Zhager

Accounts

Roger Cohen

I look forward with considerable emotion to returning to Žagarė next month for the unveiling of a plaque that will commemorate the slaughter of more than 2,250 Jews in the town on October 2, 1941. More than three score years and ten have gone by since that mass murder without full acknowledgment of its scope. The men, women and children taken from the main square into the woods to be killed have remained anonymous, mere shadows, their fates at first concealed by Soviet political calculation and taboos, and then only falteringly recognized after Lithuania gained independence in 1990. I do not know the Jews who were killed but I know that each of them valued life and its joys as we do, and I know that my grandmother, Pauline (“Polly”) Soloveychik would have been among them had she not left Žagarė for South Africa in the early 20^th Century. For me, the fate of theŽagarė Jews is personal.

When I visited the village for the first time in November last year, as I began research on a family memoir, the last Jew in Žagarė, Isaac Mendelson, has just died. So ended a presence that began in the 16^th century. In 1897, three years after my grandmother’s birth, there were 5,443 Jews in Žagarė. Mendelson, a community of one, used to stand on the corner of the market square with his dachshund, Chipa. He would recall the times after the war when he was a goalkeeper for the local soccer team. Never did he talk about the day Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators murdered the Jews, including members of his own family.

Žagarė is a place of echoes and absences, my grandmother’s being but one. It hovers over loss, a void that whispers. I came back to see what might have been. Next to a bridge on the Svete I noticed a plaque commemorating the death on June 29, 1941, of Jonas Bavanauskas, who was “killed defending his homeland.” He died a few days after the Nazis invaded Lithuania and embarked on one of the swiftest mass murders of a nation’s Jews in the entire European I extermination program, one largely completed before the gassing facilities of industrialized Jewish annihilation were in place.

Bavanauskas, who merits a plaque, was not a Jew. Yet he alone is identified in Žagarė. He is thereby accorded a presence that feels like more than a dutiful nod to shadows. He lived, he felt, he resisted, he died. His name is there, legible. It is there at the center of a town that lies between two disused Jewish cemeteries, one in the “new” and one in the “old” district. In the cemeteries gravestones lurch, lichen advances and Hebrew inscriptions crumble or fade into illegibility. Fragments of letters recall Anna Akhmatova’s words in Requiem, “I’d like to call you all by name, but the list has been removed and there is nowhere else to look.”

The plaque to be unveiled on July 12, 2012, will go some way toward giving the people of Žagarė a place to look to understand the history of their town. It is past time for that.

Introduction

Welcome

History

Notable personalities

Memorial Plaque Dedication - July 2012

Righteous Among the Nations Award Ceremony

- March 2013

Žagarė Cemeteries

Gravestone pictures and slideshow

Žagarė, Lithuania

Zhager

Zhager [Yid], Zhagare [Rus], Żagory [Pol], Žagarė [Latv]

Accounts

Introduction

History

Memorial Plaque Dedication - July 2012

- March 2013

Former Jewish Buildings Today

Family Histories

General