UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH
Laurel Corona, Author

Tuesday June 8, 2004

Stockholm airport. In front of me are about fifty people speaking Lithuanian, standing in line to board the plane to Vilnius. I make a mental calculation of the ages of the men in front of me. They would have been barely old enough for school during the war, but my mind will not let it go. Did they have older brothers? What about their parents? What were they all doing?

Michael Bart, the son of Leizer and Zenia Bart, whose story is told in Until Our Last Breath, stands behind me with his wife. I ask Bonnie if her stomach is in knots and she nods before looking away.

A family has boarded the plane ahead of us. The father reaches down to fasten his youngest child’s safety belt. He looks to be about thirty, slim, blue eyed, and with well-muscled shoulders—not a monster, not a demon, just a man who cares about his family.

Indistinguishable in appearance, I imagine, from men who only a few decades before might have tucked their own children in bed before going out to murder entire families. I remind myself that everyone is entitled to be judged only by his or her own actions, and I try to put these thoughts aside.

The plane lifts off. I am a little over an hour away from the country where the Final Solution was first tried out, and the city where Jews responded with one of the great resistance movements of World War II. Below me the Swedish forests and lakes, punctuated by farms with red barns and tidy farmhouses, seem the perfect image of peace. Train tracks and telephone lines bisect the patchwork of green, and as Sweden slowly fades in the haze, I think about the severed phone lines, blown up tracks, and derailed trains that were the mark of the partisans. When we descend, the train tracks and telephone lines will have a different history. The plane disappears into the clouds, a passageway to another world.

…

Our guide, Regina Kapilovich, wants to give us a general tour of Vilna, but we ask to go directly to the ghetto. Her brown hair is in two loose braids that stay plaited without being tied at the bottom. She has an easy smile and soft, gray-green eyes, but she is all business. A graduate of Hebrew University, she is fluent in four languages and seems to know everyone in Vilnius. She greets one person in Russian, another in Hebrew, and another in Lithuanian, all within a few minutes. She takes us across one tidy square in front of the City Hall, down another street and into a tiny park where two Lithuanian teenagers kiss and talk under a linden tree, and a small group of adolescent boys jostle and tease each other.

On the other side of the park, Regina stops. “Here begins the small ghetto,” she says, waving with her hand to indicate where the gate once was. All I see are streets converging at odd angles onto a small open space filled with cars. “There used to be other old buildings all around, but they were bombed,” she explains. Vilna, I realize, is going to require some imagination.

Using old photographs and stopping every few yards to explain, Regina recreates a world that is gone forever. She points out the sites of the old Strashun Library and the home of the rabbi known as the Vilna Gaon, but the buildings themselves no longer exist. A dull, new cinderblock building mars the site where the beautiful and historic Great Synagogue once stood.

Gentrification has turned the streets into a pleasant neighborhood of small buildings with clean stucco and brightly-colored trims, and shady squares. Markers here and there describe events that occurred during the war, but some have been stolen, and those that remain are only in Yiddish and Lithuanian, languages unlikely to be familiar to most tourists. In a city that makes sure to translate into English anything it wants to sell to visitors, I wonder whether leaving the memorials untranslated is an oversight, or a conscious desire not to make a full admission of the city’s complicity in what happened to the Jews.

…

The ghosts of Michael’s family feel present to me as I walk through the larger of the two ghettos created by the Nazis. The paint is peeling on the doors and windows, the stucco has fallen away to reveal the bricks underneath, and faded curtains line the windows. In one of these buildings his parents met, and in one of these alleys they had their first kiss. Because I don’t know exactly where these things happened, I feel them anywhere, everywhere.

On Rudnitska Street, at the site of the entrance to the ghetto, we stand where Michael’s father Leizer, a ghetto police officer, used to guard the gate. We walk the stones where his mother Zenia, grandmother Rose, and uncle Michael marched to and from their work assignments. I vow to come again to stand alone and wait until Vilna's ghosts tell me how to write this story. As I say this to myself, the bell of the church that stood just outside the gate peals once.
…

We have one last mission for the day—to find the house where Michael’s mother lived before the war. We can walk directly there from the ghetto now, since the end of the street is no longer boarded up. Still on the ghetto side, we look over the roof of the Jewish hospital, which formed part of the boundary of the ghetto, at the silver dome of the Choral Synagogue on Zawalna Street. In front of the dome are marble tablets of the law.

“When the Torah entered the world, freedom entered it also.” These words from the Shabbat service come to my mind, a sad irony when in the ghetto the tablets would have gleamed just out of reach over the wall. Would Jews have come to stand here, or tried not to look up as they passed? Would they have felt scorned by God, or would the dome have been a beacon, reminding them that captivity even as deep and desperate as that of our ancestors in Egypt eventually came to an end? That even in the ghetto they retained an essential self the Germans could not touch? That they continued to have at least some moral choices?

I think of the Catholic nun who risked her own life to hide resistance leader Abba Kovner in a cloister outside Vilna. When asked why she threw in her fate with the Jews, she replied, “In these times a Jew is the only honorable thing to be.” The ghosts of Vilna confirm the truth that there is a permanent and unbreakable link between personal integrity and any real sense of freedom.

As we continue our walk, I see graffiti written in English on the wall across the way. Rather than the tagging and vulgarity so common at home, walls in Vilna are sprayed with homilies.

“It is good to keep your mind open.”

“Friendship begins with peace.”

One, however, gives me pause. “It is a good time to finish up old tasks”--ominous in its context, inside the ghetto boundaries. I think of the minuscule Jewish population of Vilnius today and hope the creator of the message has simply chosen an inopportune spot to say something innocent and optimistic.

Only a few blocks from the Choral Synagogue we look for Zenia’s grandmother’s home on Zawalna Street. There, as in many other places in Vilna, street numbers have been changed since the war, not just because of reconfigurations of streets after the bombing, but also, I was told, to make post-war claims on confiscated property more difficult. Based on descriptions and photos, we decide one particular house is the most likely candidate, a hunch we are later able to confirm.

In their last days at home, Zenia’s family would have seen doors and entryways boarded up to create the ghetto wall just across the street, a thoroughfare on which they had been forbidden to walk several months before. As Zenia watched, she could not possibly have imagined the turn her life was about to take, or that well over a half a century later, her son, looking for answers, would stare up into that same window where, in my imagination, she now stands.

She is just a girl getting ready to graduate from high school as the ghetto streets are closed off. Graduation will never come. The march she and her schoolmates will soon make is of another sort altogether, without music, new dresses, or parties. It will be years before she has any of those things again. Most of her friends never will.


June 9, 2004

Suboch Street leaves Vilna’s center and continues along a ridge overlooking the city. Towers of medieval castles and church spires poke out above groves of trees as the land slopes downward toward the Vilnele River. Along the roadside, Queen Anne’s lace waves in the brisk wind.

Regina turns between two tall, narrow buildings and walks up a rise. “We are standing in HKP,” she says. HKP, known before the war as the Cheap Houses, is where Leizer Bart lived when he first came to Vilna to escape the Nazi occupation of Poland and to train with his youth group, Hashomer Hatzair, for immigration to Palestine. Later these buildings were used as the dormitories for the HKP work camp, where Zenia’s mother and brother were sent shortly before the last remaining ghetto residents were murdered or deported.

Regina points to a square patch of weeds and grass bordered by rows of brick. “That is where the bodies were found,” she says.

I gaze between the buildings and imagine Zenia and Leizer, after the liberation of the city, running toward where I am standing. I picture them finding what is harder to endure than a winter in the forest, harder than two years in the ghetto. Zenia’s mother and brother had been dragged from a hiding place and shot in the last hours before the Germans left the camp. They had been dead only a day.

It is so sudden for Michael, and I don’t look at him out of respect for his privacy. This is the grandmother he had heard about all his life, and the uncle after whom he was named—neither of whom he ever met because of what happened here.

Regina has gone down to the area in front of a plaque honoring the victims and is using a piece of trash to pick up two dog droppings left in front of the memorial. I cannot imagine anyone allowing their dogs to defile such a place. Once again I wonder if it is deliberate.

As we leave, a caretaker is weed-whacking a patch of grass near the entrance. Grass flies and stains the sidewalk with wet, green clumps. As he hits a particularly tall patch, the woody stalks give way with a crackle that sounds like gunfire. My head turns instinctively for a moment toward the site of the executions as we continue down Suboch Street in silence.

In the afternoon we go to the Yiddish Institute of Vilnius University to pick up Fania Jocheles, who, along with Michael’s parents, was a member of the Avengers, the legendary poet-activist Abba Kovner’s partisan group. A tiny woman with steel-gray hair and still nearly unlined skin greets us all warmly, pausing for a moment to search Michael’s face for signs of his father and mother’s features.

We go to lunch in a restaurant overlooking the old city. When Michael hands Fania an alphabetical list of all the partisans in the Rudnicki Forest, we are off down memory lane. Beginning with A, she tells us about at least a quarter of them. Most are dead, but a few live in Israel and a few more in the United States. She asks if we want addresses and tells us what their children have been up to.

She tells us she met her husband in the forest and married him only a few days after the liberation of Vilna. She must have bowled him over. The woman he would ask to marry him was often sent out as a spy because with a hat on she looked like a boy. Unlike dainty and flirtatious Zenia, who served as a camp cook, Fania was one of the fighters sent on sabotage missions. She recalls with undisguised pride that in Abba Kovner’s wife’s memoir she is called “heroic Fania.”

She points to another name on the list and tells Regina in excited Russian what she remembers about that person. They are talking about people we don’t know, and even though Regina translates, we are learning nothing about Michael’s parents. We order lunch and wait. Eventually she is ready, and the stories flow.

We learn about an overweight partisan they nicknamed Tolstoy because of its similarity to the Russian word “tolsti,” which means fat. She describes how, when they got wet in the swamps around their hideout, they sometimes put their feet so close to the campfire they would realize only when the soles of their boots began to smolder that they were about to set their feet on fire.

Michael asks what she remembers about his parents’ personalities in the camp. Were they somber and withdrawn? Cheerfuland sociable? Fania surprises us all when she replies, “We were all always happy.”

I lose track of the conversation as I sit pondering what she has just said. Thin, malnourished, cold, and threatened, they were happy. They were free and they were fighting back.

We talk until everyone begins to hide yawns behind their hands, and then we take Fania home. Our driver, Victor, jumps from the front seat to help her out of the car. She waves him off.

“I don’t need help,” she says. “I’m only eighty-two.” She walks away from the car with the pace and the sureness of a teenager.

“She is quite a woman,” Regina says. “I think even today she could go out and blow up a train.”

END OF PART ONE

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Copyright Laurel Corona, 2004. The reader has permission to print this article for ease of reading. For any other use, contact the author at uolb@cox.net. Express permission of the author is required to make copies or publish all or any part of this article in any medium.