by Rita Gabis
Dr. Tomkiewicz had explained that the IPN’s investigations (among them the Katyń massacre of Polish officers, committed by the NKVD but blamed on the Germans) both prior to 1989—the year of Poland’s emergence as a democracy—and currently, fell into two categories: “against” and “regarding a case.” The first was direct and narrow, the other much wider, focusing on an event. Although the Maciulevičius case was underpinned by an event—the killing of Polish citizens during the Beck reprisals, which by its nature tasked the prosecution with an examination of the massacre of the Jews of the Švenčionys region—his prosecution and the evidence gathered to support it fell into the “against” category, limited to his culpability as a war criminal.
ONCE HOME, I unwound my scarf, shut my study door behind me, and Skyped Maciej.
It was nine at night in Gdańsk. Maciej was wired, close to his computer screen, his face serious, expressive, repeating for me when I asked, when I couldn’t understand.
Yes, my grandfather was mentioned almost immediately in the case files as one of the “three pillars” of authority in Švenčionys, directly under Maciulevičius.
Yes, testimony placed Senelis at Poligon with Maciulevičius.
Maciulevičius himself, along with other witnesses, placed Senelis at the meeting with Januskevicius and the Gestapo representatives when plans were made for the killing of the Jews and the creation of the ghetto: who would be responsible for what and when.
Another witness had heard Senelis complain that Maciulevičius was so power hungry and overzealous that he was usurping his role as chief of Saugumas, though according to a bystander, they were often “seen together” walking the streets of Švenčionys. (Maciulevičius, long before the German occupation, had a history of engendering conflict which lends credence to Senelis’s complaint.)
From the veranda of the Švenčionys post office, a witness named Aleksander Bilakiewicz had seen, from five meters away, “how the defendant Maciulevičius with a rifle in hand, dressed in a uniform, together with Puronas walked next to the column of arrested Poles led to the site of execution … After … about 4:00 P.M. the police organized themselves a party at the school [the Lithuanian gymnasium turned Kasino] near the post office.”
A man who worked in the housing office in Švenčionys, headed by one Żukowski, spoke of my grandfather’s friendship with Żukowski and how, several weeks after the killing rampage against the Poles, my grandfather paid his friend a visit to vent. Senelis could understand the destruction of the Poles, but not Maciulevičius’s willingness to go after Lithuanians as well. “That’s why we don’t like him, Kukutis told me the same,” my grandfather reportedly said. (Mykolas Kukutis, chief of the local white bands, had became “the district governor” and in that role in 1941, helped commandeer the workforce of local shooters and diggers and guards at Poligon.)
Mieczysław Szuchowski testified that he “became the commandant of the ghetto … I shall also state that Puronas the chief of political police often called me to his office, beat me and demanded a ransom. Once I had to give him my wife’s golden watch.”
A watch that perhaps belonged to someone else’s wife, either still alive in the ghetto or in the pit in Švenčionėliai, or maybe a watch that Szuchowski had given his wife as a present, or maybe a watch my grandfather knew was stolen from a Jew and so he pocketed it and paid a visit to Moshe Gordon to make sure it was returned, or perhaps a gold watch and other ransoms too, because unlike Szuchowski’s, my grandfather’s job did not put him in daily proximity to a captive population that could be ordered to pay up at a moment’s notice.
(Maciulevičius, apparently, was infamous for his visits to the ghetto to beat and rob. Before his arrest, he was spotted in France with his wife, who was wearing a fur coat that belonged to the wife of one of the few survivors from the Švenčionys ghetto.)
Bohdan Polak, a boy at the time, remembered the fear “Puronas’s death brigades” inspired.
In his own testimony before the court, Maciulevičius claimed that during his tenure as chief of criminal police in Švenčionys, he brought my grandfather up on bribery charges that ultimately cost Senelis his job and landed him briefly in Lukiškės prison. This is somewhat supported by the Malinauskas complaint, which describes Maciulevičius’s discovery of a large number of hides my grandfather had dropped off at the local tannery to be worked on, presumably at no cost. But then, Maciulevičius was, by many accounts, a sadist and a liar and was deeply involved, as many were, in extorting the ghetto inhabitants and the locals outside the ghetto.
CHAPTER 50
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THE COMPANY WE KEEP
Maciej and I spoke every day that week but one—a long day and night he spent organizing and translating the material that was important to me. At the IPN, he was given the desk of a secretary on holiday. He was given cookies and help with the ten unindexed volumes he searched on my behalf. Because of his efforts, I have every mention of my grandfather, with its context, in the Polish, accompanied by an English translation. Another translator worked on the long (130 pages or so) case summary.
Most often, the damning mentions of Senelis are off the cuff—the subject is Maciulevičius, but the witness remembers my grandfather in passing, almost as an afterthought: “Other officers also arrived at the scene of the attack [on Beck], Puronas as well … I don’t know whether he [Puronas] was sentenced.”
My grandfather’s presence at the Poligon massacre is confirmed by two different witnesses. Three people confirm his presence at the meeting to plan the killing of the Jews and the creation of the ghetto from which, one day, Yitzhak Arad and his fellow partisans would flee into the forest to fight, and where Chaya Palevsky would spend the last days with her mother, Malke, her father, Eliash, and her youngest brother, Hirshele, before they were shot at Ponary on April 5, 1943. (Her sister Rivke had attempted, early on, to escape to the Soviet Union, but the family knew that she had met her death along the way.)
The IPN court summary stresses that Maciulevičius was the engine behind the killing of the Poles and that yes, a list of those to be executed had been made up by a “committee” that included the defendant, my grandfather, the local Reverend Budra, and Dr. Rymas, the school principal. The committee had made up the list in advance, waiting for the opportunity to use it.
I was able to Skype with my tipster, and he clarified. My tipster believed that because my grandfather was relatively new to the area, Budra and Rymas would most easily have been able to provide the names and locations of the Poles. He also surmised, as did the IPN court summary, that the slaughter of the Poles was in part political revenge for the Polish incursion of 1919, which had, among other humiliations, robbed Lithuanians of Vilnius. It was only 1942, after all; if you lived in the Švenčionys region and you or a member of your family had been in the Polish Legions, you had a death sentence on your head.
Yet, as with many, though not all, mass killings, the documentation suggests a randomness to the violence. People were gunned down working in the fields. You might flee to another town, but a list would be waiting there as well. According to the IPN court summary, the Germans had originally given the Lithuanians a week to wreak their vengeance against the Poles. But the killing got out of hand; after two or three days, they reined men like Maciulevičius and my grandfather in. The victims of the Beck reprisals—the Poles, a few Russians and three Jews who had worked for Beck and were shot in the Jewish cemetery in Švenčionys—were lying facedown, each with a bullet to the back of the head. But before they were shot, either in prison or at the cemetery, they’d been beaten; there were cracked skulls, broken ribs.
The massacre of the eight thousand Jews at Poligon was, oddly, more contained. One witness in the IPN files states that the Germans there were only documenting the killings, not giving orders about trucks or lining up shooters or winding up the killers over bonfires with a barrel of vodka. Liquor was given so freely to the guards and shooters during the genocide that the words of a witness
named Dionizy Blicharski, thirteen at the time, seem likely to be at least partly hyperbolic: “At the time when the crimes against the Jews were committed, drunk Lithuanian policemen were walking through the town, and in exchange for the rings, earrings, and gold teeth, sometimes still covered in blood, they wanted to buy vodka.”
Saugumas members were in attendance at the shooters’ banquet after the killing. Since my grandfather was their chief, it is hard to imagine that he wasn’t there when the musicians Zdzisław Walulewicz and Alosza Podoszewny-Żaniewicz angered the Shaulists.
Among the drunken band of Shaulists were the Poligon shooters and those who performed tasks other than shooting—making sure the trucks were loaded up at the barracks as quickly as possible, directing the swift clearing away of the victims’ stripped-off clothing at the pit’s edge before the next terrified group was unloaded from another truck. No doubt some at the banquet were simply there to take advantage of free food and drink. Multiple testimonies concur that a group of the enraged banquet attendees, fueled by blood and liquor, turned on the musicians because they wouldn’t speak Lithuanian with them, and so dragged them out and killed them (acting out of “instinct,” as the poet Zenon Tumalovic had said).
The killings of Sore Lewin, and Yitzhak Arad’s friends Gershon Bak and Rueven Miadziolski are mentioned frequently in the court summary and in witness statements, several of which claim that Maciulevičius directed their executions and, in fact, buried Gerson Bak while he was still alive.
AND THEN THERE is Eleanora Rakowska, who was there for all of it, until, of course, her arrest in late spring of 1942. Her interview as a witness in the Maciulevičius file is succinct. She was, she said, a member of the Polish Home Army with the code names “Hajduczek” and “Magda.” So it was as a spy that she became an interpreter to Beck, whom she described as “apolitical, he snored during Hitler’s speeches on the radio.” To my ear, her comment about Beck demonstrates one of the oddities of the borderland—a Pole working for the underground calls one of the few German commanders in town “apolitical,” though he was part of the machinery of Poligon. Even if he wasn’t eager to be there, I found no evidence that he intervened on behalf of Jews in Švenčionys or the region as a whole.
Because Rakowska is the only survivor of the Beck attack, I include her testimony at length.
On May 19 in Świr [where Lily Holzman’s grandfather died in the ghetto] a horse overview to which Beck, Gruhl, and Schneider [who was, Rakowska confirmed, head of a POW camp near Švenčionys] were invited by Beck’s counterpart in Świr about 30 km away … I was asked to come by at seven o’clock, we departed at eight. We drove the road toward Łyntupy. Beck was driving, Gruhl next to him, Schneider behind Beck, and myself behind Gruhl. I don’t remember what kind of car, but it was small with two doors.
A woman walked on the road, she stopped and she was waving at us. Beck did not stop. Actually she had waved just before the road was coming into the forest. We’ve entered the forest and we’ve got a petard that set the car on fire. The shooting began on the right-hand side. We’ve all jumped out of the car. While still in the car a bullet went just by my head. Germans began to escape to the right … I crawled for some time. At some point I could hear a gun being loaded over my head … I looked up and I saw the Soviet partisans.
Then Markow [Markov] came and recognized me. He told me to go home. Markow used to live in Święciany under the Soviet occupation. He was the school principal while I taught there. Markow was surprised, he asked “Razwie eta Beck?” I think Beck was not their target. I did not see the killed Germans. Only the Gestapo showed me the pictures. On the same day the Gestapo came to us [her mother and sister lived with her] and arrested me. They first took me for interrogations in the HQ of gendarmerie of Święciany … a cell in prison, in water where the rats were … On the next day I was beaten again, interrogated by Germans, Gestapo … also by Maciulevičius. Later I was transported to Lukiškės prison in Wilno, where I found out that my mother and sister and myself … got a death sentence. We were bailed out by the Home Army, [our] death sentence was changed for the labor camp in Prawieniszki [Pravieniškės in Lithuanian; the site of a camp not far from Kaunas].
But Eleanora Rakowska and parts of her testimony are a puzzle, even to Dr. Tomkiewicz, who came to know her well. Her documents claimed that she was born in Wilno, yet her family had an estate in “Old Święciany.” Rakowska told Dr. Tomkiewicz several stories about her father, who perhaps, at some point during the war, had fled to Belarus. But when Dr. Tomkiewicz attended Rakowska’s funeral, a family member contradicted Rakowska’s narrative about her father. (Dr. Tomkiewicz did not want to elaborate on the nature of the contradiction).
Rakowska arrived at nineteen in Švenčionys with a “degree” in the German language from Batory University in Wilno, yet no such course was given there. According to Dr. Tomkiewicz, the Germans had been “operating” in Lithuania from the 1920s and in greater numbers the following decade, probably recruiting informants and gathering intelligence.
That her former colleague Markov appeared at the moment one of his attack team was going to take her life is rather miraculous. Perhaps miraculous is too strong a word, but Markov must have known her well, if he believed she might hold up under torture and not give him away.
Tomkiewicz has spent years of her professional life studying Lukiškės prison. To her knowledge, no one charged with a capital crime ever had a sentence reduced during the war, not even with a big bribe from the Home Army. Rakowska’s sentence reduction is as strange as my grandfather’s reassignment to Panevėžys under the Gestapo, assuming that the story that he released fifty or eighty prisoners or more from the Švenčionys jail in the fall of 1943 is true.
At the camp in Prawieniszki, instead of doing hard labor, Rakowska was installed in the chancellery, where she was often left alone with prisoner files. She used the opportunity, when she could, to let prisoners know of changes in their status. If a file was marked “Karcer,” for instance, it meant a trip to a special solitary cell where inmates were tortured. Her relatively easy work duty and her access to records were, according to Dr. Tomkiewicz, unprecedented. Why did the Germans allow it?
ELEANORA RAKOWSKA WAS, according to Dr. Tomkiewicz, “very bright, and had this talent, ability to find herself in every situation.” There is no evidence that while at Prawieniszki she aided the Home Army in any way. When the war ended, she went back to Warsaw with her mother and sister and began to work for the postwar regime of the day.
There is perhaps more to Rakowska’s story, but Dr. Tomkiewicz is protective of her memory. Rakowska suffered greatly. During her torture in Švenčionys, she was choked and battered to such an extent that she never fully recovered her physical stamina. Whatever she did, and whoever she may have done it for, she was devastated by the war she survived.
Dr. Tomkiewicz offered to share a few pictures of an elderly Rakowska with me. After looking at them for a few days, I realized with a small shock that I’d had two pictures of her during wartime, the ones that Konrad Beck had been gracious enough to share with me. In one of the photos (shown earlier here), undated, but obviously taken before May 1942, Rakowska is behind the typewriter with a map, presumably of Ostland or the borderland, above her. Fitting that in the photograph of her, much older, she also appears to be holding a map. She, like Senelis, crossed borders, becoming what her nature and her circumstances required.
CHAPTER 51
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ONLY GOD KNOWS
Romuald-Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel
Yitzhak Arad told me in Israel, in June 2013, that I should speak with a man who became a Catholic priest in Poland, only learning at the age of thirty-five, on February 23, 1978 (“the date of my second birth,” he calls it), that he was Jewish—alive because his Jewish parents had found a home for him before they perished.
Romuald-Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel was born in the Švenčionys ghetto to Batya Weksler and her husband, the tailor Jakub Weksler. (In
the Boyarin translation of the Koniuchowsky testimonies, Jakub Weksler’s name is given as Yankl Wexler—the gifted tailor who, with his language skills and intelligence, became a ghetto leader, able to gather crucial information from the German and Lithuanian command and interact with them when a crisis required it.) He was not, it turns out, the tailor whose customer had to slip terrified out of the ghetto past curfew. Until the liquidation of the ghetto, Jakub Weksler was allowed to work in his shop, which stood outside the walls and the wire.
Romuald-Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel, Arad said, was living in Israel, working in the archives at Yad Vashem. But I had only two days left in the country, both reserved for meetings with Lili Holzman. And besides, much has already been written of Weksler-Waszkinel. He has been interviewed at length, and in 2011, the filmmaker Ronit Kertsner made a documentary, Torn, about his life as both a priest and a Jewish scholar of the Talmud.
IN AUGUST, WHILE I was in Warsaw, Maciej Bulanda sent me a link to the same “incredible” documentary. He was excited to tell me that, as it happened, Romuald-Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel was back in Lublin for a few days to give a talk. Should he contact him on my behalf to set up a meeting? I said no. People get tired of being asked to repeat their story. I had combed the web and read a lot about him, had seen the photo of him as a young boy, standing with his “Polish parents,” Emilia and Piotr Waszkinel, who are honored as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. Like the woman who bore the Ashkenazi face of my grandmother at the freight elevator door in Fairway, the young Romuald had clearly Semitic features.
He was a fragile child who began intuitively questioning his identity early on. A story in the New York Times described the intense fear and confusion that accompanied his suspicions that he might be Jewish. He would stare at himself in the mirror, trying to find physical similarities to his Polish parents. In a time of intense postwar anti-Semitism, the family repatriated to Paslek, a Polish town away from the settlement area chosen by most of the Poles who left the Švenčionys region for their home country. His parents were horrified when Romuald decided to become a priest. It was a choice utterly contrary to his lively, social nature—better to live a regular life like any young man, choose a profession, take a wife.