by Rita Gabis
“Yes, I do remember the yellow stars and that they had to walk in the street,” my mother had said at the February gathering with my aunts on the island. Fragments of her past had started to come loose, a glacier breaking up, but just a little, and never for very long. She spoke soberly but without emotion, as if carefully recalling a detail about a medical procedure that happened to someone else or remembering a long-ago visitor, whose face, the purpose of the visit, was lost to her. Because at the time we spoke, the only country I’d visited outside of the States was France, I imagined people walking off the sidewalks in a place like a medieval village in the Languedoc. The little streets all steep and mazelike. Summer disappearing into stone. Wisteria dripping down, that seasonal oblivious beauty.
Aunt Agnes had barged into the conversation, uncharacteristically specific, intense. She’s German, was a child there during the war.
“I remember I was in dis store and an old man was in line in front of me to pay and someone—I don’t know who, maybe it was an officer or just someone ordinary—said to me, ‘You get in front of the line, all Jews at the end of the line.’ And I felt so darn bad. I was so embarrassed. I’d always been taught to respect my elders and dat stuff. I always remember dat.”
I FOCUS AGAIN on the hypnotic typeface, out of horror and habit. My father collected old manual typewriters. I turn my chair away from the screen because it’s easier, just now, to think of him, remember our visits to the “genius” typewriter man on Circuit Avenue in Oak Bluffs, up a flight of stairs to a room full of little jars and cubbies with typewriter parts. Oil. Grimy rags. I remember the typewriter man as slight, tired, with gray stubble on his face. My father wanted to know everything; platens and key strikes. How did you learn your trade? Where were you born? Was there ever one you couldn’t fix? What did your father do? The man flattered at first, then God, get this customer out of here.
Periodically, my father would hand off an old typewriter to me. Underwoods were his favorite. We would talk about the action of the keys (the way his sister would talk about a piano) and about typefaces, so it’s something I notice. Even now, before a whole vocabulary of erasure.
The type before me looks like Fraktur, rejected by the Reich as “Jew letters.” All type would be Latin! Martin Borman, one of Hitler’s devoted, decreed in January 1941. Latin from now on, in every typewriter key over all the many German-ruled lands. But how impossible to accomplish this—there were war shortages, after all. Slave labor was needed for munitions production, not typewriter keys. The German officers in Litauen (Lithuania) already had their typewriters, thank you very much. Wanderer-Werke Continental Silentas, possibly, or Gromas, thought to be Hitler’s favorite. A Groma from his bunker said to be his is on display, in of all places, Bessemer’s Hall of History Museum in Alabama.
In a civil rights unit I taught years ago, we read, in letter form, the reminiscences of a former slaveowner, Mr. O. J. McCann. They unfolded in a wobbly, tentative script. When I looked at the cursive trying so hard to stay in the margins, the misspellings (skilet/skillet), I felt an odd unwarranted tenderness that had nothing to do with the text but with the effort—“it was very seldom the [slave] huts had a window in them”—an effort Senelis made, in the holiday cards and the birthday cards, chosen for their sparkle and prettiness, the few words he wrote in a script so awkward and careful it made English seem like a kind of calligraphic penance, attempted only because he loved me.
The heavy black letters of the German documents make it hard to breathe.
I think of my father’s maternal grandfather and grandmother again.
Wolf Treegoob, Ķlarah Treegoob
Though my father was the first academic in the family—a Ph.D., imagine!—I never heard him speak about Plato or Aristotle with the same reverence with which he extolled the gifts of the typewriter man or the college kid at the bike repair shop or the mechanic who repaired the engine of his ancient, rusted-out blue Volvo. All versions, I think, of his “genius” grandfather.
You can hold a Tiffany, a Hamilton, a Gruen, in your hand. You can observe, as my great-grandfather did, the end of the era of timepieces: the pocket watch gifted, inscribed. Weigh out, in your palm, the three ounces, close your hand around it. Something real, something the sheen of your sweat, if your palm is warm, will mist a little, until you take a cloth and shine the evidence of yourself away from the crystal and gold. But nothing on the pages before me can be fixed, or made whole. I’ve made myself a few promises; one is never to use the words unbelievable, unimaginable, as I read. Not to think them or say them. They’re a write-off, a way of disposing of. I’m already too good at splitting off, abstracting.
I click and scan a letter that has only one link to Senelis—geography. I know that after his three years as chief of security police in Švenčionys, he was sent to work for the SS in Panevėžys (Ponewesch in German). This letter, from 1943, is a complaint written from one Röhler, the commander of the security police in the Ponewesch field office, to the Kauen/Kaunas/Kovno commander of the security police (his name is not visible on the document, only his title) about the Jewish labor battalion under Röhler’s watch. Röhler wants him to know that Jews have escaped from a work detail, and they haven’t been supervised properly either. I go over it and over it: the Lithuanian versions of each Jewish name. The space between the letters of their surnames, like a chasm, an abyss, an accumulation of obliteration.
I use my own fumbling linguistic skills to unpack the last three paragraphs (later I’ll hire a translator to go over the material and be surprised how close my own patchwork of words and sentences is to his formal translation).
Levinas … number 15, has been treated in a special way, shot during his escape and seriously wounded. One could expect him to die anyway.
I ask for a decision and a message what is supposed to happen with the Jews. If there is no special treatment planned, I suggest to relocate them from here and to accommodate them somewhere else, because the prison is overcrowded.
I ask to consider a special treatment for the Jewish policeman, Bakas, because he failed to report about the incidents, even though he knew about them. Besides, B. had been strictly warned once before …
Some of the escapees are still missing. But there is an informant who has even drawn a crude map of the street, showing the house where the men are hiding.
Special way, special treatment. Shoot to death, beat with the back of a shovel, pull the skin off first to use as grafts for wounded soldiers, say “You’re spared” to a trembling man, a physician in his former life, then—a Mauser to the forehead. A crumpled body.
If Senelis killed anyone, I have to know who it was. Otherwise, there is only that blankness, the spaces between the type, the perversion of language. The letter is dated November 4, 1943. “I ask, I ask, let me explain about the special treatment,” writes Röhler. Perhaps the writer has to take care to justify the execution of a Jewish worker because by that time, in Lithuania, there are hardly any Jews left for the labor that war requires.
I stop, click, scan a page, scan another. But I don’t actually want any of the pages accumulating on the flash drive I’ve brought from home. I don’t want to be here. I’m still not sure why an old man being shoved to the end of the line, a story that hurts my Aunt Agnes, should be repeated, brought into view like a scar. Everything I read, scan, concerns private lives. Private deaths. Turn, click. “Aktion”—a word that infers damage, a roundup, an implementation of a particular policy on a particular day in large, dangerous letters stamped sideways across certain pages, not to be confused with the more innocuous “Akten,” which simply means files. After a time, in my cubby at the museum, I start to conflate the two words; typewriter keys clacking throughout the occupied territories, carriage returns thrown back, fingers smudged from ribbon changes, the old ribbons burned because of the imprinted keystrokes on the long spools, letters that spelled the ends of lives, the latest order.
I have a small timeline in my head:
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The Germans take Kaunas on June 23, 1941, Vilnius on June 24—the whole country by June 27. The days are long; it is only June, but it is hot. Dust on the roads; rubble clouds in the blown-up towns. In the German newsreels you see soldiers in tanks, on bicycles, horses. So odd, that—invade Ostland on a bicycle, as if you’re on your way to a picnic or delivering a telegram. Shirtless boys in the heat, tramping up and down, mug their righteous vigor for the camera, but also, now and then, there is a flicker of discovery, a shade of disorientation, wonder on a quickly vanishing face. Weirdly lazy summer clouds drift overhead as you push on, the convulsive forward rampage of war in a country you didn’t grow up in, go to school in, fall in love in, learn to drive in, yoke an ox to a plow in, get drunk in as you might have back home, maybe in one of the famous Munich beer halls that became rallying sites, knocking back dark wheat beer after beer while speeches were made, curses spat, slap after slap on the back—all the younger boys your brothers, all the older men your father. There’s a purity law even for beer in the homeland. Six glasses, and the 5 percent—give or take—alcohol content knocks you on your ass, brings you to your knees in an alley, your friends laughing while you retch. It’s a joy. It’s an antidote to all the loneliness of the world.
The Red Army tries to fight back, according to a German newsreel about the taking of Jonava and Šiauliai. Burning the towns as they retreated, leaving only the synagogue standing—for the Communist “Jewish scum of the earth.” But neither my mother nor her sister recalls this. The towns they saw were intact. The farms working. The roads passable.
The panzers come in ahead of the infantry. Their tanks are too light for the Soviets, but in Lithuania the Red Army is so undersupplied, it doesn’t matter. Locals give the Germans flowers, dark bread, and salt—the traditional welcome. But not every local. Not Elena Buividaite-Kutorgene. Not my great-grandmother Barbara, who my mother remembers saying, “It’s terrible—what they’re doing to the Jews.” Though my mother is not sure when or where these words were said.
Back in Germany (it’s not like the last war when Senelis went running after the family horse), the light tanks would be retooled and upgraded, the task made so much more efficient by slave labor for Henschel, Alkett, Daimler-Benz—later bought out by Chrysler.
Click, scan. My Jewish grandmother’s friends who had numbers on their arms, my fascination with that blue-black ink. I wanted to touch it, try to rub it out. To speak of it was forbidden. To be caught staring meant being pulled aside, something clawlike about my grandmother’s arthritic hands when she was upset. Scram. Gei shoyn.
My back hurts. Ten more minutes, I tell myself. The man with small eyes and large glasses long gone from the cubby in back of mine. The helpful reference librarian yawns, catches herself, puts her palm to her mouth. I go to the bathroom. Come back. Sit, force myself to look at a few more pages. Press the button that makes the pages fly past too fast to scrutinize. No cheating, I tell myself. Why? I ask myself. Then.
My grandfather’s name, in his handwriting. His signature on the document is at eye level. An affront. A dare. As if it wanted to be found. All the writing in the body of the document his, in Lithuanian. One document with his signature at the top. And then another and another and another and another.
CHAPTER 12
* * *
A GOOD GET
The handwriting. My grandfather is front and center. He’s with me, his clean folded handkerchiefs—thin cotton with the smell of the press of the iron, his small green (or was it black) tackle box with line, sinkers, single and double hooks. His face is red. He’s roaring a laugh. He’s dead.
The handwriting is the handwriting of a younger man. Do I know him, inside the older man I did know?
I leave the archives at closing time. Walk in long shadows. The hotel is quiet, the lobby smells nice, the light just so, a vase of something tall and springlike—forsythia? The first thing I do in my compact room is close the thick curtains of the two windows that look out on a row of windows of other rooms. I turn on every light, strip, get in the shower. Make the water hot, then hotter. My hands shake under the bright stream.
I order so much food from room service that the man who takes my order repeats it all back to me slowly, twice. The food arrives under shiny domes and thick creamy napkins. I’ve only eaten the one cookie all day. I pick up a roll, put it down. The food sits until it congeals. A waste.
I got a cheap price for a great hotel. It’s a thing I do, the way my Jewish grandmother used to: get the bargain, but not just for any random purchase. I stare at the food and think of her, of what she would say about my day at the Holocaust Museum archives. Would I even tell her? She of the yards of Liberty silk bought during a trip to London to visit her sister Sally, or a kilim rug, a beautiful drop-leaf oak table. And then, chocolate. “Wait here,” she’d command, after she veered her car into the long driveway of the Chilmark chocolate store. She’d slam the car door behind her and then begin to hobble as part of her faux decrepitude—ninety, she was still climbing ladders and pruning her trees, obsessively lugging all the border stone around her entire property an inch this way, then an inch back. Not small, skip-in-the-flat-salty-bay stones but boulders, stones as big as a small dog.
From right to left: my grandmother Rachel; her mother, Klara; my grandmother’s sister, Bertha, 1925
In the store, she’d buy a small bar of the darkest chocolate, her arthritic hands shaking. Propped against the counter, she would take a few minutes to catch her breath. Often, as part of the endless thrift that was the flip side of her love of fine things, she made shirts out of torn beach towels. I see her, in orange terry. Safely out of view of the store window, she strides quickly to the car. To me she gives the small chocolate bar. For herself, she has a pound of chocolate, the broken pieces presented to her in a white bag—a gift for an old woman on the brink.
“You privilege yourself,” a friend accused me once during an argument, scathing. Something about sheets and thread count. Good coffee as opposed to well, not-good coffee.
My grandmother would have found such an accusation incomprehensible. An Eastern European Jew, a woman, she shoved and bargained and worked her way out of a very particular impoverishment. Despite her father’s considerable business success, her parents had remained fixed in their cloistered old-world life. She broke into the larger world. She read voraciously—Dickens was a favorite—took the children to concerts and museums. She used part of her limited income to buy the work of young artists brought to her door by her pianist daughter, my aunt Shirley. She was both repressed and rapacious. You’re alive. So live! But watch out every second because life is a disaster.
I look at the rolling cart of food. She would have made me pack it all up and take it with me when I left D.C.
Wrapped in towels and a terry robe, I phone my husband and tell him about the documents my grandfather wrote: protokolas, “reports,” with place names I can pick out, the names of people. That’s it. My Lithuanian tutor Aldona was right. I should have tried harder because now, not being able to decipher the pages on my flash drive is unbearable.
“That’s a good get,” my husband says about what I found. Newspaper parlance.
For a second, I hate him for it.
Whatever is on those handwritten pages isn’t good.
After we hang up, I think of calling my mother. Reading the words on the pages to her as best as I can. See if she can tell me what they mean. The thought lasts a second. She’s recently told me she doesn’t understand Lithuanian anymore, though we both know that I know that each week she has long conversations with Aunt Karina in Lithuanian. And anyway, I’ve made another promise to myself and to her. I will not tell her anything I find out about her father unless she asks a specific question, unless she wants to know.
I wheel the food cart out to the hallway.
I turn the lights out.
The bedsheets are heavy and soft. Even so, they bother a blister on my left foot. I wasn’t wearing sock
s with my sneakers on the walk to and from the museum. I keep seeing my grandfather, then not seeing him. I walk backward in my life, this way and that, in my head.
In 2006 I was in a book group on the Upper West Side that lasted for one book: The Odyssey. The eloquent man who led our discussions is the only person I’ve ever met who lives up to the cliché of being someone who could entrance just by reading a phone book aloud. Our discussions went on through long dinners and even back out into the old elegance of West End Avenue on late spring and summer nights. Our leader was writing a book about his Jewish family and relatives who had perished in the Holocaust. One night, at the dinner table—a few oily, desolate leaves left in the huge salad bowl, a hunk or two of bread, an empty bottle of wine—talk turned to his work, to World War II.
“The Lithuanians were the worst,” he said, punctuating “the worst.” Many nods around the table.
I looked away, to my side, to floor-to-ceiling bookcases crammed with books our host, also a writer I greatly admire, had inherited from his father. My father was four months dead, his overloaded bookcases not yet taken apart. Our host’s beautiful wife had died suddenly a few weeks after my father. The two deaths are incomparable. My father was in his eighties. Still, my father. And since his death, I heard things differently.
In the Boston train station on my way back from the horrible faux living room of the Vineyard funeral home—with its stuffed striped sofas, gilt frames around neutral paint-by-number paintings, the bizarre catalog of urns—I thought I heard someone announce on the station’s PA system, “Will all passengers whose fathers have died come to the ticket counter?”
