A Guest at the Shooters' Banquet:
My Grandfather's SS Past,
My Jewish Family, My Search for the Truth
Rita Gabis
Bloomsbury USA, New
York, NY, 2015
~*~
The
following passages have been excerpted
with permission of the publisher, Bloomsbury, USA
Testimony of the 91-yr.-old poet
Zenon Tumalovic
We have
friends, and they were forced to dig, young men, Norbert Uzela
(he died already). He told how it was . . . not everyone was
killed immediately. It was cries and movements of hands,
terrible. We were afraid too. They were absolutely innocent.
The ones who were shooters had a sign of a corpse, a skull on
their uniforms, and bones. Shaulists. Everything was organized
beforehand. It was the ditch, local people were forced to dig
in the evening before. People in the town knew. The ones who
dug told to their families. They explained to everybody. And
they knew that the Jews were over there. And it was the local
people who were covering the ditches, a function like some
people were bringing the dirt, others were putting in corpses,
like a conveyor. And they were putting lime on.
I was born in January of 1923. I was nineteen. When
they were over with shooting all the shooters went to
Svencionys and they were singing Lithuanian songs . . . they
were very joyful. They were drunk beforehand. In Svencionys
there was a big long table in the open air, with food like a
holiday. The mood was supported by the orchestra. They got
drunker. They took from the orchestra two men with beards, old
believers, Russians. They took them away, and they were found
killed as well. And the people buried them. It was a duty for
them to shoot. They signed that they will shoot. It was a
service. But the two people from the
orchestra--instinct.
Over here there were two wooden synagogues and these
were used as warehouses. All the belongings of the Jews were
put over there, and afterward there was a sale, an auction.
"Who would give these marks, who would give more?" I'm
partisan. I'm not standing in line. It was like euphoria. I
saw it. People were very excited. It was after the killings,
so everyone knew. Later they figured out that the best things
were already taken. Cicenas was in charge. The clothes, the
dress, he would give the price, and they were selling.
Underwear. Some people were very upset that there was nothing
good. There were war shortages so people wanted what they
could get. When the Jews were taken
from their homes, they carried suitcases. Suitcases were left,
so people came to look for them. People from the villages used
to come. Children used to sneak over to Poligon. One Polish
man told me sometimes they would find a coin. Villagers who
found suitcases were hiding them. I do not know. I do not
care. When the Jews were killed . . . some people would go and
dig and find the gold . . . near the houses.
pages 240-241
Testimony
of Karina Margolis
What was possible? What was not? Could a secret be kept in the
ghetto? Who, among those outside the ghetto, might help you or
kill you? Dvora Goldhirsh’s best friend in school—a Polish
girl—had turned on her in 1941, “never so happy as to see
Jewish blood spill.”
Karina Margolis, with the peroxide-blond hair,
had a different story.
Her parents, perhaps better informed than most or
shrewder than some, understood when they heard through rumor
or official announcement about the roundup for Poligon that
they would probably be killed or taken to a camp, where their
four-year-old Karina would have little chance of survival.
They begged a man named Sylkovsky to take Karina and raise
her. He agreed. One of the few memories Karina has of her
birth parents is of the piano in their house that her mother,
who did not work, sometimes played. They seemed to have been
well off, so they would have offered whatever they could on
behalf of their only child.
Silkovsky grew frightened. It was hard to
disguise a little Jewish girl. Perhaps the fact of the
slaughter at Poligon terrorized him. First the Jews—who would
be next? He decided he couldn’t keep the child. It was simply
impossible. He began asking, discretely, this person and that
person—take the girl, I
beg you. But one after another, those he asked refused
until finally, Anna and Piotr Miksta at 112 Strunaicha Street
said yes. They’d just lost a twenty-year-old son to war. They
opened their hearts to Karina.
.
. .
Her new mother and father were at constant risk.
Inevitably, someone informed on them. Karina was hauled to the
police station with Anna Miksta, who was put in a separate
room, down a hallway, behind a closed door, out of Karina’s
sight line. Karina was five. She was led into a room where a
red-haired German officer waited to interrogate her. . . .
A female translator, well dressed, well spoken, was in
attendance.
.
. .
Crammed into the office with the translator, the
officer, and the girl under scrutiny were all the women of the
Svencionys ghetto of childbearing age. Rachel, Hana, Ester,
Mira, Genia, Riva, Frieda, face after face, hands nervously
pulling at the fabric of a shawl or chafed and white and
still.
The German began his interrogation abruptly. He wasn’t
going to slip a sweet to the girl to disarm her. He wasn’t
going to pat her on the head and instruct the translator to
reassure her.
He tipped his head or motioned with a large hand toward
the cluster of women sitting and standing, some in near rags,
others wearing the well-made clothes of their former lives: a
blouse, a dress, a sweater that had not yet been bartered
away. “Look at them. Look,” he commanded the blond
Jewish/Catholic girl. The translator quickly translated his
German into Polish. Did she know it was a lie—this girl, her
Polish “mother” down the hall? She must have known. The
informer had some sort of proof, others to confirm his story.
But then, it was a time of informers, a consumer enterprise
that brought every liar, every local with a private jealousy
or old wretched grudge, every man or woman hungry enough
and/or mean enough or frightened enough, to the buyer’s table.
The women’s faces were turned to the floor. Some wept.
At least a few had known Karina’s mother or father or both
before the couple were summoned away from their piano, their
only comfort the fact that their daughter was, they hoped,
safe. Which meant that they had lost her, that they were lost.
Which one is your mama? The German officer made it
clear that the women from the ghetto must show their faces to
the child, all headscarves off, no shifting behind someone
taller.
.
. .
“My mama is in the other room,” Karina replied in
Polish without stumbling.
How thick the air must have been. . . .
“Look at them,” the German screamed in his frustration.
He pointed at the women summoned without warning, their lives
resting on the ability of Karina to withstand the German
officer’s threats.
Karina didn’t know Polish well, but her adoptive
parents had made the most of the little time they had to teach
her a few words about her mama, to drill into her that this
was all she must say, whatever question she was asked. So she,
who “understood everything” did. Her only mother was outside
the room, down the hallway, in another room. She was terrified
to look at the ghetto women crowded together. Among them there
might have been a familiar face—a neighbor, an aunt, a family
friend, even her real mother—and she might have given them all
away. Longing compelled her to risk; she looked. Among the
distraught group there was no one she recognized, no mother.
The red-haired German had had enough. He undid the
large buckle of his belt, a practiced move—he’d used it
before, though perhaps not on his own children.
“Which one is your mama?” As he spoke, he slapped the
belt down on the edge of the desk. . . . He turned to Karina
with the belt.
“Mama,” Karina cried.
He grabbed her arm, bent her over for the first blow,
but suddenly the translator . . . began speaking to him
quickly, softly. Karina, today, has no idea what the
translator said to him, what mollification, what alternative—a
better way to find the truth, or perhaps a very carefully
worded suggestion of what the little girl might be worth to
her “family.”
The women from the ghetto were there for all of it. The
little blond-haired girl was one of them, belonged to them,
but she didn’t. She ate bacon and potatoes with Piotr and
Anna. She slept outside the ghetto. She’d been baptized at the
Catholic church. She would survive, and as an adult she would
never be sure of the day or the year in which she was born.
Whatever the translator had said on the day of
the German and the belt and the weeping women, relatives of
the Mikstas who had a farm gave away a prized cow, and with
the Mikstas, put together a huge sum of money in addition to
the cow—both impossible to recoup in wartime—and in this way
paid off the German officer, the informer, and whoever else
could have taken Karina away.
For the moment, Karina was safe. She was allowed
to go down the hall and find Mama and go home.
On the phone I asked Karina what she believed
accounted for the bravery of Anna and Piotr Miksta.
She didn’t know. She didn’t even know if she
would call it bravery. Maybe they just wanted a child to love
them and to love.
pages
272-275