Within forty-eight hours, men are digging pits in the forests just outside Riga, making them deep enough to hold thousands of dead.
With seventy-two hours, smoke chokes the city as its synagogues burn. Trapped congregants pound on doors that have been locked from the outside by young men who stand guard to make sure no one escapes. Some people try to exit through the windows, but the men surround anyone who makes it to the street. They bludgeon the escapees with the butt ends of guns. Meanwhile, out in the forests, in the dark, the first wave of prisoners is pushed toward the edge of the pits. A firing squad of ten stands on the other side. After they unload all their bullets, a man with a machine gun roams the edge of the pit, looking for any survivors, then gives the signal for the diggers to cover it all back up. But the killers are all drunk, rushing, and sometimes they refill the hole before everyone is dead. Some see the soil moving, rippling, but they don’t do anything, except ask for more vodka.
Out in the countryside, the reaction has been just as fierce and swift. In Gulbene, my grandmother’s region of Latvia, census takers, in the years just before the war, recorded the number of Jewish residents to be 84. But within days of the German troops’ arrival, every single one of them has vanished, rounded up by soldiers, directed by the local police, who know where everyone lives. Then they are taken to the local train station, where they are held in outbuildings, until the day the blue buses arrive.
The blue buses come from Riga, requisitioned from the city’s fleet, filled with the volunteers who have perfected their methods in the forest killings and synagogue burnings and basement tortures. They meet the train carrying Gulbene’s Jews about twenty kilometers from the village, then lead the men and women and children to a former army shooting range, where they are slaughtered four at a time, their bodies dumped in a single mass grave.
When the Nazis first marched into Latvia, there were an estimated 70,000 Jews living in the country.
Just three months later, a status report is sent to commanders in Germany. On a map of Latvia, there is a coffin. Above it is written the number 35,238.
It is October 1941.
That month, my grandparents conceive their first child.
A month later, they marry.
By then, nearly every remaining Jew in Latvia will have been murdered.
I HAVE NOT found evidence that my grandfather was a participant in the atrocities that took place in Riga, or the Latvian countryside, or that he condoned them. But there is his silence. It is impossible to imagine that he did not witness what was happening throughout the city, that anyone who lived in Riga at that time could not have seen the smoke and smelled the fires; the neighboring apartments, suddenly empty; the columns of men and women and children being marched down Freedom Street at gunpoint; the barbed wire cordoning off a twelve-square-block section of the city, with a sign outside, in both German and Latvian that reads Persons who climb the fence or attempt to communicate with ghetto inhabitants through the fence will be shot on sight. The trains arriving every day, delivering Jews from other countries to the ghetto.
And yet, the outlines of his life in 1941 suggest that my grandfather is trying to live as if none of this is happening, as if he is trying to make his presence smaller and smaller, so that no one will notice him pretending not to notice.
Each morning, he rises and waits for the tram. He goes to his job at the textile factory, and balances the books. At night, he teaches. He stands at the chalkboard. He writes. He erases. He takes the streetcar home.
He slides under the blankets next to my grandmother, who moves his hand to meet their baby’s kick.
In July 1942, nearly one year to the day the Nazis arrived in Riga, she tells him it is time.
THE BABY has dark hair, thick and unruly, like her father’s.
They name her Maruta.
He buys a camera, holds it up to his eye, fixing her in the viewfinder: such a tiny thing tucked in the crook of her mother’s arm, sucking the folds of fabric that wrap her.
But while that camera is pressed against his eye: the German high command is fretting over its losses. They are hemorrhaging soldiers, losing ground to the Russians. They managed to recruit several hundred Latvian volunteers without any trouble. Then they formed a separate unit they called the Latvian Legion, hoping to appeal to Latvian nationalism by giving them their own division, commanded by their own officers. But that’s still given them nowhere near enough bodies.
As talk begins of a mandatory induction, my grandparents bundle baby Maruta, just ten months old, and take a train from the city to spend a few days at Lembi, as if a country retreat might let them pretend that there is a parallel universe from the one unfolding in Riga, a world where it was still possible to believe that people could do simple, unthinking things like gather lettuce while the baby gums dirt, or put a stick in her hand and let her wave it at the unamused pigs. Where her uncle will hoist her onto the back of a bored plow horse flicking its tail at her kicks as if they were little more than the touch of settling flies. And where her aunt Ausma, just fourteen, can hold her and sing to her and let her lick sweet batter from her fingers while Livija sleeps.
Maybe it is moments like this that convince my grandfather over the next six months, following that visit to Lembi, that he can go on pretending indefinitely, blocking out the truth of what is happening all around him, and his place in it, especially when his birthday falls just outside the first induction order, issued at the end of 1943.
That month my grandfather Emils and my grandmother Livija conceive their second child, my father.
NO ONE reads the newspapers in Riga anymore for news. In fact most people have forgotten what news looks like, what it was to read about the yearly accumulation of rainfall, or the health of the national rye crop, or a review of a performance of Verdi’s Aïda at the Opera House, or a report on the annual gathering of regional folklorists. Instead, the papers carry statements, proclamations, polemics, bulleted items now preceded by the word WARNING. In late March 1944, my grandfather’s conscription order arrives. His brother-in-law, my grandmother’s brother, Janis, has already received his call-up. Not long after my grandfather’s order arrives, the following appears in one of the city’s newspapers, under the words FINAL WARNING:
Unconscious citizens who refrain from fulfilling their responsibility to their nation at this decisive moment and have not heeded the instructions will not be able to live unaffected. Sooner or later they will receive the punishment they deserve.
There are men who resist, who take to the forests, who run. But most, like my grandfather, choose to accept their call-up. Some of the men say it does not matter what uniform they wear, they are not fighting for the Germans, they are fighting to protect Latvia, fighting against the Soviets—and when they defeat them, they will turn against the Germans. Still, when they pull the army-issue tunics over their heads, the elbows hollowed to fit the shape of their previous owners, how can they deny the S.S. bolts at the collars?
At his induction, my grandfather and his fellow conscripts repeat the following: I swear by God this holy oath that in the struggle against Bolshevism I will give the Commander in Chief of the German Armed Forces, Adolf Hitler, absolute obedience and as a brave soldier I will always be ready to lay down my life for this oath.
At home, on his last leave, he raises the camera once more:
Maruta, her hair dark as a rook’s wing, plump-legged like a pony, given, alternately, to gumming a toy dog or closing her eyes against the winter-thinned sunlight. These are the last images of the family, together in Latvia, and even though my father is not yet present, he is already there with them, cells dividing, multiplying, an unseen partner in the moments unfolding.
My grandfather is largely absent from the record of these last days, as if he has already started to hold himself apart, choosing instead to control their framing, lingering on images of mother and child, using the several seconds’ stillness required to take a photograph with his old camera as
an excuse to memorize their features: Maruta’s tiny ears, whorled and vulnerable, like snails unshelled; her first milk teeth, fluttering at the edge of lips callused from breast-feeding; the lines that appear around the edges of his wife’s eyes when she smiles, soft like the creases traced in the dirt after a sudden rain; the base of her neck, the way it hollows when she looks down to admire the girl in her lap.
Only a few times, he crosses over to join that life inside the frame: his hands, large and rigid as garden spades, gloved in leather, military issue, Maruta’s twig-fingers lost in his grip as he helps her take her first toeing steps.
He is assigned to combat on the eastern front, where Latvia borders Russia. They go without training, with hand-me-down guns and severe shortages of supplies. According to a report from the colonel who headed my grandfather’s division:
Of the 536 horses we were promised, we received only 85, 5 of which were lame. Of the estimated 15 light vehicles there were only 2; of the estimated 18 heavy vehicles, only 2. . . . The soldiers received nothing to drink out of or any eating utensils.
This is how my grandfather will spend the next six months, with dwindling ammunition, under heavy attack, each day bringing him closer to the battle that will claim his eye. Shelled from one side, pinned by tank fire from the other. Guerrilla snipers hidden in the forest canopy, picking off thirty men in a single sustained barrage. One day, while under fire, their commander sends them across a river, storm-swollen, raging. One soldier drowns. The rafts carrying the heavy weapons, and what is left of their ammunition, sink like stones.
The soldiers know before anyone has to tell them: this is a retreat.
What is left of my grandfather’s division crosses back into Latvia at the end of July, and suddenly my grandfather is marching through the countryside where he was raised, past farms and barns and horses too old to be afraid of the bombs; past the turnoff for Cesvaine, where he and my grandmother first met; past the former army shooting range, and the unmarked mass grave that holds the bodies of every Jew who once called this area home, too.
He is marching past houses emptied of all life, the inhabitants off to forests to try to hide from the mortar bursts.
One of my grandfather’s fellow soldiers, whose job it is to collect the wounded and dying, checks each abandoned house for pillows, which he confiscates so that after he has given each man a gulp of cognac, the only analgesic left, he has something soft to place under their heads.
Abandoned farm animals roam the roads: a pregnant sow, tits dragging on the ground. One of the soldiers shoots it, then guts it, leaving the piglets and viscera in a mound.
By the time my grandfather reaches the site of the battle that will take his eye, his son will have been born. Maybe my grandfather knows. Maybe this is why he and the others do what they do, digging in, facing the onslaught, knowing that their ammunition will not last, that this is likely their end.
There are some Latvian historians who say that the battle in which my grandfather was wounded was critical in giving tens of thousands of refugees like my grandmother time to flee the final violent tremors of the war as it played out in Latvia. A sacrifice, they call it. But the word for sacrifice in Latvian can also mean victim, casualty. There are other historians who say that it can never matter why a person fought with the Germans, whether or not their service was mandatory, whether or not they say they only ever served on the Russian front, whether or not they insist that their actions were never meant to help the Reich, but simply, to defend the idea of their former nation, their own families against Bolshevism. Because every day that you helped delay the advance of anyone who was on the side of the Allies, was another day you helped delay the end of the war. And each day you delayed the end of the war was another day you gave the Nazis time to commit additional war crimes.
All those years, as I watched my grandfather convulse and cry in silent agony, I never once considered that maybe he hurt so badly not because of the wounds he received that day, but because he had not died.
Instead, he woke up in a field hospital, stripped of his uniform, his head bandaged, the chart at his feet noting the extent of the damage that is caused by a single bullet as it enters the eye socket, passes through the impossibly small pocket of space between brain and skull and exits just behind the ear.
XIII
DEEP IN THE BARN, a cow pushes, water breaks upon straw. The first hoof emerges. Then another. One calf drops. Then another. Twins. Their birth-slick bodies steaming in the gloom of the barn. Their mother licks them clean of blood and shit and afterbirth with her bark-rough tongue. Her teats are emptied, and the barn cats shoot from their dens in the hay to fight over the splashes. Some of her milk is set aside for the babies, but some goes to those who care for them, too.
First milk, the farmers call it, thick like blood, the color of a lily’s stamen.
Ausma decides we will use it to make bread, so sweet there’s no call for sugar, so thick it needs nothing else to bind the flour.
The radio is playing. Ausma sings along: Oh my beautiful youth, come back to me. . . .
She hands me her rolling pin, so I can take a turn at the dough.
What was it like for my sister, after she left us, during the war? Ausma asks suddenly.
Harijs, who has come in to get a glass of water, overhears Ausma’s question.
Do you know how many times I should have died? he says.
Shh! Ausma says. Not now with that! I want to know this.
Did you come here from America by airplane or by boat? Harijs tries again.
You! says Ausma. Don’t interrupt. Don’t you have something to do outside?
In America, Harijs tries one last time, do you have the same sky?
This time, Ausma looks at me, too.
My grandmother always told me it was different, I say. And now that I’m here, I can see she was right.
What’s different? asks Ausma.
The clouds feel closer here. Like you can touch them as they drift by.
I always used to think the sky was the same sky, wherever you went, Ausma says. But your grandmother wrote the same thing to me once: All I want is to see Latvia’s sky one more time before I die. . . . This was when she was in the camps, I think. A letter that reached us years later, after she had already made it to America, and we had come back from Siberia.
Ausma returns to working the dough, as if she is done with the conversation, but I can tell by the force with which she uses the heel of her hand to fold it, then fold it again, that she is thinking about something, turning it over it in her head.
What I mean is, were the camps really so bad? she says at last. Maybe they had dysentery. But she had a place to sleep and food. It couldn’t have been anything like what we had to live through. All of it. The war. Then my father’s death. Me having to run the farm, all by myself. Then being sent away. She left me alone to carry the weight of it all—just a child. She was spared from the worst of it. Wasn’t she?
SHE IS the only person to hold my father following his birth. He does not feel his own father’s touch. Soldier, she writes on the necessary paperwork, when asked her husband’s occupation, and signs whatever needs signing by herself. Whether my grandmother believes then that to bear this alone is simply a temporary condition, soon to be remedied by a miraculous resolution to the war, in which her husband emerges not only unscathed but also unaccountable for having fought in an army under fascist command; or if she has begun to suspect, based on the whispered news of overwhelmed troops, breached borders and orders of retreat, that it is to be the new life to which she must become accustomed, she never utters her thoughts on this aloud.
My father is born as Russian aircraft hurl fire down on the German troops hunkered down in the marshlands surrounding Riga, their guns tatting against the bellies of the big, wailing planes that are known to their own soldiers as hunchbacks. Massive, lumbering things, bulge-eyed, narrow-snouted, said by Stalin to be as essential as air and bread.
As this due date had approached, Livija asked her sister to come to Riga to help her. But then word came that all civilian rail service within the country had stopped. Then the phones no longer sang, and when lifted from their cradles, screamed a silence louder than the sound of the planes horneting overhead.
When it is time, she turns to a friend—a fellow accountant at the bacon export factory where my grandmother works. She comes to look after Maruta while my grandmother is in the maternity ward.
Her name is Liene, a diminutive of the English name Helen. She is a single woman, with no family. The time has passed for her to have children of her own. And this may be the start of it, a plan, building like the contractions that will send my grandmother outside to catch the streetcar to the maternity ward housed in a building in downtown Riga that will one day house the Soviet secret police.
Maybe Livija is the one who asks. Maybe Liene asks, once she has spent time caring for two-year-old Maruta. Either way, a decision is made. Whatever happens next, it will happen with Liene’s help.
The Soviets are encircling the city. Outside my grandmother’s apartment on Peace Street, the bombs wail day and night, matching the pitch of the baby’s cries. As my grandmother tries to get him to latch, Liene offers to bring my grandmother food, whatever she can find or trade. The only other people on the streets seem to be refugees, column after column, bent backs dusted with ash. They trail goats and calves, along with stories of villages to the east and the north burned like spoiled crops, the destruction caused by not just the advancing Russian troops but also the retreating German armies, who would rather level everything than leave anything, even a wedge of bread, behind for their enemies to claim. At night the refugees’ cook-fires burn in the city’s parks and cemeteries.
Among the Living and the Dead Page 13
