair of boots upright in a small autumn field, military issue, the owner of them, like Khone Zak’s father, buried headfirst off the side of the road, his legs sticking out; only this was not Khone Zak’s father in Podbrodz, but an unnamed man in an unnamed village. And those bodies slumped against the wooden siding of a barn—whose barn? Who were the dead, and what were the circumstances of their deaths? The absence of narrative made the images grotesque mysteries with no way to honor those in the frame. Beyond that, the lack of a cohesive story made me acutely aware of all that was missing in the information I had so far about Senelis.
Motive, means, method, opportunity, or some variation thereof: these create narrative. Senelis’s expressed anti-Semitism, KGB testimony that linked him to the selection after Beck’s death, a plethora of other research, a town and its surrounds starting to come to life through interviews and travel—I called it all, to myself, “ghost knowledge.” It was enough to haunt you, but not enough to flesh out one man’s actions in an area under his partial wartime jurisdiction. Not enough to get a clear grasp of his thoughts and feelings regarding the small and not-so-small decisions he made when he lived there.
CHAPTER 43