by Rita Gabis
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JUMP
CHAYA PALEVSKY NÉE PORUS, FEBRUARY 2012
Švenčionėliai train station
[In April 1943] they announced that Sventsian ghetto and all around would be evacuated to a larger ghetto—either Kovno or Vilna. Did people believe it? They wanted to believe it. In the ghetto they always made you believe there will again be a future. The reason given was that there were a lot of partisans in the area and they wanted to take everyone to a “safer place.”
You had no choice, no place to run. It was before Pesach; they told you take whatever you can, you will be there, you will need it. Already, they were preparing lists and unfortunately our family was put on the list to Kovno. We had family in Vilna and there was a room for us there, we’d been on that list. But someone bribed their way on, so we got taken off. We didn’t have anyone in Kovno, but okay—this had happened.
This was typical of Chaya in the small chunk of our time together, an attitude modeled perhaps by her mother—be prepared, stay “intact.” The winds shift; shift with them.
It happened at that time (the Germans didn’t know) we had a hidden hospital in a big house in the ghetto. One of the front rooms was a library with books and shelves, but the shelves opened, and behind there were two rooms with beds and people sick with typhus. If people outside knew there was typhus in the ghetto, they would burn it down instantly. So my sister Rochl and I worked day after day, hidden, and no one knew. My other sister took sick and then I took sick with typhus at the time when you had to leave for Kovno.
Malke Porus
They took me home on a stretcher. I told my mother, “I’m not going. I cannot move”—104-degree fever. “Leave me here because I will be a burden to you. I cannot walk.”
My mother said: “Chaya, you are going with me. I will dress you and take you along. Or I will undress myself, lie down in bed with you, and we will both be killed.”
“Mother, I don’t want you to be killed because of me.” So I promised her I will be there.
“There” was the train station in Nowe-Święciany (Švenčionėliai), where ghetto residents had been assigned trains to either Kovno or Vilna. According to Yitzhak Arad, thirty-three cars for Kovno, only two for Vilna.
The Chief of the Partisans arranged it; a few of them had found out about the repatriation from the ghetto, so they came to take the rest of the Sventsian ghetto partisan group to the woods. They didn’t know that I was sick and couldn’t go—then they came and saw me in bed with a high fever. I promised my mother that the two partisans would bring me later to Nowe Sventsian. I told her, “Mother go, don’t worry—I will meet you there.” She dressed me and left.
Yeschik Gertman and another partisan took me under their arms and carried me twelve kilometers to the station. The train cars were already closed up. When they carried me I felt so wet—maybe the temperature broke—I felt a little better. I could stand. A few minutes before the train was to leave, Gertman stepped up on the steps of the train and I after him … on the steps, not even inside the train.
At the request of the Germans, Jacob Gens, the head of the Vilna ghetto, had helped to organize the repatriation. He was actually in one of the two train cars bound for Vilna, in a cabin for police that was the only one not locked from the outside. Residents of the now-forsaken Švenčionys ghetto were surprised and alarmed when Jewish policemen from Vilna slid the train car doors shut and bolted them, but the presence of Gens at the outset was reassuring.
On the steps all of a sudden, Gertman said, “Chaya, please jump. Jump!”
I jumped—and he jumped after me just as the train started moving.
He said, “I had a premonition. I don’t want to go on this train. We will find another train and go to Vilna, and then find a way to Kovno and meet your parents.”
I wasn’t wearing the star, and we began to move a little farther from the station so people wouldn’t notice us. I was blond in those days, and he was tall—we were like Gentiles. We laughed and spoke Polish, as if we were two young people without any cares on a sunny spring afternoon. When people looked our way, one of us would say, “Oh, we wanted to say good-bye to our friends.”
Gertman had a train worker’s shoulder band with a particular insignia, and sometimes on his missions, he would use it. Now, still near the station, we waited. In the evening a commercial train came through; cattle cars—one car with straw, the other with cattle. He helped me jump into a car without cattle, then he jumped in after me and we crawled deep into the straw. The train was headed for Vileika, a station not far from Vilna, maybe ten miles away or less. In Vileika, the train would stop and we could crawl out.
Yeschik Gertman had a brain. I knew him from our time in the ghetto, but we were in two different environments: mine was Polish; his was Yiddish. He was like an open encyclopedia, full of common sense. He knew everything. In the dark, the train car opened, and before we could be noticed, we jumped again. We rolled, with hay on us, down the incline from the track and lay there until early morning. From the Vilna ghetto, a group would be coming to work on the Vileika train tracks, and Gertman knew the leader. We would be able to pretend we were workers with that group and make our way to Vilna.
We both had guns—I had a small Belgium. No one noticed. The leader of the work group hid it for me. We had trained to shoot in the ghetto in Sventsian. So we came to Vilna.
IT HAPPENED THAT, already, there were a lot of friends from different towns that we knew from the ghetto in Sventsian in the Vilna ghetto. Some of them belonged to our group, and we were in touch with the FPO [Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye—the partisan group from the Vilna ghetto] underground. And so we told them what our aim is. They wanted us to stay.
“No, no—we are looking to go to Kovno because my parents are there.” They looked at me like I was from another planet.
“Chaya, you did the right thing. You are in the right place. Don’t think about going to Kovno.”
They told me everyone on the other trains was killed at Ponary.
I became a stone. I couldn’t say a word. Couldn’t cry, couldn’t understand. All of a sudden I thought: It’s impossible. It’s not true. I was numb.
They took me to an apartment and inside, into the kitchen. They put a curtain up in the kitchen with a cot behind it—a place. You know, I wasn’t myself. I didn’t know what to think. I felt I am all alone; I have no one now. [She puts her hand over her mouth.] No tears. Everything upside down. And I thought, my goodness, my mother wanted to save me by going with her and she was so worried I will be killed and here they are all killed and I am alive.
Chaya dabs at her eyes with a paper napkin. It can’t be described, she says, the feeling—her family dead, with the exception of her brother Itzik (also a partisan) and Bronia, the oldest of her sisters. “The feeling,” she says again, and then is very quiet for several moments. We both sit.
Then Chaya leaves the reverie behind us.
I became my own mother. “What should I do, Mom?” For me, the moment was unforgettable. I felt like her spirit turned in me. She was with me. I became her. For myself, I became my own mother. That’s what I felt. “What should I do now?” I thought, Mom, whatever you tell me to do—I always listened to you. You were very smart, so show me the way, show me what I should do. I talked to myself. I talked to my mother. Until now I have episodes that my mother is with me; she is always with me. Whenever I have to decide. She is with me, my best friend.
This was in April. In May, the Vilna ghetto used to have special theater events … They had a concert on May 1. They were not allowed to call it “May day” because of Communism, so they called it “spring festival.” At that time, in the ghetto, I found friends of one of my oldest sisters; one was Avrom Sutzkever [the poet], and they said to me, “Chayale, come with us to the concert, come, it will do good for you.” One young man, I learned his name later—Rabinovich—he played the violin and he played Pablo de Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen (Gypsy Airs). This is
the last thing my father played in the ghetto before he gave his violin away to be “hid” upon his leavetaking. I broke out in such hysterical crying, no one could stop me: there was a doctor there and he came to me and said, “Take her home. Let her cry.”
I cried all night.
In the morning, I felt so at ease. The tears had been pressing on me—I let them go. With the other partisans of my group—we were prepared. The FPO wasn’t ready to go, but we decided we will take the rest of the partisans in the ghetto; we knew they had some ammunition from our group that came from Sventsian. We decided that, on our own, we would go out together [to fight, as clandestine partisans, on behalf of the murdered and incarcerated Jews] with a group of working people on the highways, and that’s what it was and we went out of the ghetto. Forty people and we made it.
Sarasate composed Zigeunerweisen in 1878; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made it a great favorite of Sherlock Holmes. In the face of the unsolvable, what better than a bow on the strings, a piece that is wild, and sweet, and sad? I listened to it after my interview with Chaya. I’m listening to it now.
V
Puronas ancestral grave in Gindviliai—the writing is in Kupiškis dialect and Latin letters
CHAPTER 44
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JANUARY 2014
Back to Lithuania again. Sixteen degrees below, breathing the night air was like inhaling dark, pure oxygen.
On the first hop of my flight, from JFK to Frankfurt, the flight attendants woke us in the middle of the transatlantic night; we were turning around—far out to sea already—for an emergency landing in St. John’s, Newfoundland. A woman had had heart trouble. An hour or so later we landed at the small airport. Several medics in dark blue ferried the woman on a stretcher down the aisle opposite mine and out of the plane. Would she die that night? Would she tell the story for years to come with just a tinge of embarrassment, or simply gratitude and awe: They turned the whole plane around to save my life!
Instead of empathy, I grumbled with other grumblers—the long delay, connections missed, etc. Others were gracious, concerned, asking the flight crew about the condition of the sick one. I flashed on my sudden return to the hospital in New York when things went bad for me postsurgery, each breath a knife between my shoulder blades. I pressed my face against the dark window, searching for an ambulance. Would the woman get the right medical care here? I wasn’t grumbling anymore. She’d frightened me. I was frightened for her.
My airline had only two flights out from Frankfurt to Vilnius each day. I watched the day draw down out the lounge windows. Intermittently I cataloged what the ill passenger’s situation might be: pulmonary embolism, heart attack, clots in her arteries, a thoracic aneurysm like me—no, if she had a bursting aneurysm, she might have been dead before the plane made it back to St. John’s. Another stranger whose fate I’ll never know. Too many now.
Almost midnight that night, our small plane from Frankfurt landed in Vilnius. There was no heat on in the airport; most of the staff had gone home. I blew on my hands until the baggage tumbled onto the short track, then out the double doors, and there was Petras bundled in a heavy jacket—the first time I’d seen him with a hat on his head. I was glad to see him, to be here, glad to be alive. I’d come for more archival work and to do what I’d not done in any of my previous trips: meet with some of my Lithuanian family.
CHAPTER 45
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ŠAKOTIS
They had been waiting for me: Marytė with her flushed cheeks and warmth and cutlets and the gift of the blue knitted shawl; Danute’s family with the gift of šakotis (“branch”), a cake in a waffly tree shape, sweet and long-lasting. The Lithuanian national cake, it is sister to a Polish version, if you follow the trail of recipes and time. It’s a cake made on a spit, rich and yolk yellow. Take it back to New York with you! They’d all heard I’d been traveling in and out of the country over the past several years, but why hadn’t I come to visit?
I’d been afraid to meet them.
I was afraid they would hate me for the research I was doing. More and more, my mother’s terror had grown: “something” I might find out about Senelis, if it came to light, would shame her in her community. Since she did not want to know what I was actually discovering, there was no way for her to mediate her anxiety. Senelis was her father, and I was dismantling part of her hold on him, her memory of him. Any fear she had, any enmity toward me, was legitimate. On my end, it was in part what I thought to be her outsize fear that made me keep digging. Under her nonmemory, what was there a memory of? What was brutal enough and big enough to make her imagine someone would paint a swatiska on her front door, friends shun her, a revelation undo her?
I never wanted to experience again, as I had at Ruta Sepetys’s reading at the Lithuanian embassy, the feeling of being both split apart and erased. Still, I was sure Senelis’s relatives would have their own important stories about him and Babita, but I also wanted to tell them of my search for details about Senelis during wartime before they found out indirectly.
It was Aunt Karina, several years earlier, who, after our meeting on the Vineyard, had thoughtfully sent me a letter with contact information for my relatives in Lithuania along with detailed descriptions of who was related to whom. Before this winter trip, I unfolded the two-page list of names and descriptions, grateful for my aunt’s effort and struck by the irony that it was she, who’d been out of my life for so many years, who was helping me get in touch with the Puronas branch of the family.*
I took a dumb chance and phoned my mother to see if she might make a few advance calls to Lithuania on my behalf, to say I was coming. She spoke tersely. “No more.”
My first visit to Lithuania, I’d called her in the bright northern evening as soon as Petras dropped me at my hotel.
“I’m here, Mom, the place you talked about all those years!”
She was excited and moved and spoke about flax and the smells of the countryside, a homemade sauna at an aunt’s house, juniper branches, a handwoven sash a cousin gave her as a welcome gift, the beauty of Vilnius. In some strange way, I felt like I’d found her for the first time. Since then I’d been finding and losing her over and over.
ROSE AND PETRAS picked me up in the blue, dark morning at my hotel the day after I arrived. Because she knew I wouldn’t think of it, Rose had somehow found and bought, an hour earlier, a bouquet of fragile roses tinged with faint lavender. I brought the dry frozen air into the van with me, and she handed me the flowers—divided into four small bouquets, three roses in each. In Lithuania, she explained, you don’t give an even number of flowers unless someone has died.
The tiny bouquets seemed too small to give, even in their beauty.
“You don’t understand very well,” Rose said. “This is your family. They will be very happy. You will see.”
She was right.
Instead of Vilnius Highway, we took another road outside the city—everyone’s headlights on because of the early hour, the late dawn, and long night of the northern winter. The snowpack in the field was a fingertip layer of ice crystals. Petals and tissue paper soft in my hand, I went over the names of my relatives with Rose so I would pronounce them correctly. At each stop, I instantly forgot her brief lesson.
Česlovas (pronounced “Cheslŏvahs”) and Bronė (pronounced “Brana”) in Panevėžys were our first stop. Bronė’s father Danielius, born in 1910, had been eleven years younger than his brother, my Senelis.
Recently recovered from a stroke, Česlovas was gray and spry and thoughtful. He’d been an architect, and it was he who had drawn the marvelous family tree that Aunt Agnes had sent me a copy of. Bronė took the gift of flowers, and the couple ushered us into their light-filled apartment. In the living room, a table was laid with special glasses and cakes and meat and cheeses and the fancy plates for the guest from America.
I could not see my grandfather in Bronė. She’d been less than a year old, according to Aunt Karina, when Senelis fled the country with th
e children. In her sweater and skirt, with her lovely hands, Bronė reminded me of my mother more than anyone. She loaded up my plate with more food than I could eat in two days, and Česlovas, after our meal, made me a good copy on thick paper of the family tree.
In bits and pieces they told me part of the family history, beginning with the fate of Bronė’s father, Danielius, and her mother, Vaclova, after the Soviets retook Lithuania before the official end of the war.
Bronė’s father, “a well-known chorister” at his local parish had inherited the Puronas family house and farm in Gindviliai. The fleeing Soviets torched it at the beginning of the war, the cattle stolen along with the furniture, china, and clothes. All they left were the clay walls of the barn. Due to the “goodwill of the people,” timber and other building materials were donated for a start at a new life. So when the Soviets returned in 1945 and began conscripting men into the army, Danielius refused to join. If he went, who would run the farm? Who would take care of his wife and two children, Bronė and her brother? Danielius was arrested and sent from prison to prison, before eventually ending up in Lukiškės in Vilnius.
There Danielius suffered from a terrible hernia—perhaps the result of work on the farm, or from a beating by a guard. Finally, he was taken to a Vilnius hospital for surgery.
Bronė sets her plate back down on the glass table. The sun warms every corner of the room as if the cold outside is a fiction. She mimics her mother putting food and warm clothing into a carryall, something she could hold on her lap, with the food carefully wrapped so as not to spoil or spill. Bronė looks at me, then down at her lap and shakes her head. Her mother was traveling with her carryall to see a dead man. Blood poisoning had killed Danielius during the long-delayed surgery before Vaclova set foot in Vilnius. He died on April 29, 1945, right before the end of the war and of the Soviet conscription.