From Russia with Lunch (16 page)

On the one hand, it is remembered sentimentally … it sends up a nostalgic glow for its survivors and for those who have received the tradition from parents and grandparents. It is pictured as one of the rare and happy breathing spells of the Exile, the nearest thing to a home that the Jews have ever known. On the other hand it is recalled with a grimace of distaste. Those forlorn little settlements in a vast and hostile wilderness, isolated alike from Jewish and non-Jewish centres of civilization, their tenure precarious, their structure ramshackle, their spirit squalid. Who would want to live in one of them?

The far-flung nature of these communities is often the first furphy targeted as their inhabitants were relatively literate and serviced by a buoyant Yiddish press. Business travel was permitted within the Pale of Settlement and these commercial venturers returned with tales of what they had seen. What's more, Lucy Dawidowicz, author of
The Golden Tradition,
notes that by the late 1800s the ‘proletarianisation of the Jewish masses and their accelerated urbanisation began to disrupt segments of traditionalist society where earlier modernist movements had not penetrated'. The most authentic depiction of
shtetl
existence is most probably a collage of sentiment and cynicism, the first underpinned by fact, the second by the aching hunger which drove those like my great-grandfather to leave Naishtot.

Fittingly, I drove southwest from Kaunas under a gauze pewter sky that flattened the landscape like an old photograph. The town straddles the confluence of the Shirvinta stream – which formed the border with Prussia – and the Sesupe River. First noted in the sixteenth century, it flitted between Polish and Russian ownership and by 1835 some 76 per cent of its 4413 residents were Jewish. Despite enduring several catastrophic fires and a cholera epidemic that ran from 1871 to 1893, Naishtot's Jews didn't so much prosper but endure. Before World War I, Jewish families owned four brush-manufacturing plants (employing one hundred workers), two soft drink and beer factories, a silk-spinning workshop and 300 hectares under grain.

Like many such towns, Naishtot's Jewish community not only boasted a government-subsidised Hebrew school and Zionist fundraising society but also provided a steady trickle of customers to smugglers across the German border, who could get them passage on a boat to Africa or America. Increased life expectancy and medical advances offset this population drain and despite deportation in World War I, the Jewish community that returned to Naishtot in 1919 did so in healthy numbers. Most were traders who sold farm produce such as vegetables, fruit, livestock and eggs to German clients over the river and bought industrial products from them.

Artisans including shoemakers, clockmakers, barbers, bakers and butchers also made enough of a living to stay despite the hardships. As in the larger settlements, a number of community organisations were established. There was a charitable loan fund, a burial society, medical treatment for Jews who could otherwise not afford it, a homeless shelter, ritual bathhouses for men and women and a library run by the marvellously named Lovers of Knowledge Association.

Stepping out onto the 100-metre by 100-metre cobbled square at the centre of the town, I was prepared for everything except my own ambivalence. Bounded by brick and concrete apartment blocks with pitched tiled roofs, the odd brown brick cottage and a wooden museum that seemed to have been closed due to lack of interest, Naishtot's hub bore the mien of the recently anaesthetised. Thanks once again to the sparkling detective work of my Melburnian cousins, I had a map of Naishtot drawn up in 1971 by Ralph Goldberg, who had left the town in 1922 for Chicago. Aside from laying out the schematics of the settlement, Goldberg had etched the names of the town's Jewish inhabitants where their homes stood.

One of those was Myrom Epshtein, a cousin of my greatgrandfather. Across oceans and generations, I could now get a bead on my bloodline. A roof under which my ancestors sheltered, a kitchen in which they cooked, a dunny in which they read between exertions. For many Jewish travellers with Lithuanian heritage, this moment is the ne plus ultra of their trip. I had heard tales of being welcomed into musty parlours by long-presumed-dead relatives who showered their lost kin with tears and rock-hard biscuits. I had been told of suspicious eyes retreating behind drawn curtains in a home whose ownership might be contested by the international interloper at the door.

Prepared for both, I got
bubkus.
Myrom's home was now the garden of a drab detached cottage with a white wooden fence and green corrugated-iron roof. Hoping against hope, I rapped on the door. Nothing. Outside the grubby fluoro-drenched supermarket which seemed to be Naish-tot's focal point, a group of men lounged on a scratched white BMW and watched me with a slightly intimidating blend of sneer and suspicion. There was only one thing for me to do. Approach them. Then make a sharp left into the confectionary aisle. Two Kit-Kats, one Coke and several withering glances from a cashier who made Brezhnev look like Christie Brinkley later, I tried my luck once again at Myrom's place. Still nothing.

I drove around Naishtot out of a lingering sense of obligation. However, neither the journey nor the emotion lasted. It had the unremarkable air of a settlement that had once been much more than it now was. The bungalows were neatly whitewashed, the gardens had obvious indications of maintenance and the thin rim of suburbia bled into pasture half a kilometre from the centre of town. In the marvellous Mel Brooks' film
History of the World Part One,
Dom DeLu-ise plays a hideously bloated and avaricious Emperor Nero who is presented with a handcarved alabaster bathing vessel by a returned conquering general. Between saliva-glossed bites of a chicken leg, Nero appraises the objet d'art with, ‘Nice. Not thrilling, but nice.' This summarised Naishtot for me. As it receded in my rear-view mirror, I had a sense of regret that I had not felt more there.

Five kilometres out of town was a signpost that might as well have read ‘be careful what you wish for'. In actuality, it said ‘Genocide Memorial' and was accompanied by a faded blue Star of David.

8

Just another town

Hitler and Goering are arguing about the Jews. Goering says that they are very clever people, but Hitler denies it. Finally, Goering tells Hitler that he'll prove it's true if Hitler is prepared to disguise himself and come shopping with him. Hitler agrees, so they both disguise themselves and go into Berlin.

Goering takes Hitler into a shop, goes up to the counter, and asks the German clerk: ‘Do you sell left-handed teacups?'

The clerk stares at Goering for a moment, then says, ‘No, mein Herr, we do not.'

They leave and now Goering takes Hitler into a Jewish shop. He goes up to the counter and asks the clerk: ‘Do you sell left-handed teacups?'

The clerk smiles politely, goes into the back room, makes a show of rummaging around, then brings out a saucer and teacup, sets the saucer down and carefully places the cup with the handle pointed so that Goering can pick it up with his left hand. ‘There you are, mein Herr!' the clerk says.

Goering buys the teacup, thanks the clerk, and leaves the shop with Hitler. Once they're outside, he turns to Hitler and says: ‘See, I told you the Jews were very clever people!'

‘I don't see what was so clever about that,' Hitler snaps. ‘He just happened to have one in stock!'

Peeling off onto a gravel road that wound its way among greying palisades of wooden farmhouses, I missed the track to the Genocide Memorial on several occasions. Obscured by weeds and boggy scrub, a pair of rutted paths ran side by side into oppressive overhanging bushland the tendrils of which pinged against the car's flanks. Two kilometres and ten bone-shuddering minutes later, the path dissolved into a patch of gravel on the outskirts of a conifer forest. Hacked into it was an expanse of lawn as long as a football field and half as wide, beyond which, through a pine curtain, could be glimpsed a lake of shattered crystal. The sky's ashes had long since been scattered by an insistent breeze and bright sunshine now threaded its way through the leaf needles.

Were it not what it was, this clearing would have been the perfect backdrop for everything from stolen picnic kisses to marriage proposals and eventual weddings. The memory of those interred beneath its mossy gulches and bible-black fungi rendered it anything but. If gaunt ghosts in striped pyjamas and yellow stars ever haunted this forest, they were now long gone. In their stead was a sterile chasm of nothingness soaked through with a keening melancholy. Like many men, my defence mechanism in the face of overwhelming emotion is irrelevant rationality. Seeking refuge in numbers, I calculated the dimensions of the memorial to be around 100 metres long and 35 wide. At a modest depth of, say, a metre and a half, how many stacked bodies could a ditch of this magnitude accommodate?

Mapmaker Ralph Goldberg of Chicago provided the gruesome answer. Assuming that the male and female Jewish population of Naishtot was roughly equal, the number of Nazi victims beneath my feet was around 375. According to his map, I had found the mass grave of Parazhneve Forest, where all of Naishtot's Jewish women and children had been slain on 16 September 1941. They had been told they were being taken to join their menfolk who were working in Germany. The truth of the matter was that all of Naishtot's Jewish males aged fourteen and over had been rounded up some three months earlier by Lithuanian fascists, transported to a barn on wagons and executed in groups of fifty. Their corpses were then dumped in a prepared mass grave at what is now the Besoylem Jewish Cemetery. Likewise, the women's wagons creaked into this clearing where they were ordered to dig the pits in which they would die.

I'd been to the gas chambers of Dachau and asked myself how human beings could do this to one another. I had examined the blurry camp liberation images of bewildered inmates with parchment skin and void eyes, then swallowed the lump in my throat. The figure of six million had been rendered abstract by its atrociousness. Now that number could be reduced to a place and personal pronouns. Punched in the chest by the probability that my own flesh and blood were interred beneath me, I had my first visceral reaction to the Holocaust.

Lest you believe I am a religious man, let me dissuade you of that notion right now. As far as Judaism goes, I am as lapsed as lapsed can be. I don't fast on the high holy day of atonement. I eat pork, shellfish and, where possible, both. Yet in the middle of a Lithuanian forest, I found myself wrenching the traditional mourner's prayer from deep within my most sorrowful memories. The first lines came easily:
Yit'gadal v'yit'kadash sh'mei raba
(May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified). As did the final couplet:
Oseh shalom bim'romav hu ya'aseh shalom aleinu v'al kol Yis'ra'eil
(He who makes peace in His heights, may He make peace, upon us and upon all Israel). The body of the prayer, however, was a rambling mess of linguistic fragments interspersed by diphthongs of embarrassment in which I felt I should have been more coherent given the circumstances. What I did recall, however, was that this prayer never once mentioned the word ‘death'. Rather, it was a plea for the Almighty to grant a life of peace. What befell Lithuanian Jewry under Nazi rule was anything but.

From the get-go contemporary Lithuanian authorities are commendably quick to acknowledge that their Holocaust was not perpetrated by Hitler's henchmen alone. Locals also gleefully took part in the slaughter. According to the Genocide Research and Resistance Centre of Lithuania, ‘Although almost every type of Lithuanian police force took part in the persecution and murder of the Jews, their role in the Holocaust was not so important as that of the police battalions. Ten out of 28 Lithuanian police battalions took part in the Holocaust in various ways (direct shooting, guarding the shooting sites during the murders, transporting victims to the killing sites, ghetto security).' One of the reasons for this was a Nazi propaganda campaign which posited that Bolshevism was essentially a front for Jewish power. It was therefore the Jews who were primarily responsible for the horrors endured by Lithuanians during the Soviet occupation.

Regardless of who was pulling the trigger, the massacres began during the earliest skirmishes of the Soviet–Nazi war. Another factor was the legitimisation of old-fashioned anti-Semitism which had little to do with Bolshevism. Long before the Germans confined urban Jews to ghettoes in August 1941, those in the countryside were being butchered. On the first day of the conflict, 22 June 1941, orders were given to begin the murder of Semites and communists in a 25-kilometre band around the Sovetsk region. Within two days, the Sovetsk Gestapo group had shot 201 victims in Gargzdai. They became more efficient with practice and by the end of the summer, this single unit had taken 5502 lives.

When Kaunas fell on 25 June, the Gestapo warmed further to their grim task. After several random butcherings, such as the one at the Lietukis garage where dozens of corpses were put on display as a show of Teutonic might, they began transporting Jews en masse to the nine forts on the city's outskirts, where they would be put to death. On 15 August, Kaunas' 37,000-strong Jewish population was confined to a cramped ghetto in the city centre – which in effect acted as a holding pen for cattle awaiting slaughter. Once thus contained, in the words of overseeing Commandant Jaeger, ‘the cleansing of the ghetto of unnecessary Jews' could transpire. One of the most insidious of these exercises took place when Commandant Fritz Jordan ordered the ghetto's Council of Elders to gather a group of intellectuals to work in the city archives. Believing their mental capacities would prolong their lives and secure them better living conditions, 534 volunteered. All were executed at the Fourth Fort. In a single afternoon, an entire community's leading writers, artists, doctors, engineers, attorneys and teachers were obliterated.

The most barbaric of these slaughters took place on 29 October 1941. The previous evening, the Gestapo had toured the ghetto cherry-picking victims. The criteria? Families with many children, the physically weak, the old and the sick. By the time the last bodies fell at the Ninth Fort, the death toll was 9200 – of which 4273 were children. The same grim scene was being played out in Vilnius, where the Jewish population stood at 58,000 – a quarter of the city's inhabitants – before the war. With their properties looted and their dignity assailed, Jews were forced to wear yellow stars to signify their religious status and crammed into two ghettoes. Comprising no more than a few ramshackle blocks, these areas accommodated some forty thousand. The only reason they were able to accommodate the city's Jewish population was that it had already been culled by 10,000–20,000 in the killing fields of Paneriai, seven kilometres out of town. On 2 September 1941 alone, 3700 Jews drew their final breath there.

And so it went, larger populations were corralled into ghettoes then liquidated – with just enough left for expendable labour – while more modest Jewish communities were simply divided by gender then dispensed with in shady glades. Between June and December 1941, it is estimated that 164,000-167,000 Lithuanian Jews – 80 per cent of the Semitic population – were murdered by the Nazis or their agents. Many of those who remained were killed when the ghettoes were liquidated in 1943 while those deemed fit to work were sent to concentration camps such as Auschwitz. Which raises a grim distinction. In contrast to the millions of European Jews – as well as homosexuals, gypsies, communists and Poles – who were gassed in the Nazi death factories, the overwhelming majority of Lithuanian victims were dispensed with by firing squads. This mode of execution lends a morose intimacy to the act that requires a special degree of detached inhumanity. At least that's what eyewitness accounts of the killings suggest.

In the Green House, an annexe of the Lithuanian Jewish State Museum in Vilnius, were several such recollections. Arriving in Paneriai in early July 1941, an unnamed driver from a motorised column of the German army recalled seeing a group of 400 Jewish men being led into what he described as two large sandpits separated by a strip of land. Lined with gravel, each was roughly 1.5 metres deep and the same wide. He wrote, ‘As the Jews were being led in groups into the pit, an elderly man stopped in front of the entrance for a moment and said in good German, “What do you want from me? I am only a poor composer.” The two civilians standing at the entrance started pummelling him with blows so that he literally flew into the pit.'

Moving closer to the ditch, the driver noted that the Jews were being clubbed by guards if they tried to climb out and that several had been stripped to the waist. Groups of ten were then dragged from the pits and the driver commented that many ‘covered their heads with their clothes'. This was most likely an attempt on the part of the more pious to fulfil the commandment of covering one's head when in the Lord's presence. Which is always. It was at this point that they were led to the designated slaughter spot, holding on to the upper body of the man in front of them. Lined up before another trench, which the driver estimated to have a diameter of 15–20 metres and a depth of six, these men then faced a firing squad of ten:

The shots were fired simultaneously so that the Jews fell into the pit behind them at exactly the same time. The 400 Jews were shot in exactly the same way over a period of about an hour. If any of the men in the pit were still moving a few more single shots were fired on them.

The (approximately) 400 Jews who had been shot the previous day were also in there. They were covered with a thin sprinkling of sand. Right on top, on this layer of sand, there were a further three men and a woman who had been shot on the morning of the day in question. Parts of their bodies protruded out of the sand. After about 100 Jews had been shot, other Jews had to sprinkle sand over their bodies.

During a break in the proceedings, the driver asked one of the executioners how he could bring himself to carry out the killings so dispassionately. The man replied, ‘After what we've gone through under the domination of Russian Jewish commissars, we no longer find it difficult.' Although few Jews ever attained such posts or were actually active at this level in the communist hierarchy, the shooter told the driver of a Jewish commissar who had apparently broken into a man's flat and raped his wife before his eyes. Afterwards the commissar had butchered the wife, cut her heart out, fried it in a pan and eaten it. In the three days the driver spent in Paneriai, he estimated 1200 Jews were shot to death, although he could not bring himself to attend the executions again. Describing the events he witnessed as ‘quite horrific', he added, ‘May God grant us victory, because if they get their revenge, we're in for a hard time.' And then some.

Half an hour in this arena of carnage had knotted my guts and transmogrified intellectual outrage into a personal resentment. Chances of history and circumstance ensured I have not been subject to the purging anti-Semitism that my relatives in Naishtot endured. In fact my closest experience is so comparatively mild that it's practically irrelevant. Several years ago at work, I told a Jewish joke which went down a treat. A few minutes later, my boss cornered me in the kitchen and asked why Jews were ‘so in people's faces' about their identity and culture. To which I replied with more vehemence than I might have liked, ‘It's a “fuck you” to the world, a “we're still here”. ' There was no raise that year.

Amateur cartographer Ralph Goldberg put it far better with the Yiskor (Remembrance) saying he added to the Naishtot schematic: ‘My intention in making this map is perhaps in future generations a grandchild or a great-grandchild will out of curiosity unfold it. He may accidentally recognise a familiar name that he heard years ago in his parents' or grandparents' home. He will also read about how and when this terrible Holocaust happened. It is my hope that it will remind him NOT TO FORGET AND NOT TO FORGIVE.'