by Rita Gabis
The arrangement they had then—because everybody had to work, and there were families there with children—they organized little day-care centers for the kids, and an older woman would take care of the children. That day at four in the afternoon when the women were done working, they came to pick up their kids—they didn’t know. I remember today the screaming and crying of those mothers who came back and found out there were no children left.
CHAPTER 47
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GIVEN BACK
Part of the first page of a three-page procedural for Babita’s emigration to the United States
The way I remember the story—which, since I wasn’t there at the time, is probably inaccurate—is that Aunt Karina, who would never, as my mother and Senelis and Uncle Roy had at least partially done, accept the fact that her mother was lost to her, got a phone call one day. It was a friend from the Lithuanian-American community. Someone her friend knew had received a letter, and in the letter the writer had casually mentioned seeing Ona Puroniene walking down a street in Lithuania. Aunt Karina nearly dropped the phone.
As quickly as possible, contact was made. In discreet written communiqués—no point calling, my mother had said, since all the phones were tapped—Babita listed goods she could give certain Soviet officials, their underlings at first, then someone with greater power. And so the boxes of bribes were packed up and sent. Beautiful fabrics, velvet, I think Aunt Karina mentioned, were particularly sought after, yards and yards of it. Silk, children’s toys, aspirin. Canny, Babita would find out what a local politico might be yearning for, what his wife might thank him for a thousand times over (and perhaps be convinced to forgive a few sins), the date of his childrens’ birthdays. The energy of my Lithuanian family gathered around the return of the lost one. Because I was a child at the time, the whole enterprise had the feel of a strange and magical turn of events that would give back to my mother and her sister and her brother what I had had all my life. I do not know how Senelis reacted to the discovery that she was alive. On his certificate of naturalization from 1962, he lists his status as married; his wife “apart from me.”
As Anne Applebaum notes in Gulag: A History, it had become clear to the reform-minded Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that the vast Gulag system was draining the country’s coffers rather than expanding (with slave labor) the agricultural and industrial enterprises modernity required. Had Khrushchev not come to power, Babita might have lived out her days from camp to camp to camp. (In fact, my mother—always slow to remember/divulge family particulars beyond her own personal set of losses—ultimately told me, Babita was offered a job at a camp when her release was pending.) As a prisoner, she had won an “award” when, under her direction, her barracks was recognized for being the cleanest. She turned the offer down.
When the bloated Soviet bureaucracy in Lithuania made the decision to let Babita go, she was given twenty-four hours to ready herself and was then flown out of the country in the middle of winter in her summer clothes. She was only allowed to take her travel and emigration documents, the money for the fees to be paid, and the outfit she had hastily thrown on before boarding the transport at the end of December in 1965, first from Soviet Lithuania, then from Moscow into her childrens’ arms.
I WAS EIGHT years old on the night in late December 1965 at Chicago O’Hare when a blizzard kept her plane circling above us for hours. Hotel rooms had been rented to spare Babita the drive back to Hammond after her long flight, a drive the weather would have made impossible anyway. The snow fell like goose feathers, blanketing the tarmac as soon as it was plowed clear. The night swirled with the storm. Senelis was there, eyes red-rimmed from a complex of emotions I can’t imagine, along with my regal Aunt Karina, her husband, and my father, who had volunteered to welcome Babita on my mother’s behalf because she felt compelled to leave the airport to care for my year-old brother, who, with a babysitter in tow, was sick with a high fever at the hotel.
Our part of the terminal was mostly empty. Uncle Alan, short, animated, told jokes, got us candy from the snack machines. My father, of course, had a book to read and mark up with tiny hieroglyphics in the margins. The snowy dark outside the long windows seemed limitless, endless. I thought, It won’t happen, the plane won’t ever land.
Finally, the wild weather broke. I can’t remember if the passengers entered through the terminal doors or my family went out to meet Babita once the stairs, folding open and down under the spell of some invisible force, revealed the open door of the plane. It seemed a very long time before the small, shaking woman who was my grandmother appeared, helped by one of the flight crew. Aunt Karina, the first to reach her, placed a fur coat, a gift from Babita’s children, over the thin shoulders of my grandmother. I remember thinking she might collapse under the weight of the fur.
I do not recall whether she and Senelis embraced; they would not live together until the very end of their lives. Babita took my face in her trembling hands. Her voice quavered, and she spoke to me in Lithuanian: Dear one. Hello. Granddaughter. Exhausted from the long trip, her excitement and trepidation, she was fragile and wan. I’d expected another grandmother like Nana; Babita, with her quivering voice, was a ghost.
Even though it was the middle of the night, a Lithuanian feast covered the long table the hotel staff had set up in one of the rooms. Babita was matchstick thin. Was there a ham? A goose? I know there were dark breads and meats, perhaps octopus, maybe a turkey. There were candies wrapped in different colored paper. There were toasts, the pop of a bottle of champagne.
So many of Aunt Karina’s hopes had circled around her lost mother, but she didn’t really know the woman the Soviets had ripped from our family and then given back. The woman who had said, at one camp within sight of the Manchurian border, when one of the guards let her know if she walked toward the border he wouldn’t stop her, “Where would I go?” Broken down by imprisonment, elderly though she was not yet old, how could she find a life in a strange Asiatic country without money or family or language or a vision of hope that is, most often, the domain of the young?
Of course, she did, in fact, find a life, crossing many borders and settling in a place where the urban lifestyle, the language, the culture, were not her own.
During my recent visits with my Lithuanian relatives, they spoke of the letters she wrote them from America. She would have been happier in her home country, she told them. It was too different, the new home of her children. She (with the gifts of many languages) never learned more than a small bit of English. She hardly ever wore the fur coat.
When she first arrived among us, being young and improper, I was fascinated by her tribulations and asked questions. The only tidbit I was given was the word torture. During my reunion with Aunt Karina at my mother’s house, she described how the physician, at the excellent hospital my aunt took her mother to straightaway, couldn’t believe how much scar tissue Babita had on her upper arms, “where the skin was pulled out with pliers.”
She gave me intricate pieces of needlework that all looked like doilies. She made amazing desserts: twists of fried dough served with powdered sugar, a cake decorated in the shape of a log, like one of the branches on our family tree. When I was visiting, I regularly snuck into her room at Aunt Karina’s and Uncle Alan’s where she lived the first years of her arrival. Her bed was made with the tight corners of a barracks. Except for a few pieces of amber, some of her needlework, and a cross over her bed, it was a spartan, empty space. I couldn’t understand why someone who had lived with nothing for so long, someone who had eaten snakes and rats and grass, someone who had expected death to come each day, wouldn’t want a pretty blanket and lots of pillows, furs, and shag rugs (they were all the rage then). Only now can I almost imagine how important a well-kept, sparse sanctuary must have been for her, and how lonely she was.
Of her time in the Gulag, she said, “If I thought about what the next day would bring, I would have slit my throat.” She was always something of a marvel to me, an
d remains so today, for her toughness. She never forgave my mother for not being at the airport.
In the prewar and postwar Soviet sweeps to Siberian prison and labor camps, the Lithuanian Center for Genocide and Resistance (where Arunas Bubnys directs research) numbers the deportees at approximately 132,000. Eighty thousand did not come back, dead or forgotten by the Gulag administrators in faraway Siberian work villages.
My Babita, who flew down to land among us like an angry sparrow, her fingers always stained with nicotine until her lungs were close to ruined and she quit her chain-smoking ways, lived in and through each minute of her travail. She did not endure by imagining a future of freedom and loved ones. She endured by entering each moment without thinking of the next, except in the most utilitarian terms. Cigarettes were her great luxury. She liked to clean.
She of the parquet floors, who appeared to me in a dream years before I began making inquiries about Senelis. I sat at a long plank table, and she walked over to me, holding in her shaking hands a white bowl of fresh raspberries, which I refused at first. She pressed me. “Eat,” she said in English in my dream. And then her hands stopped shaking, and I took the bowl, and I ate.
CHAPTER 48
* * *
ROBIN FISH
Since I first learned about Senelis’s time in Švenčionys, I’d wanted tangible evidence of what he had done or not done, what he had participated in, what he had walked away from, whom he had helped, whom he had hurt. When I returned to New York from Lithuania in January 2014, Maciej Bulanda contacted me. With the generous help of Dr. Monika Tomkiewicz, a senior historian at the Gdańsk branch of the Institute of National Remembrance—Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation (IPN), the errors (all my fault) that Maciej and I had made in our attempts to gain access to the Maciulevičius case files were corrected.
In a few weeks Maciej would travel to Gdańsk, where Dr. Tomkiewicz had graciously offered to lend him a hand. To our astonishment, it turned out that she had actually known the elusive translator Rakowska (Eleanora was her first name) quite well in Rakowska’s later years. During Maciej’s time at the archive, Dr. Tomkiewicz would make herself available for an interview about the translator who had drifted into my mother’s memory what seemed like a very long time ago.
That I would, through Maciej, be able to ask questions of someone to whom Rakowska had spoken of her time in Švenčionys was miraculous to me. Whether or not the case records of Jonas Maciulevičius would answer any of my questions about Senelis was a complete unknown. Nonetheless, in the days leading up to Maciej’s arrival at the archive, a brew of hope (for something conclusive) and dread (of anything conclusive) wound me up. I watched videos of interviews I’d done, read and reread testimony, looked at the faces of the dead and the living in my own stills, in photographs from archives and family photographs survivors had thoughtfully made available to me—a photo of my grandmother Rachel with her mother and her sister Klara, both girls ravishingly beautiful, Babita in her elder years, Senelis as a boy. I couldn’t sleep.
During those few weeks, someone who had heard that I had been in Lithuania researching the Švenčionys region contacted Rose and asked her to pass some information along to me. He wanted to remain anonymous since he still lived in the area and didn’t want to suffer the enmity of those who had known him and his family all of his life. Not surprisingly, Maciulevičius still had family in Lithuania, clustered together in some of the villages that, if you are ignorant of their history, seem simply lovely, delightfully antique—especially when the flax is a sheen across the fields and the days are warm, with a good breeze.
Among his Lithuanian descendants there was the general opinion that he had been a sadist, a man capable of many crimes of great brutality. (Rose had already sent me some information about his arrest in 1920 for impersonating another officer during his army service. Convicted by a military court, he spent eight months in prison and was stripped of his rank. “The inventor of identity theft,” Rose wrote.) It was unusual for a Lithuanian family—for any family, for that matter—to readily describe one of their own in such a way, but there was more that my anonymous source wanted me to know. As treacherous as their relative Jonas Maciulevičius had been, as many crimes he might have indeed committed, the slaughter of the Poles in Švenčionys—well, that one was on Puronas.
Perhaps what struck me most about this “tip” was simply that my grandfather’s name was remembered, at least in some circles, outside of his Lithuanian family. Through another source I learned that Maciulevičius had a son who was alive and living in America. Because his father had been Senelis’s co-worker, I wanted to talk with him. I knew how old he was. It was quite likely that he would have attended the same small Lithuanian school as my mother in Švenčionys. I was given the new name the son had taken and tracked down a phone number and left a brief message. He never returned my call. Given the trajectory of his father’s life, why would he? His father had been executed by the Polish government for war crimes, not something a son would be eager to talk about with a stranger. Still, I had to try.
During those same, strange few weeks, I pulled out some notes I’d made a year or so back, when my brother called me out of the blue because he had suddenly remembered an experience he’d had with Senelis and wanted to share with me. I’d had a partial memory of it all along but had forgot the totality of it. As soon as he started talking, my own memory resurfaced.
“Remember how we used to go fishing on the pier in Oak Bluffs with Senelis?” my brother said.
Of course I did. The pier was a popular spot for solo fisherman and families. I’d forgotten that my much younger brother had made his own trips with Senelis to the pier, but I’d loved them. We fished for baby blues that swam in the shadows near the pilings. When we’d caught enough of them, Senelis taught me how to knife off the rainbow scales. Filleted, thrown in a pan with butter, salt, parsley, a bit of lemon—they tasted like all the goodness of summer by the sea, of the sea itself.
“There was this one kind of fish everyone threw back. I think it was called robin fish. Maybe they didn’t taste good. I don’t remember now why, but if you pulled one up, you unhooked it and let it go back into the water. Everyone did it, except Senelis.”
As my brother spoke, I was there again with the smell of the planking, the squid we used for bait, the long stretch of the pier, as long as summer, different gradations of green and, farther out, a blue shimmer of water.
“When Senelis pulled up a robin fish, he never threw it back. He unhooked it and let it flop on the dock and then started stomping on it, blood and guts everywhere, stomping until the fish was dead. It embarrassed me. People would be looking at us. I asked him why he didn’t just let the fish go. He said it was dirty. He said it had no right to live.”
And then I remembered turning my back on the people who watched while Senelis ground the dying fish under his heel with vigor and not quite disgust but a kind of righteousness, as if he was ridding the waters of a pestilence. As I recalled it with my brother on the phone, it had seemed to take a long time for the killing to be done with. But then, I was a child during those hot summer days on the pier, and like all children, experienced time in a measure commensurate with my age. July lasted a year, at least. My grandfather would live forever.
CHAPTER 49
* * *
WITNESSES FOR THE PROSECUTION
On February 17, all afternoon, as I moved through the city, I checked and rechecked my e-mail on my cell phone. Maciej was six hours ahead of me in Gdańsk on the Baltic Sea, at his first day of work at the IPN.
My frame of reference for that city, until Arunas Bubnys mentioned the file at the IPN, had been limited to three names and events. It was in Gdańsk that Lech Wałęsa founded the Solidarity movement in the famous shipyards. Lili Holzman, at one point in her wartime journey, was nearby when the city was known as Danzig—a “free city” by order of the Treaty of Versailles, then taken by the Germans in 1939. Lili’
s story also intersected with that of one SS-Sturmbannführer Max Pauly, who directed the execution of the Danzig postal employees and locals who fought off the SS occupation of the Danzig post office for hours with a paltry stock of weaponry. An amazing story, though they were overcome—another story within a story, as Chaya Palevsky would say.
I was all the way downtown, on Spring Street in SoHo, when I heard from Maciej. “Good news! Skype as soon as possible.” I skidded on the slushy sidewalk, King Street to Houston, a block north to the subway. Out of the subway uptown, I ran home.
Jonas Maciulevičius was extradited from France for war crimes against the Polish nation. He was sentenced to death by the appeals court in Olsztyn, Poland, on May 2, 1950, and then executed. The investigation was reopened on August 18, 1997, and closed eight years later, on January 1, 2005. Once Poland was no longer a puppet nation of the Soviet Union, it began re-examining war crimes cases to ensure that proper juidicial standards had been met. This was crucial to me. This was not a case built on testimony from tortured witnesses. So many decades on there was far less political capital or revenge to be gained by those who had had wartime contact with the defendant. Witnesses—Jewish, Lithuanian, Polish, and Belarusian—came forward, first in the postwar occupation zone in Germany, then in Poland.
Through Maciej, I had queried Dr. Tomkiewicz about the focus of the case. Neither my grandfather nor any other chief or village head or Lithuanian district commander who had worked with Maciulevičius had been under scrutiny. (During Maciulevičius’s original prosecution, my grandfather was in the vast system of DP camps, then on his way to the United States with his children and his oldest sister, Ona.)