by Rita Gabis
“Where did he bury it?” I ask.
No one knew. It was my grandfather’s secret.
THE OLDEST MARYTĖ, who lives in Kupiškis, is the only family relative I met before this trip. Her father is Peter—or Petras. The previous summer, in a local hospital with heart trouble, she had checked out for the day to see me. Her wide face flushed easily. We sat that summer under an umbrella at a little café, stopping between spoonfuls of soup to hug. Her heart, I kept thinking, astonished and also worried that she had left the hospital for just our brief visit. In her seventies, smart and magnanimous, she exuded both frailty and strength. I hurt her feelings when I picked up the small café bill and paid it while she was inside washing her hands.
This winter visit, she is well. Flowers bloom on one sill of her neat apartment. In the living room a low table is covered with dish after dish. Rose, Petras (our driver), and I eat again. Candy in shiny wrappers fills a bowl. The potatoes are huge and steaming. We settle back. There is time now to talk.
She brings out several albums of photographs, some sent to her from my family in the States. It’s somehow jarring to see those faces here: myself as a child, Aunt Karina by a Christmas tree, my father holding a newspaper. I never knew those photographs had made their way to Lithuania. There are other photographs, taken at a Siberian logging camp where Marytė’s whole family was deported after the war for ten years.
(Marytė too, does not speak about it in my presence, but the experience of her family fills out the picture of how Senelis’s collaboration and his disappearance at war’s end brought suffering to the family he left behind. The Soviet administrative units under whose directives the secret police operated wanted my grandfather. If they couldn’t get him, they would get his relatives.)
Marytė describes the sight of fifty or perhaps seventy freight cars, how everyone being deported to work (not to prison camps) made and then dried bread that would last. Their freight car was number 50, sixty people or more crammed inside, her mother breastfeeding in the chaos. When the Soviet secret police had come to send them away, Marytė remembers one of them was a woman who kept taking out a little mirror to touch up her lipstick.
At the logging camp in the Altai region of Siberia, whenever packages of bread and pork fat arrived from their family, Marytė’s father Peter shared it with the others who lived in their barracks. The barracks was made of wood; there was no lock on the door, for there were no thieves. Marytė remembered the felt boots they wore, and her father falling in the cold, loading wood. Even so, young as she was, she came to feel at home there—it was what she knew, and so returning to Lithuania was very hard.
We leave Marytė not having eaten enough of her feast to please her, but with embraces all around. As Petras blasts the heat in the van and backs out of the parking lot in front of her apartment complex I ask Rose how close we are to Skapiškis, where according to the Lithuanian history published by a Soviet writer after the war—a bit of which my journalist friend from Vilnius had shared with me some time ago—Commandant Puronas sat behind a desk while a woman waited for the verdict on her husband to be pronounced by him. The husband was shot.
“Maybe twenty minutes from here,” Rose tells me, winding and unwinding a thick strand of her hair.
On a map I’ll look at back at my hotel, Skapiškis makes a scalene triangle—no side equal to another—with Gindviliai, the Puronas ancestral home, and Kupiškis, where we were so warmly greated by the oldest Marytė. It was in Kupiškis where my mother and her sister and brother stayed with Krukchamama for a time during the war, before my grandfather got his job with the Germans, and then again, right before before Senelis fled the country, the machinary of the German occupation crumbling as he ran.
* * *
* Please refer to the Puronas family tree.
CHAPTER 46
* * *
GONE
It takes a long time to drive back to Vilnius. The strange roads are mostly empty.
“Lithuanians don’t usually drive in the dark,” Rose says.
I ask her why.
She shrugs, as if to say, Why would anyone want to drive in the dark? “They don’t like it.”
A quarter moon glazes the white field stubble; then woods and a scrim of shadows I can’t see beyond. I imagine my grandfather, digging in the dark, digging and digging—a hole big enough for his BMW motorcycle. I have the branch cake wrapped in crinkly see-through paper. I have the printout of the Puronas family tree. Hands I’ve held, farewell embraces, long individual and group hugs with promises of return. Lovely, inquiring faces that will come to me often, in memory, in the photographs I go back to again and again. Lili Holzman was right: half of me is this. I’m not sure what that means, not sure that if or when I can create a coherent timeline of Senelis during the war, I will be so welcome in the homes I’ve just visited. But that seems churlish. “I want to know,” Danute had said. A few weeks later in his office in D.C., Michael MacQueen will mention that it is much harder, in some ways, for those who leave the home country. Perhaps not materially, not in terms of freedoms offered or denied, but something deeper, more complex—a dislocation that wrecks the heart or creates an emptiness that time only partialy remediates.
In the dark I wonder if all the silence imposed upon my Lithuanian relatives who stayed behind during the Soviet era makes them value “truth” or openness more—silence like a long shadow that stretched out over the country, into phone lines, under the carefully licked flaps of envelopes: oppressive, dulling, dangerous. Like Vaclav Wilcoitz in the Jewish cemetery in Švenčionėliai, the conversations with my Lithuanian family eluded the easy categories; the Lithuanians who refused to fully recognize the role their own population played in the decimation of the Jewish population of their county, those who argued for the equivalency of the Soviet occupation and the Jewish Holocaust.
In the small booklet about the deportations to Siberia I bought a few years back at the KGB Museum in Vilnius, one passage had stuck with me. “No one has been called to account … The West has chosen to forget these horrors … There is no grand museum in Washington, D.C., dedicated to those whose lives were destroyed by the communists.” Well, then build one, I’d thought. A thought as facile as any generality about the West or the East or, for that matter, the road I was traveling on—too full, wired from all the cakes and cookies and coffee and a cosseted sense of belonging equally matched by the absolute difference between the forces that had governed my own personal history up to now and the history that had dictated the postwar lives of my Puronas relatives. Except for one common denominator: silence.
I ASK PETRAS how much longer to Vilnius.
“Not too long,” he says. Then, “Far, I think, maybe.”
He’s like me, trying to mollify and say what he knows at the same time.
Every so often wisps of low, stratus clouds hide the moon, and the only light is the front beams of the van. I can’t see the forest. The fields are dark gray. I have my own simple equation about wartime. It only goes as far as the borderland, the life of my family, and the families whose stories have been unspooled for me over time. It’s this: who ends up dead, who ends up alive.
AT THE HOTEL there was another e-mail from Maciej Bulanda. I had hoped to go to Poland, to the IPN, from Lithuania this trip, but we were still held up by paperwork and permissions. There was yet another “official” letter I had to write. The ten-volume court case of Jonas Maciulevičius felt like a last stop for me. I was running out of archives to consult. I opened the curtains to the night and looked out. Cathedral Square, empty and lit up.
Why is it that the unobtainable takes on magical properties? I turned the light on again and wrote Maciej a strident e-mail about how critical it was that we get access. His “reading break” at grad school was coming up; once it passed, he would have no time to leave London for Poland to be my proxy at the IPN.
I thought of all I hadn’t said to Danute and Egidijus about Senelis. How his crony Malinauskas’s compl
aint traveled for several years up the Gestapo food chain. Copies are signed off on by Ostuf (short for OberSTUurmFührer) Paul Müller of the SD, the security branch of the SS; Hschaf (SSHauptscharführer) Rauca, the staff sergeant who for a time worked under Joachim Hamann with his shooting squad; and the deputy commander of the Gestapo in Lithuania, Heinrich Schmitz. (The same Rauca, along with Schmitz, took part in the selection in the Kovno ghetto on October 28, 1941.)
But during the many months in which different ranks of the Gestapo and other branches of the SS reviewed the Malinauskas complaint—which included proof of Senelis’s permission to the Jew Elena Las to live outside the ghetto and his decree that three Jewish men should be given the right to leave the Todt labor camp, where beatings were frequent and rations were even scarcer than in the Švenčionys ghetto—Senelis kept working as chief of security police in Švenčionys, until his brief stint at Lukiškės prison and a demotion and transfer to Panevėžys, where he was a member of the security police under the Gestapo.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, a small plane carried me over Vilnius and the winter woods beyond. What had they looked like in 1943? As the ground shrank beneath me, I thought of Chaya and her partisan group and Yitzhak Arad with the Chapayev unit commanded by Markov, of the order from the Soviet partisan leadership that required Arad and his mates from the liquidated Švenčionys ghetto to hand over all but a few of the weapons they had obtained with such daring and risk. But before the plane even took off, before we bumped our heads on the low ceiling above the seats and squeezed through the narrow aisle with our carry-ons, I had asked our driver Petras, as we made the turn to the airport, if he knew anything about a wartime labor camp nearby during the war.
He didn’t.
It was such an important destination in Lili Holzman’s journey during the war, and Petras knew so much about local wartime geography. I wondered, not about the veracity of Lili’s testimony, but about the many structures of work and death—prisons, really, even if they were not officially called that during the war, nor labeled “concentration camps”—that have simply vanished.
IN ŽIEŽMARIAI, DUE to the kindness of their “hoarse” German commander, Lili’s little sister Khanale and Lili’s mother were given permission to join Lili in 1943. They have news. Lili’s grandfather is gone, starved to death in the Svir ghetto.
He was a man who liked to eat—a big guy. We would always laugh that he would eat soup out of a serving bowl and that his fruit compote he would eat also out of a big bowl. So imagine, he was almost eighty and he had nothing to eat. When I was a young girl I would imitate my grandfather burping, three burps and one big one.
Lili’s Aunt Manya, who baked such wonderful bread, has been mowed down with her husband at Ponar (Ponary). People know about the shooting pits at Ponary. “The news traveled … it just moved.”
As she has done before, Lili’s mother is allowed to function as a dentist for the workers, with Khanale beside her, but shortly after their arrival another change: trucks appear, to take them to Ponar, they think. They’re loaded on and driven not to Ponar but to the Kovno ghetto, which to Lili seems like civilization. “Look—we saw that there was life, and that people were dressed, and we even saw new hairstyles.” Two cousins of her father invite them to their house to bathe and get organized. “I remember very clearly walking into their house, and in one of the rooms they had a light fixture that was pink, and I was astonished. I said to myself—well, people are still alive. And a bed. I saw a bed.”
In the recent ghetto past, ten thousand ghetto prisoners have been taken to the Ninth Fort and shot. (My grandfather still has his job in Švenčionys at this time, still hasn’t been arrested for a crime I haven’t been able to pinpoint, still hasn’t been driven past the Ninth Fort in Kaunas/Kovno, aware of the killing zone it has become and afraid for his life.)
Lili works for a time digging peat outside of Kovno and starts to write poetry. Her shrewd mother finds her way to the Judenrat and is given the job of assistant to the head of the orphanage for children whose parents have already been exterminated. “And this [the job] was very important because there was food at the orphanage and she could bring little Khanale every day and Khanale could have food from the orphanage.” Work—where, for how long, what kind—was, as the historian Joachim Tauber said to me, everything.
They eat a soup they nickname yushke—a Ukrainian word for a fish soup with many variations. For them, “watered-down—tasteless, with little bits of things floating in it, peels and vegetables.” There are also very small portions of horsemeat: diced, cooked with onions and made into meatballs, one hundred grams every two weeks. (Lili—unusual for her—left her narrative of the past briefly, mentioned a current scandal in France about horsemeat being passed off in restaurants as, well, some other meat. She smiled a smile full of irony: “I remember the taste of it today as though it was a delicacy.”)
Through her mother’s connections in the Judenrat, Lili gets work at a sock factory called Silva outside the ghetto. She works at night, checking the socks for defects, first bland silk, then dyed. (Today she gets compensation from the German company for her work there, but only because when the paperwork came from the company regarding the compensation, she agreed not to write “forced labor.” Otherwise, no compensation.)
Older workers, particularly those emboldened by their knowledge of Lithuanian, steal socks by wrapping them around their bodies under their clothes, and then sell them in the ghetto.
Then—“a smell,” Lili calls it, that this isn’t going to continue, something is going to change.
So we’re at the end of 1943. It’s after Stalingrad and the German defeat … There was one job at the airport that was a very, very hard job, but people feared … with the Germans, your fear was always not to work—so people went anyway to the airport. There was an old kind of base outside … It had been used as a prisoner-of war camp, so the Kovno Judenrat decided that instead of moving people every day, because it was a far walk, they would put two thousand people that work in the airport to live in the base because it was only a kilometer away. Because there is a sense of some kind of doom, everybody tries to organize a job for themselves that they feel is necessary. There was a feeling that they were going to close the ghetto.
But once again Lili’s mother was able to convince the camp authorities to let her practice dentistry at the base near the airport instead of going out each day for the punishing work. When they arrived at the base, her mother claimed that Lili, at sixteen and a half, was a certified nurse, and the “Germans were so stupid they believed it.” But then, she had worked with her mother before. She knew how to hand her mother a piece of equipment or hold the head of a patient undergoing an extraction. Because they were part of a very small medical team at the base—a doctor, his mother, and a nurse and her mother—they were spared sleeping on the floor in the big halls. They had bunk beds. They treated only the two thousand workers, not the German personnel.
Lili told me several times that the base was near the Vilnius airport. In fact there was a Soviet POW “stalag” in Vilnius, but it appears more likely that the airport was the S. Darius and S. Girėnas Airport/Aleksotas, closer to the Kovno ghetto. The Germans sent ghetto workers there to break ground and build out the small runway for a functional military aviation center. Airport workers were known as “aerodromshchikes”; theirs one of the most taxing, dirty jobs.
This one day—I remember because we stayed within the camp, we worked in the camp—it was the twenty-seventh of March [1944]. So there was a building that was used as a laundromat. That’s an exaggeration … that’s where we all went to wash our clothes, in these big pots where you could boil clothes … You know, by hand we washed clothes. So I went to wash and the door was open, but suddenly I see a German soldier and he closed the door and locks me in the laundry room, and says, “Don’t go out.” And my mother is in [a separate] building with my sister. I could look out the window … saw that they were leading the old people and ch
ildren outside of [that] building. I remember very clearly that they organized them near the gate.
I saw my little sister Khanale walking hand in hand with Mrs. Rubincheck, the mother of Frieda, the twenty-year-old camp nurse … Mrs. Rubincheck … has her arm around my sister. The gate opens, and I see a big black truck pull up. The doors of the truck are open and I see them start to throw the old people and the children in—I’m watching it all from the window in the laundry. All at once a German soldier walks into the laundry room. I hid, and from my hiding place I see him take his gun and with the gun’s bayonet start puncturing the big washing vats in case somebody was hiding a child there.
Several trucks had come. They pulled away and about two hours later the laundry was finally opened up. I got out and ran to my mother [who was in the room with bunk beds in the adjacent building]. The first thing I did was hit my mother. I yelled, “Why did you let them take Khanale?” And my mother explained that she had hidden my sister underneath the bunk bed, but they had a large dog and the dog had smelled her sister and the soldiers pulled her out. My mother told them, “Take me with my child.” But they had unleashed the dog on my mother and the dog jumped up on her and knocked her down. She must have lost consciousness, she said, for maybe just under a minute. When she opened her eyes, Khanale was gone, the dog was gone, and the Germans were gone.
Our girl was gone.
They took all the children, not only my sister.