by Rita Gabis
Before her death, my great-grandmother Barbara made sure that Bronė and the rest of the family knew how Danielius’s widow, Vaclova, and the two children struggled. A doctor had told her that Vaclova, weak from grief and work, should eat cabbage for strength, but that year—the horrible year of her husband’s death—their cabbages would not grow. “The women from the village were bringing many pots of sauerkraut for her. That shows how good and sensitive were the people of Gindviliai.” Vaclova regained her strength. She worked her land. She could slaughter a pig on her own. So went Bronė’s history, passed down from my namesake.
We are all quiet after the story of Danielius. The cakes and homemade cookies sit on the table. To break up the sadness, I reach for a cookie, buttery, rich. “Good,” I say.
Bronė smiles. She’ll give me some to take with me later. In the moment, in the bright room, they’re the best cookies I’ve ever eaten. I want her to be happy. I want the story of my family to contain happiness.
“What about Kazimieras, Senelis’s father, what kind of man was he?” I ask.
Česlovas and Bronė look at each other and smile. Then Česlovas leaves the room for a minute and comes back with a copy of the Puronas family history that Bronė had written. He points to a word I can’t understand. It was Senelis’s father’s nickname: skersai. Česlovas translates; as a nickname it means “he who walks crosswise or not in a straight line”—bestowed upon Kazimieras because he was stone drunk most of the time.
“Alcoholic,” we all say together, and my hosts nod and laugh, and I laugh with them, even as I think of the barrels of vodka at Poligon and the smell of cherry wine on Senelis’s breath and the dark, deep green of the bottles he’d bring to the Vineyard on his summer visits.
Coffee is poured. We pile the desserts on our plates. On the wall across from the table hang several of Česlovas’s and Bronė’s immediate and extended family trees, full of leaves and branches and birds and graves and broken offshoots, all drawn by Česlovas. I try to say something about my research and Senelis, but Bronė plants herself next to me on the couch to talk about Babita, who had stayed with Bronė’s family for quite a while after she was freed from the Gulag and came back to Lithuania.
Babita was very kind. (Kindness was a word my mother and her sister had reserved for their own Babita, Barbara.) She was very malnourished when she returned, and it took her a long time to get any strength back.
It is from Bronė that I learn about the needlework done from bandages and my grandmother’s chain-smoking. It is also from Bronė that I learn what others would repeat later in the day: the match with my grandfather was no good—everyone knew it from the start. They were too different.
“She didn’t have any clothes,” Bronė said of my grandmother upon her return.
The family dressed her and fed her, and no, my grandmother would say very little of her time in the Gulag.
On one of my earlier visits to Lithuania, Rose had found a woman who claimed she’d known my grandmother in Siberia, had met her briefly in some holding cell, shortly before Babita was allowed to return to Lithuania. I had interviewed the woman at her home; she spoke rapidly, without making eye contact. She said my grandmother had obviously had a nervous breakdown, since she shook so much. I shared this with Bronė who assured me that the shaking was a motor disorder. There had been no breakdown. Tuburculosis, torture, typhus—but the woman who came back to them in the mid-1950s had all her faculties and baked wonderful sweets. She endured.
Babita was kind.
At first she had no notion of the lives of the family she’d lost, or the possibility of joining them. For the first time in my life I wondered if she had any idea what Senelis had done and where he had been during the war, if she had wanted to know when she returned from Siberia.
When I look closely at the first picture taken of her after the Gulag, one hand behind her back, something is out of joint in her posture. I can’t stop staring at her ankles. Her hands are much larger than I’d imagined, long fingers good for work with a small crochet hook or a threading needle. There is a slight vacancy in her smile. I wonder what shape her teeth were in, how many times in fifteen years she unwrapped the rags around her thin ankles to freeze out the lice. A librarian. I vaguely remember someone telling me that there was a protocol for the photograph of the re-educated prisoner come home: a particular backdrop, the best (one’s own or borrowed) shoes, and a new dress—a healthy, good Communist. Perhaps that’s the reason for the hidden arm, why she faces forward, though her body turns away.
Babita in 1956
When we leave, Česlovas slyly disappears for a second, comes back with a large accordion and makes music out of our good-byes. When the music ends, after they have wrapped up cookies and chocolates for me, Česlovas and Bronė tell me to e-mail, to stay in touch now that we have met, after all this time.
THERE ARE TWO Marytės I see on this winter day. The first Marytė also lives in Panevėžys not far from Česlovas and Bronė. Her father was Senelis’s brother Povilas, seven years younger. Widowed in 1975, Marytė ushers us into her roomy house with her sister, a new nephew, and her lively daughter-in-law. She takes my face in her hands many times. Smart, she is a retired teacher like Aunt Karina. Petite, yet sturdy, she wears a lovely scarf around her neck and a pin on her sweater. I wish I’d worn a nicer dress, cleaned my boots.
“Teach,” we say together when I tell her about my own teaching.
We laugh then, and hold hands. The younger sister Marytė cares for is silent. A bit like a stunned child in my presence, she is shepherded gently to each place we sit, each room we walk through. She is a casualty of the cruelty inflicted upon the family by the Soviet secret police after my grandfather fled Lithuania, and the Soviets were again in power. Night after night, for fifteen years, the secret police came to Marytė’s childhood home. The head of the secret police in that region was actually a Latvian, notorious for his brutality. Marytė speaks of those years, describes the horror of it animatedly, moves about the room as if the police were here now, here again.
“Puronas was commandant, and you too stole from the Jews,” was one of the accusations the Latvian head of the NKVD made.
A rote accusation? I wonder.
“Jews came to your grandfather with propositions, but he never took anything,” she says.
How do you know that? I want to ask, but don’t. This is what she was told, and very little else. The NKVD chief would drag her father into the yard and tell him to run so he could be shot in the back—run in the snow, run in the night, run in the late light of summers. After fifteen years of it, his health went. The secret police only went after family members with the Puronas last name.
On the night of one of these visitations from the secret police, Marytė’s very pregnant mother was struggling to climb down a ladder from the attic when one of the secret police screamed at her to hurry. Startled, she fell and later gave birth to the child who is now the silent, slow-moving woman who walks with us into a room off the living room, her face shiny, her eyes, when she looks at me, without curiosity or comprehension.
Marytė and her daughter-in-law, who has donned a brightly woven traditional dress to show part of the past to me, lead me into a side room where a huge hand-painted dowry chest, given to Marytė by Great-Grandmother Barbara’s sister, Ona, sits. It’s magnificent. I touch the raised dots of paint on the old wood. Is it big enough to hold all I carry from both sides of my family? The mix of sweetness and confusion is overwhelming; for a second I send up a silent prayer to Great-Grandmother Barbara that she lay a soft spell on me.
The gift of the chest was a rarity, she tells me, for Ona was as parsimonious as Barbara was kind. Yes, Great-Grandmother Barbara was a spell caster. She had a spell for snakebite. She had other spells. Ona knew them too, but unlike her sister, Barbara, she did not gift them to any of the family. This, I learn, is what you are supposed to do with a spell: pass it down to the younger generation, treasure the old knowledge, keep it
alive.
We go back to the living room. Even with the language barrier it feels as if there is so much to say. Marytė bestows her own gifts upon me. First is flax woven by my great-grandmother. I hold the fabric up to my face, the linen scratchy and soft at the same time. I wish I’d known her, Barbara who would not let someone in need leave her house without some trifle, a bit of food, a coin.
After the linen comes a gift of amber. After the amber, the rest of the cakes and chocolate.
My grandfather was beloved, Marytė tells me, but he was not spoken of very often over the years. Except for a mention, of course, of his fondness for a good card game and the fact that Ona, his wife, in her day was a beauty and spoke Polish and German along with Lithuanian. I had not known my Babita was a beauty. The trouble Marytė’s family experienced at the Soviet’s hand after the war appears to be directly connected to Senelis’s “criminal activity,” but she doesn’t say so. She was a child, after all, when her mother fell from the ladder and her father ran, his back a target.
It’s hard to leave the warmth of this gathering. The small narrative I present to them about my research is, as with Česlovas and Bronė, less important in the moment than our meeting. They actually know very little about my grandfather during the war, but they know the Jews were massacred. “Everywhere,” Marytė acknowledges. But it is time for family pictures. It is time to hold hands again, time to walk with waves and tears out the door.
“Ah, what a nice family you have!” Rose says.
It is so much easier to be the stranger from afar, welcomed briefly into the family fold, than with my Lithuanian family in the States. I grew up knowing my mother’s story, but knew nothing of these people who are part of me through Senelis.
At our next stop there will be much more talk about Senelis. Everything I hear about him I immediately compare to all the archival material I’ve waded through: myth and fact, lived experience and KGB inventions, survivors’ statements, photographs. I feel alternately like a double agent and an idiot. I feel strange unto myself. I feel unknown but loved.
THE FACE OF a young woman peers through lacy curtains at the cold and the sound of the van’s engine. What is she looking at? I take her in through the back-seat window. A few seconds later, a well-fed, intrepid cat leads the charge. Kristina, the woman in the window, and the rest of the family come out to the gravel driveway; they are the family of Danute, a widow whose husband, Petras, was the son of Senelis’s brother Danielius, the one who died of blood poisoning in 1945. (That is a story I’ll hear again in summer, when Danute’s grandson sits at our dinner table in New York City and tells me he wants to know everything I’ve learned about Senelis.)
There is a version of cepelinai, Lithuanian dumplings. There are meats. There is fish and chicken. There is sweet layered pastry with custard. To my right, dark-haired Kristina, Danute’s daughter, begins to cry when we start to talk about the family. Her face goes red, and the tears fall onto her plate. They all remember Uncle Roy’s visit. Afterward Kristina visited him and Aunt Aggie in Kansas, and they would talk on the phone, and she misses him so much; now there are just phone calls with my aunt. “We cry together,” Kristina says.
I hadn’t seen Uncle Roy for several decades before he died. I should be crying too at the loss of him, along with my lovely young Lithuanian relative. But I am the one who left the family when I was still a girl, and part of the price of that leavetaking is, oddly enough, an absence of tears at a moment like this. The gift of remembered closeness.
Danute, her son, Egidijus, and Kristina, recall how they all drove with Roy to Švenčionys, how the large, slow-moving man my uncle was got out of the car and ran as soon as they came to Gedmino Street (where he and my mother and her sister and Krukchamama lived when Senelis was chief of security police), and then stood in the place I stood the last summer, and stared at the patch of green, the vanished past.
“But one part of town, he wouldn’t go near,” says Egidijus, round-faced, with quick eyes.
His sister and mother echo him. It was a part of town where shooting regularly took place.
When I begin to talk about my research, about being half Lithuanian-American, half Jewish, Egidijus and Danute begin to tell me bits and pieces about the family during wartime. Danute tilts her head a bit and smiles when she looks at me, as if looking for part of her own past. Egidijus talks in bursts, trails off, and then his mother or sister fills in what comes next.
“Your grandfather warned the Jews in Kupiškis when it started,” Danute says.
(So he was there, near Skapiškis—Commandant Puronas—when the Soviets fled and the Germans trampled in.)
She continues, remembering what was told to her by someone in the family, perhaps her husband, who had heard it from Bronė or the Marytė we haven’t visited with yet today.
“Jews came to Senelis’s brother Petras and his wife in Gindviliai for help. It was a young couple, and they gave a pair of long white socks and a gold watch, but our family said we don’t want to take it and told them not to go back to Kupiškis. Someone had told them there was an escape route through Kupiškis, a way to get to Palestine. They were pleaded with not to go, but they went, and they insisted on leaving the socks and the gold watch.”
“And they were killed,” I say.
“Yes, all the Jews in Kupiškis,” the matriarch Danute confirms.
Again, I’m told that the family didn’t want the socks and the watch, and that soon enough white bands came banging at the door and demanded the family hand over anything Jews had given them.
Where was my grandfather? According to Danute and her family, he was in the area warning the Jews to leave, warning them that death was coming. He was, I was told, the only commandant in the family.
Egidijus speaks rapid fire: “I got the worker list [of those employed during the Poligon massacre] from the archive to see if his name was there.”
I tell him I got the same list and looked for Pranas Puronas.
I make a gesture of wiping sweat from my brow. What a relief, Egidijus says, that he wasn’t on it. I nod and smile back at him. I’m impressed that Egidijus did his own micro search about Senelis, but I’m remembering the passage in the shooter Sausitis’s statement where he elaborates on the fact that the higher-ups never signed anything, never put their names on paper, but were shooters too—roaming free.
I mention the massacre of the Poles in 1942.
Egidijus clears that up too. “He just had to sign some list. He had nothing to do with it. Ramute [my uncle Roy] told us about it.”
Danute clears her throat. “Your Senelis wrote us when your mom and dad married. All he said was that your mother had married a Jew. Nothing else.”
I’m dazed by all the meetings. I keep drifting off to those white socks and the gold watch. Why did the couple leave them, when they might have been needed to secure passage to Palestine? The long white socks the mark of the observant male, worn to synogogue. Precious. Perhaps the couple were newlyweds. Did the young man unroll his socks in front of my long-ago relatives? Were they stashed in a quick bundle? How did the white bands know to come knocking on my family’s door? Probably they went everywhere.
I take Kristina’s hands and tell her if she keeps crying, I will cry too. She stops. And starts. And finally smiles.
With Rose translating, I begin a small narrative about Senelis: how his job gave him a modicum of power, how there was a huge massacre of the Jewish population under his watch in Švenčionys. How my mother does not want to know any of the details, anything I’ve dredged up in the archives. So I won’t speak of it to her, and won’t speak of any of it to them if they prefer.
Danute sits straight, her chin high, looks in my eyes. “I want to know.”
Rose gives me a look—So go on, speak. But I don’t know how to begin. There is not yet any way to clarify the information I’ve found. How do I speak about Chaya Palevsky? I briefly tell the story of Mirele Rein, and then quickly, guiltily—for they have be
en so kind to me, all of them—I talk about Senelis drinking with Moshe Gordon and how he hated the Germans who reneged on their promise of Lithuania for Lithuanians. Egidijus nods, though I can see he knows there is more. Perhaps not more that is “true,” but more than the brief outline I’ve given them, like one of Chaya’s quick sketches, though without her local knowledge. Maciej Bulanda and I are still sending official requests to the IPN in Poland; I am still reading archival material.
I don’t know how to describe the years of research. I don’t even know how to talk about the day before, when Rose and Viktorija and I, at the Lithuanian Central State Archives, went through roughly four thousand arrest cards from Lukiškės prison to separate out the ones from the Švenčionys region.
The cards of those sent down from Švenčionys to Vilnius to be killed do not say who made the arrest. It could have been Senelis. It could have been Jonas Maciulevičius. The first card I found was for one of Yitzhak Arad’s closest friends, Gershon Bak. I smell Senelis’s breath and feel the heat of the porch in summer when he asks me not to be like my father. I mention Poligon, and the faces of my relatives turn toward mine, waiting, but I have no more words to talk about any of it.
I hate myself for trying to be ingratiating, not saying too much, not wanting to be cast out. It is my own private fear. It isn’t put on me by Danute and her children, who are, just as Rose says when we are back in the van, “a very wonderful, very intelligent family.”
And even as I agree with her, I’m thinking of what, according to Egidijus, Senelis told my Uncle Roy: “I never took anything from the Jews.”
And one last detail about my grandfather, shared with a mix of seriousness and levity. His motorcycle with a sidecar—yes, it was German, they confirmed. He buried it in Lithuania before he fled the country because he loved it so much, was so proud of it, was sure he would return one day to dig it out of the ground and speed away.