A Guest at the Shooters' Banquet

by Rita Gabis

  Ironically, it had been Batya Weksler’s appeal to Emilia Waszkinel’s Catholic faith that had finally convinced her, childless and frightened, to take the infant, born sometime in 1943 when pregnancy was illegal in the ghetto and liquidation was on its way. “You believe in Jesus, who was a Jew. So try and save this Jewish baby … and one day he will grow up to be a priest.” Emilia Waszkinel willed herself to forget the names of her son’s Jewish birth parents, lest she give away his identity under torture.

  When I turned down a meeting with Weksler-Waszkinel, Maciej momentarily became a young, blond Polish version of Rose, who in Lithuania frequently commanded me to do this or see that or speak with someone when I was reluctant.

  “You must have this meeting,” Maciej said. And so I did.

  Romuald-Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel surprised me at every turn with his quick wit and openness as we talked in his apartment at the Convent of Ursuline Nuns in Lublin. His father had died of a heart attack shortly after his son began his studies for the priesthood; so, despite his own conflicts, Romek, as he was called, pressed forward to honor his father. All of Eastern Europe had lockjaw. Certain topics—the fate of Eastern European Jewry and Polish complicity among them—were never to be discussed.

  After Weksler-Waszkinel was ordained, he took a degree in philosophy at the Sorbonne. It was after he began teaching that a colleague steered him toward a history of World War II that broke through the rhetoric of suffering Soviet citizens and presented a more inclusive and complex narrative.

  In his third decade, he began to press his mother, who, still afraid, still traumatized by war and the effort to keep her son safe, asked him to stop asking. He didn’t stop, and finally she told him that his first parents had been Jews from the Švenčionys ghetto.

  “It felt like I was dropped from a plane into no-man’s-land,” he said.

  His mother could not tell him his Jewish parents’ names, though she was certain they had died.

  “I was really afraid to tell anyone that I’m a Jew. To be rejected. In Poland, in my generation, Jews are not liked. So Pope John Paul II, before he was chosen, was cardinal and my teacher, and he was the first person I told I was a Jew.”

  He gave Pope John Paul two reasons why he had chosen him: “First, you are a successor of a Jew because Peter was a Jew, and secondly, you are Polish and I have been fortunate to have amazing Polish parents. I thanked him for the Polish part of who I am and asked John Paul for a prayer that I might find a trace of my biological parents.”

  He also wrote that he would keep his identity secret until he found out his real name. “I didn’t want to be some Jew, I wanted to have a name, a mother and a father.”

  The letter he received back from John Paul began: “My beloved brother.”

  Some time later, Weksler-Waszkinel was in summer residence in a school for blind children in the suburbs of Warsaw. He took the confession of a nun there, and in the course of the confession used a Polish idiom—“To be born five minutes before midnight”—in the context of believing in faith over fear, of being saved. He had no way of knowing that the nun, who helped save Jewish children during the war, had another very specific context for the idiom: the Jewish child who is snatched from death at the last minute.

  “She left me a note in my room—‘If you have anything you want to tell, you can tell me.’ ”

  The message confused and angered him. He confronted the nun: “What the hell do you mean? Do you think I have big eyes, big nose, big ears … is this racist?”

  “Don’t be angry. I’ve seen more Jews in my lifetime than you have in yours,” she said. Taking her confession, his use of the idiom had felt like a miracle to her.

  In her presence, Weksler-Waszkinel began to weep. “I only know two things: my father was a tailor, and I had a brother, Samuel.”

  Ultimately, the nun, ninety or ninety-two years old, would be his first emissary. On a trip to Israel she made inquiries. Yes, people knew about the tailor Yankl Wexler in the Švenčionys ghetto who had given up his son to a Gentile family. In 1982 Romuald-Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel traveled to Israel for the first time. He purposefully didn’t wear his clerical garb, for his father’s relatives were Orthodox. After he went through security in the Tel Aviv airport, a “group of elderly people started running toward me. They hugged and kissed me. ‘How did you know it was me?’ I asked. One of my relatives said, ‘You walk just like your father.’ ”

  In the Yitzkor book for the Švenčionys region, there is a photo of his Jewish mother, Batya. He has never seen an image of his father’s face. When he said this, with tears that came easily to him during our time together, it struck me that most likely my grandfather had seen the face of Jakub Weksler, who knew Lithuanian and who was the resident tailor for the occupiers—until, one day, he wasn’t.

  I told Weksler-Waszkinel I would try to find an image of his father in my archival work; I have tried and, so far, failed. In the moment, he listened carefully and spoke with detailed eloquence—the windows closed against a barrage of motorcycles, the day waning. I felt a hatred of time itself. My grandfather quite probably had once had a gift the man in front of me might never find—a memory of the face of a tailor with his needles and threads and fabrics, and a shrewd ability, even under the duress of his day, to establish relationships with the enemy, one of whom would have been Senelis, unreachable behind the wall of time.

  There is another remarkable story: how, by accident, luck, fate, Romuald-Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel, in Israel, where he ultimately gained permanent residency status, happened to get a ride home from Yad Vashem with a stranger who turned out to be part of his mother Batya (Kovarski) Weksler’s large clan.

  In Arunas Bubnys’s compilation about the Švenčionys region during the war, the 1942 Švenčionys ghetto census reports that Weksler-Waszkinel had an older brother. It gives his name as “Kolya,” born in 1940. In fact, Weksler-Waszkinel’s older brother was named Samuel and the Wekslers had given all their wealth to a Lithuanian family to take him in, take him out of the ghetto. And Kolya? Perhaps he was an orphan they claimed as their own, both to help him and to divert suspicion should any authority question them about a son born in 1940, before the Germans arrived. Or perhaps “Kolya” is simply some record keeper’s error.

  Sometime before the liquidation of the ghetto, the Lithuanian family who had agreed to take Samuel came back to Batya and Jakub Weksler demanding more money, more valuables. But there was nothing left to give, and the family returned Samuel. Later, when Batya Weksler approached Emilia Waszkinel with her pleas, she gave the Waszkinels the only thing she and her husband had left: a samovar. The Wekslers survived the liquidation of the ghetto in Švenčionys and made it to the Vilnius ghetto. Most likely Samuel was killed during the same “Children’s Action” that took the life of Lili Holzman’s little sister. Weksler-Waszkinel believes his mother met her death at Majdanek, the vast camp outside Lublin.

  Today, in one of the surviving wooden barracks along a dusty old camp road, a new air-conditioned, digitized exhibit commemorates Poles who were displaced or killed during the war. In the others, there is only the stifling heat; the scent coming off the wood; the decaying leather of a mountain of shoes; the old displays providing the slightest embodied experience of what it might have been for those worked to death instead of being killed outright as the lives of the locals continued on just outside the massive complex, which was fenced by a system of trenches and barbed wire and guard posts so that it was possible to take notice, if you cared to, of the marching and counting and the arrivals, of the pit shootings that accompanied the gassing by Zyklon B or by carbon monoxide from truck exhaust.

  WHEN BLUMKE KATZ, the resident historian of Švenčionys, was still alive, Romuald-Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel, ordained by then, came back to Švenčionys. He asked the priest at the Catholic church if he might speak before the congregation.

  “Okay, but make it quick,” the priest advised.

  Weksler-Waszkinel smiled when he re
lated this detail to me, irony, sadness, and a bit of his shrewdness perhaps all part of that smile; he wasn’t as quick as the Švenčionys priest had hoped. “I told the story of myself and who I am and the story of my brother and the family that took him and then brought him back demanding more money and that my brother died because of this. I said I had not come to ask for money but to say that it was absolutely cruel and can not happen again.”

  I asked if he knew the name of the family who brought Samuel back. He wouldn’t tell me.

  “Only God knows,” he said; again, the same complicated smile.

  “What was the response of the congregation?” I asked.

  “None, maybe. We don’t know, we are afraid still …”

  A few days later an article appeared in a Lithuanian newspaper that defamed his Jewish father: “The tailor—a bad Jew.”

  Blumke Katz advised Weksler-Waszkinel to get out of the country: if he got into trouble, she wouldn’t have much pull to help him. So he left.

  Lithuania is probably one of the only countries where perpetrators were not convicted [after the end of Soviet rule]. The policy, the agenda in Vilna is to divide history into three parts: Nazis, Communists, and a Free Lithuania that does not bear any responsibility for what came before. Lithuania entered the EU and NATO without any responsibility to rehabilitate the perpetrators; there is no debate like the one that is so present in Poland today, and this is why I understand the grief and anger of many Poles. I just wanted to tell the truth. I wasn’t naive. I wasn’t counting on them to start crying.

  He explained to me that when his young Polish parents first took him in, someone from Švenčionys informed on them, so they quickly left their rented room at Grotsky’s on Vilenska (Vilnius Highway, which runs directly through town). “I was already a few years into the priesthood when I got a letter from this lady, asking for forgiveness. All the kids in Švenčionys were getting conjunctivitis during the war, and her little girl died and she couldn’t stand that I was alive [with new parents] … so out of grief and anger she reported them. What was it like for me to get the letter? Well, I’m crying now, so you can imagine … This is the bottom line of what it’s like. The aim of the letter was to ask for forgiveness so she knew what she’d done and that I survived. So I wrote her back that I was alive, and I had to forgive her because she had asked me to.”

  “Was it hard to forgive?” I asked.

  “Yes, it was hard,” he said. Then a long pause.

  Walking where the ghetto once stood in Švenčionys, he’d felt a powerful spiritual connection to his Jewish parents. “I realized, there, that the happiest time of my life was when I was in my mother’s womb. I realized what courage it took for her to let me be born, to find a way for me to live.”

  There were tears in his eyes again. He is a man through whom emotions flow freely now.

  “So there is on the one hand punishment, the problem of the past … and responsibility, which is the question of our future. The truth has to come out.”

  Shortly after, we stood and shook hands, and he ushered us down a maze of stairs into the now quiet, dusky street and waved us on our way.

  CHAPTER 52

  * * *

  MEMORY

  In the winter of 2011, during the visit my husband and I made to Martha’s Vineyard to meet with my mother, Aunt Agnes, and Aunt Karina, there was a moment at the table in the kitchen when my mother and Aunt Karina began to remember out loud the recurring nightmares that had plagued them both for decades after the war. For my mother, they have ended, though she is still unable to sit through a film in which there is gunfire, pillage, war. Aunt Karina’s nightmares, which were just like my mother’s, still visit her from time to time. Speaking sometimes in tandem, they described a close version of one of the two dreams I had had all through my childhood. Someone is coming to hunt them down, in the dark—harsh voices, shooting, escape is impossible, running is impossible, chaos, bright lights, boots kicking and stomping. There’s a strange dislocation upon waking. Is it safe? Was it real?

  My husband, whom I’d told about my two dreams several times, looked at me across the table, astonished at how closely matched one of them was to the one my mother and my aunt were describing in the dreamless morning light.

  For them, one continuous attack, coming in sleep for a long time. Neither of them dreamed my second dream: the dream of being the killer, the threat of being found out.

  Perhaps, when I was very young, my mother had shared her nightmare with me, and I’d adopted it as my own. I don’t remember this having happened, but it might have.

  Memory, I have frequently read over the last three years, is an unreliable source for a historical record. “Historia/ἱστορία,” my father had scribbled on his yellow legal pad. Perhaps that is true. My experience of late has been that memory is a record of life and of death, of story that is both freed and limited by all the variants that impact how and what and when a dream or a day or a life or the end of a life is recalled.

  I REMEMBER SITTING in a chair in the Bronx next to Chaya Palevsky as, from memory, she re-created the needlepoint cover of a photo album, made originally by her mother for a collection of family memories added to, year after year, in their home in Švenčionys before the war. It was strange and powerful to sit with her as she spoke of the dangerous missions she and her fellow partisans, many of whom were killed, undertook during the last deadly months of the war. She returned to Lithuania only once, with her children and in the company, once there, of my friend Regina Kopelevich.

  She made a pilgrimage to the pits at Ponary to honor the family she had lost. There were little yellow flowers growing, some grass around the ashy soil, but the trees were bare—“naked,” Chaya had said, as if they were ashamed of what had happened there. She sank down, her children holding her, and began to see the faces of her dead mother and sister and brother and father swimming up toward her. Without being conscious of it, she had grabbed at the soil and grass and flowers with each hand. It was Regina who had told her, “Chaya, take these back to your hotel, where there will be newspapers and magazines. Put these between the pages to dry, and in this way you can take home something of your family.”

  From left to right: Rivke Porus, Malke Porus, Hirshele Porus, Eliash Porus, Rochl Porus

  She did, and from the killing grounds at Ponary made a memorial she calls “A Vision Out from the Ashes in the Pits of Ponary” that hangs on the wall of her apartment to this day.

  IN 2007, YITZHAK Arad, serving with great equanimity according to those who worked with him on the Lithuanian Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes, found himself suddenly targeted by the Lithuanian prosecutor general’s office. Virtually the entire Jewish population of Lithuania had been exterminated during the war, largely at the hands of Lithuanians. Now the prosecutor’s office was considering charging Arad and others like him, who had escaped the ghettos and fought for their lives as partisans, with war crimes. It would take several years before a reconstituted commission sent him a written apology, and the letter did not undo the damage done.

  In the only photograph Arad has of his family before the war, he is the small, spunky boy to the left of his father; his sister, Rachel, the only other surviving member of his family, is on the far right.

  Arad titled some of the personal writing he shared with me, aptly, “Memories: From the Depths of Memory and Before Forgetting.” He began by reflecting on earlier work.

  In the memoirs I wrote those years, I tried, subconsciously, to hide the emotional aspect, and therefore my memoirs are more like a military report. I explain this to myself by acknowledging that at a young age I must have seen feelings in regard to my activities during the Holocaust as a sign of weakness as opposed to the image of a combatant against the Nazis … With the public atmosphere at that time in Israel, the heroism of the ghetto fighters and partisans was glorified, contrasted with the unjustified feeling of “sheep to the slaughter” in r
egards to survivors of camps and ghettos who then arrived in Israel …

  The lack of emphasis and limited reference to the emotional aspect is seen in the places where I describe parting from my parents, the murder of dozens of my family members in the Poligon near what is today Švenčionėliai, and also in Ponar near Vilna and the murder of all the Jews from Švenčionys. Also, in the description of the period after May 1945, when I escaped the Soviet Union and got to Poland and found no trace of my parents, and it was clear to me that they, from whom I parted at the end of December 1939 in Warsaw, were no longer alive. These feelings I hid deep, deep inside my consciousness and in my soul …

  In recent years, my thoughts go back again and again to my parents and extended family killed in the Holocaust, and to my childhood. My memories take different forms. One of them is that I hum and sing to myself often (especially in the shower) songs my mother sang to me …

  One of the songs I love singing and whose words express my feelings is a song written by Mordechai Gebirtig, “Kinder Yoren” (Childhood Years) …

  Lovely childhood years, the years of our childhood

  Forever etched into our hearts