by Rita Gabis
Their memory rises before my eyes, my heart is flooded
How fast they stayed behind
I still remember my home
Where I first opened my eyes
The picture of my crib, her coming toward me
Like a dream carried to the sky …
(The poet and songwriter Mordechai Gebirtig was in the Krakow ghetto and was murdered in 1942. He also wrote the song “Brothers, fire in our town, our town is burning completely.”)
IN MID-FEBRUARY OF 2014, toward the end of my meeting with Michael MacQueen at ICE in Washington, D.C., I detailed for him the discrepancies on my grandfather’s intake form from the DP camp registration in Ingolstadt and in the paperwork required for the U.S. Displaced Persons Commission. He had brought his children and older sister with him to Camp C with a pocketful of German marks and my mother, his oldest, utterly ridden with what a researcher at the Holocaust Museum described as “a terrible case of the creepy crawlies”—lice. At the DP camp, he claimed that, during different time frames, he had been a merchant in Lithuania, in flight school, and—during the period when he worked for the Gestapo in Panevėžys after Švenčionys—a farmer. Interestingly, on the extensive form for the DP Commission he noted his service as chief of security police in Švenčionys. Perhaps part of the advice circulating was not to lie about what was easily traceable.
But I have no idea if, on May 12, 1945, he even imagined himself as the possible target of an investigation that might impede his family’s immigration to Canada, his first choice, or to the United States.
The appeals court that sentenced Jonas Maciulevičius to death based their sentence, to a large degree, on the application and interpretation of the new Nuremberg Laws concerning perpetrators of genocide. The court included my grandfather as one of these perpetrators, along with Maciulevičius, and also made a case against the Saugumas as a whole, for the substantive role its members played as deadly agents for the Reich’s agenda. Wherever my grandfather went, it had to be somewhere out of reach of the Soviets, who were already looking for him in what was now a Lithuania under Soviet domination, handed over on a platter via the Yalta agreement.
When I brought up the complaint against Senelis—how he had let Elena Las live outside the ghetto, how he had given the three men a work release from the Todt labor camp—MacQueen sat back in his chair.
“How many members of Saugumas do you think were executed by the Germans in Lithuania?”
I had no idea.
“Zip. Not a single one. Why would the Germans bother? They could ship you off to a labor camp instead. The one thing that you could get into big trouble for was gold, money, rubles, robbing the Germans of the bounty they collected from the Jews.”
(MacQueen’s comment made me think of Senelis’s claim—I never took anything from the Jews. Was this a wartime phrase meant to inoculate one from suspicion, a phrase that outlived the war, especially in a place like Lithuania where the Soviets, for different reasons from the Germans, prosecuted and/or persecuted people for having stolen from the Jews?)
At the end of our conversation MacQueen stood up and pausing a moment just outside his office said, “You know, I started out with this work years ago thinking I’d catch the bad guys, and all these years later, the bad guys just keep coming.”
For a moment he seemed a bit like an old-time sheriff, still sharp, but feeling not so much his age as time itself and the list of the most wanted that never becomes any smaller, no matter how many names get knocked off the top.
“Well, someone has to do it, go after the bad guys,” I said.
I felt like I was twelve years old for a second. Bad guys, good guys. But what about all the gray in between? MacQueen shrugged. He was in his own private moment, and I don’t know if he even heard me.
We shook hands before he used his key card to open the heavy metal door for me and promised to be available via e-mail if I had more questions. I did, and he answered the ones he could. His case files for the Poligon guard Vincas Valkavickas are still on the specialist’s desk at FOIA (Freedom of Information Act). Perhaps they will provide a clue about how Senelis slipped through the cracks and became a United States citizen. The fact is, when he was being interviewed at the DP camp, the main interest was in the Communist threat, not the Jewish dead or those who had helped kill them.
Until the Valkavickas file is declassified, MacQueen can’t speak with me about it. I suspect he may no longer be on the job when a redacted set of records finally arrives in the mail. But I might be surprised, as I have so often been during these last years of travel.
BACK OUT IN the cold, I had one more stop before Union Station. I wanted to find, on microfiche at the Holocaust Museum, Lili Holzman and her mother Rachel’s Stutthof concentration camp registration cards. I made my own short pilgrimage in the cold. She and her mother were not, among the horrors they encountered, given tattoos. In Israel, Lili had already given me their prisoner numbers. Lili’s number was 41338, her mother’s 41339.
The blast of heat inside the museum threw me off somehow. I was exhausted, not just by the day but by all of it. My grandfather should never have been allowed into the country. But he had been. And here I was. I took the elevator upstairs, picked up my microfiche, and sat again at one of the machines to the left of the reference desk. It took only a few minutes to find the S’s, and then her maiden name, Swirski.
I looked at their cards and, when I couldn’t stand it any longer, did a quick rewind, put the roll back in its white box, delivered it to the larger box for returns, retrieved my blue jacket and bag from the locker, and made the train that outpaced the coming blizzard by a few hours. Home the next day, in the white frozen world, I thought of Lili’s account of the trek she and her mother made, past what was then occupied Danzig to one of the women’s camps at Stutthof.
Out of the freight car:
They were doing a selection of the women and we could see that they were separating the old women, and my mother, though forty-five years [Lili crimped her fingers in quotation marks] “old,” already had gray hair. But her face … was very youthful. She never had to use any cream. She always had good skin, and it had color to it. So I put a kerchief on my mother’s head to cover up the gray and because my mother looked so youthful, she was able to go with me. We were chosen for life—to life.
We were then brought into a big hall, and the German soldiers or officers were sitting behind desks and writing things, and we stripped naked. And we had no sense of shame—I walked around completely naked and so did my mother—it was nothing. My mother was naked in front of a table full of men. I don’t know why. I don’t know how to explain it. I know that I walked without shame. I was seventeen, and I had a beautiful body.
We put our clothes in a pile. After they registered us, you had to give over any jewelery … everything, except you were allowed to keep combs.
Lili laughed. “But later we wouldn’t need combs.”
Afterward there was another room with a cement table. Everyone had to lie down and have a gynecological check to see they’re not hiding anything. It was done by men; they were [again the quotation marks] “doctors.” I was young, I was a virgin, but there were older women who had had children. The men dug into them, really dug. They were aggressive. I remember very well there was a young woman with us who had hidden things. She had hidden a watch and some jewelry and in the gynecological check they found them and took them out. She was crying afterward; “Not only did I lose my jewelry, but I’m not a virgin anymore.”
After the “exam,” the women’s heads were shaved. But not all the women; Lili, for some unknown reason, was spared, but her mother was shaved. Perhaps the arrival of a new transport meant the process had to move more quickly, skip a step, a prisoner or two.
It was very very sad for me to look at my mother naked with a shaven head. This is an educated woman, and to see her like that, walking around, to see her face—
Next, the registration.
I don’t understan
d. They asked us so many questions even though their intention was to exterminate us. Height, eye color, color of hair, width of nose, of face, of mouth, education, criminal record, everything. They wrote it all out and then you had to sign at the bottom.
After a quick dribble of water in showers all the women were convinced were actually spigots for deadly gas, they were given uniforms, shoes that didn’t fit. Wooden shoes, Lili recalled. The barracks were plain wood, no straw.
We were there for six weeks. We didn’t work, just suffered from torture and beatings. And every morning they would wake us up very early and have us stand for hours with no food and nothing to drink, and it was very, very hot.
At nights, there were women—mostly Russian women—perhaps with criminal records. They looked well fed and they had connections to the Germans. We used to see orgies. They were brought in to be a kind of guard of the Jewish women. They were prisoners as well, but on a higher level.
Here she interjected, “It’s a paradox, because here when it’s a little windy or a little cold, people get sick—you get a cold, you get a flu. And there, where it was horrific, we were fine.”
It was at Stutthof that the SS Commander Max Pauly, wielding a huge wooden stick, with an empty tin tied to its end, would portion out a thin soup into the women’s brown plates. No spoons, so the women just tipped the plate and drank. When it fancied him, if perhaps a woman complained of a short ration or of hunger in general, he would beat her with the same stick used to serve the soup.
After their six weeks of internment, the women were brought out of the barracks before a huge pile of clothes: slips, pajamas, underwear, nightgowns, jackets, pants. They were instructed to take off their prison garb and dress themselves in the leftover clothes of the dead.
It was funny—we would look at each other and laugh, because a fat woman would wear something that couldn’t close on her, and a thin woman wore something very large. I ended up with a nightgown, and my mother also had some sort of nightgown. We didn’t ask why. There was no why. An order was an order.
They were sent out on trains to dig trenches, moving as the Russian front closed in. In summer, “It wasn’t so bad.” The women worked from six in the morning until six at night. When the winter of 1945 began, the work, partly under the cruel oversight of a German commander named, of all things, Kafka, became unendurable. Their shovels were blunt. The ground was frozen. They were starving and dying. On Christmas night Lili’s mother snuck out into a village and knocked on a cottage door to beg for food. The woman of the house agreed to give her some Christmas cake, but first Rachel Swirski had to sit and darn the family’s collection of torn socks.
At one point, sleeping at night on the frozen ground, finding themselves unable to work any longer, they asked their captors to send them back to Stutthof.
Lili’s children call it the day she “signed up for the gas chambers.”
They waited, inert, for the truck to come and take them to their death, but instead, a few days later, a German officer made an announcement: “We are no longer killing Jews.”
All the women were roused. They were not going to be gassed or beaten to death. They were going to be marched into oblivion.
The night came, and at that point we were near a logging factory. They brought us in there and told us to lie down. We were so exhausted we just did it. Next day, same thing—walking, marching. Where and for what? Night comes, and again we slept somewhere … we walked like this about five days. Many fell to the side and died, and anyone who couldn’t walk was shot, and my mother and I—really with our last drops of strength we just kept walking and walking.
One morning when Lili woke, her thick head of red hair that had been spared at Stutthof was frozen to the ground; clumps and strands of it broke off when she sat up to begin walking again.
One night they brought us to these Finnish-style round barracks. We heard the Russian front. We understood they were closing in, and yet we were being marched and taken and we didn’t understand where and we didn’t know why. We woke up in the morning. We were so used to being people that are ordered around, yelled at—not human in our own right. But it was silent. We looked around and realized there weren’t any guards. We actually got scared and looked for our guards; we couldn’t believe that we were free.
IT TURNED OUT that Elena Las, a young Jewish widow with a child, with means of some kind, lived—per my grandfather’s permission—at the end of Gedmino, half a block from his house during his time in Švenčionys. If they both walked out their doors at the same time in the morning, they could have waved to each other. Under the heading for religion in the 1942 census that lists her by name and provides her address, over an initial, unreadable entry is written “Roman Catholic.” I’ll never know what arrangement was made between my grandfather and her.
Of Mirele Rein, I have found no trace—just a part of a testimony that anchors her in memory and time. But one day a friend who had visited Denmark said she had seen a remarkable exhibition of drawings by a young Lithuanian artist named Mindaugas Lukošaitis. I looked up his work, and in a collection of drawings he titled Jews: My History I found an image that immediately became, for me, one way of remembering the girl who spoke beautiful Lithuanian, who perhaps tumbled into the arms of a short, dark woman in a doorway on a road in Novo-Švenčionys, and who, if the testimony about her is accurate, my grandfather would not save and who lost her life when the Postavai ghetto was liquidated; another shooting, another pit.
And then she vanishes.
WHEN MARTYNAS, THE twenty-year-old son of my Lithuanian relative Egidijus Puronas, came to New York for job training, he visited us twice for dinner.
At the end of one evening, he spoke of the story he had been told about my grandfather, about all the people Senelis had freed from jail, the lives he had perhaps saved. I watched his face as he spoke and saw there what I’ve felt inside myself, the power of the family narrative as it is handed down to us, our desire to believe in the simplest way, that those we love or have loved are good, even heroic.
He asked me many questions about my archival work, and I tried to explain to him as carefully as possible that I had looked for evidence that Senelis had performed this courageous act but had not found it.
Martynas, pragmatic, quirky, bright, said, “Maybe someday the relatives of those he saved will come forward.” He couldn’t let go of the truth as he knew it, as it had been given to him, like a spell handed down by my great-grandmother Barbara. He was optimistic.
“Maybe they will,” I said, and felt, for just a second or two, the pull of that particular narrative, a bit of hope.
It was a steamy city night, and the open window, a small whirl of a fan, didn’t alleviate the heat. I cleared the table, and perhaps it was the close air and the summer shirt sticking to my back and the Lithuanian accent of Martynas that made me think of the afternoon when I had stood in the heat outside of Lukiškės prison with the man at the top, Artūras Karalis.
There he is again, stocky, handsome (like Senelis was at his age), as the shadow of the afternoon divides the street—cautioning me about entering the prison and about the perils of memory in general. He makes a sweep of his arm, as if gesturing beyond Lukiškės to the whole of Vilnius and the country itself.
“This is a place of tears,” he says. He is right.
EPILOGUE
* * *
Try to look … if you don’t find anything, don’t regret your efforts. There’s little hope, but there’s still some sort of tiny crystal of hope.
—ONA ŠIMAITĖ IN A LETTER TO MARIJONA ČILVINAITĖS, DECEMBER 17, 1957
* * *
WHEN I FIRST began to learn about Lithuania during World War II, Ona Šimaitė—who in addition to having the same first name as Babita was also, like Babita, a Lithuanian librarian—captivated me.
Employed at the Vilnius University Library, Šimaitė continually risked arrest and death as she smuggled food and supplies into the Vilna ghetto under the cover o
f participating, with Herman Kruk and others, in the decimation of Jewish literary culture by finding and sequestering important books for the Germans.
Yad Vashem lists eight hundred Lithuanians as Righteous Among the Nations, Šimaitė included, but Lithuania keeps its wartime secrets. In the countryside especially, there is still a fear of saying too much, fear of a bad neighbor, a reprisal from one quarter or another, some of the fear left over from the Soviets who, directly at war’s end, immediately executed roughly the same number of Lithuanians honored today by Yad Vashem. And then after that, year after year, killed or deported more.
Members of the same family are often deeply divided about the past. On a trip to her home country, my mother was told by a Lithuanian relative that “we got rid of both of them, the Jews and the Russians.” A few days later, a cousin drove my mother to a small memorial for local Jews massacred during the war.
I am sure that many Lithuanian families have as yet untold stories of grandparents and great-grandparents, fathers or mothers, uncles and aunts, who brought butter to the “black window” and refused to be paid, who thrust bread into the hand of someone marching from work or to a labor camp, who gave shelter, or simply saw and did not report someone running for his life.
There were Germans also—not many, but some—like the well-known Major Karl Plagge, who through a factory in Vilnius offered extra food, protection, and life-saving permits to many of the Jewish workers there.
Some people both hurt and helped. Some people collaborated—the inadequate word—and then stopped, for reasons that might have had nothing to do with horror at the massacre of the Jewish population of Lithuania. Some helped those in need for a price that kept getting steeper.