UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH
Laurel Corona, Author

June 10, 2004

We are off again this morning, armed with the address where Michael’s mother, Zenia, lived in the ghetto. When we look up from the street at the windows of her building, our guide, Regina Kapilovich, asks us if we would like to look inside. I wonder if she knows the American expression, “no brainer.”

She sees our eagerness and says, “Wait here.” She walks across the street to where tenants in one apartment are putting bedding over window sills to air out, and she calls up to them in Lithuanian. We shake our heads and laugh at the chutzpah we have come to expect from our guide, but this time the tenants disappear into the apartment without saying anything.

Regina rejoins us. “No luck,” she says. “Let’s try in the back.”

We go through an entryway and we are standing in the courtyard of Zenia’s apartment building in the ghetto. A teenage boy is going into an apartment near the one we think might be hers. Regina calls up to him to ask if we can go inside and look around. I can’t understand what he is saying, but he shuts the door behind him.
Regina shrugs, and we turn to leave. Suddenly the door opens, and the boy motions us in. As we ascend the stairs, my heart is racing. We are going to get to see an apartment probably much like the one Zenia’s family and several dozen other people crowded into for two years.

The layout is just as described to us by a cousin Zenia lived with in the ghetto. The parents are not home, and the boy’s younger brother, entranced by a computer game, does not look up from his seat in the living room the whole time we are there. We maneuver around furniture to the window and look down on a small park, carpeted with newly-mown grass and shaded by large trees.

The scene we are trying to imagine took place more than sixty years ago, on September 6, 1941. On that day Zenia and her brother Michael had been among the first to reach the ghetto, and that afternoon they watched thousands of Jews streaming through the streets and across this park, carrying suitcases toward the ghetto gate just around the corner. Today a few people cross briskly on the way to somewhere else, a woman stops to let her dog sniff a bush, and two teenagers sit smoking. A truck and a small car try to pass in too small a space on the street below. A car alarm shrieks somewhere down the block. The ghosts of sixty years ago vanish into the mundane details of the present.

From the courtyard we go through a side gate and find ourselves in an open space about half the size of a football field. It is the enclosed yard of the Judenrat, the Jewish Council, and also the site of the ghetto police residence where Leizer lived. Which of the several hundred windows was the one in Leizer’s room? If we knew, we would also know where Leizer and Zenia had been married, and where she would have come to live with him after the wedding. We will have to content ourselves with knowing we are walking on the same pavement and looking at doorways and landings familiar to them.

I find one door unlocked in the part of the building that now serves as a community theatre, and I rush up a staircase, hoping to see an upper level before I am told to come down. I prepare the standard apology and sheepish smile I have used in the past when on other missions in my travels. The stairs disappear into total darkness, forcing me to stop, but through the walls of the story just above me I hear a group of singers warming up.

I stand in the deep shadows and listen to their voices running up and down the scales and imagine they are the voices of the ghetto’s Hebrew Choir singing to me across the years. Then the voices of today drift up the staircase telling me I need to come down. I am, as expected, really not supposed to be there. But I know that isn’t right. I am exactly where I am supposed to be.


June 11, 2004

Regina has arranged for Victor, a taxi driver, to be on call for us while we are in Vilna. As on other days, he miraculously appears within a minute or two of Regina’s cell-phone call. We pick up Fania Jocheles-Brancovski, a former partisan and friend of Michael’s parents, and she and Regina chatter in Russian for nearly an hour in the back seat as we drive away from the city.

Victor turns off one bumpy, partially-paved road onto one even narrower. Along the roadside, tall stalks of lupine poke up over the grasses. Just beyond, a grove of sapling birch trees reaches skyward. Spruce branches sag toward the ground, as if the new growth at the end of each branch is finally more than the tree can bear.

Regina tells Victor to stop. We are in what remains of the Avengers’ partisan camp in the Rudnicki forest. A mound covered with weeds and moss is cut away on one side, revealing the entrance to the first hut. Its frame and interior walls are constructed of tree trunks, except in spots reinforced with concrete after the war, part of the Soviet effort to maintain the site as a memorial not to the Jewish partisans but to the struggle against Nazi fascism. Since Lithuanian independence, the road to the camp is unmarked, the formal memorial and exhibit have disappeared, and the site is no longer maintained.

It takes a minute to realize that each of the mounds I see is a separate hut, but as I walk further into the compound I pick out as many as eight different structures. One of them still has a small metal ventilation pipe sticking up, topped with a jaunty-looking conical hat. When Fania calls to show us where Michael’s parents slept, I pull back the weeds in front of the hut and join her. She points to one patch of air on the right side of the empty hut and another on the left, identifying where she slept, with Zenia and Leizer directly across. Nothing remains except bits of the wooden floor, and on the far end an oil drum so corroded I think it would crumble if I touched it. That was the stove that kept them warm—a much easier prospect here than in the ghetto, because, as Fania points out with a wink, there was plenty of firewood in the forest.

Fania wants to show us the great luxury of their camp—a bath house. The roof has sagged so drastically that it is possible only to peer inside. Beyond the bath house is the most famous hut in the camp—the Avengers headquarters, where Abba Kovner lived with Ruszka Korschak and Vita Kempner, one of whom he married and the other who remained with the couple for much of the rest of her own life.

We wander among the other huts, admiring how well camouflaged the camp is. A few tree branches remain of those thrown over the roofs to add to the illusion of undisturbed nature from the air. Since the forest was much swampier then, the partisans had to build camouflaged bridges and stepping stones to get to the camp, and to penetrate this far into the woods one would have to know the way. Today the only reminder of the swamps is the swarm of mosquitoes that formed around each one of us before we were even out of the car.

On the way to the camp, Fania told me they sat around a fire at night with a stolen gramophone and four scratchy 78 RPM records. Someone would crank the arm of the gramophone and they would listen to the same four Russian songs over and over. When no one wanted to crank any more, they sang songs of their own, including the famous Partisan Hymn which begins with the line, “Never say that you are walking your last road.”

As they sat in the darkness looking up at the stars, they must have reflected on their road, and how they could not have predicted they would be there, among the few Jews left alive from Vilna. Many would discover after the war that, as Zenia wrote to relatives in the United States, they were “left one of all my family.”

By the time today’s date, June 11, had arrived, the Avengers had already survived the winter, and their remaining time in the woods would be short. The Germans were retreating as the Soviet Army advanced on Vilna. Within a few weeks the partisans would leave the forest to assist the Soviets in the liberation of the city.

I ask Fania how they celebrated that event. She says very simply, “We didn’t,” and she falls silent. I realize how insensitive my question was. What was there to celebrate? They were liberating only Lithuanians and Poles, risking their lives for a city that had rejected and despised them, and in fact was an accomplice in the murder of those they loved. They would find the ghetto empty and silent. Some would discover their childhood homes were occupied by others who had no intention of leaving. There would be no homecoming anywhere.

Some of them would charge into the future bent on revenge. Abba Kovner reconstituted the Avengers in Israel and plotted vengeance against the Germans for years. Others, Leizer and Zenia among them, were anxious to put the war behind them, waiting for a chance to start over in some other place, one that might offer at least a modicum of comfort and peace.

I leave the others and wander around the woods for a few minutes, trying to get a sense of what it would have been like to live here. Bird song filters down with the sunlight through the branches. It is a mysterious, vibrant, intoxicating place. I imagine Zenia might have found time during her day’s work as the camp cook to look up and marvel at how beautiful the world insists on being even while humans do their best to ruin it.

…

We have one more stop. It is a little like being hypnotized, feeling the compulsion to visit a place the heart and gut want to run from. Ponary. Here, 100,000 victims, 70,000 of them Jews, were marched to the edge of pits while firing squads reloaded. The last thing the victims smelled in this life was gunpowder and rotting flesh. The last thing they saw were the dead and dying, and the raised guns of Lithuanian volunteers or German soldiers. Then, ten at a time, they went to join the six million.

Hitler’s intention to annihilate the entire Jewish population was so far beyond imagination or logic that it took time for Jews to lose their illusion that Ponary was a labor camp and that their relatives and friends were just being kept incommunicado there. Abba Kovner, who would become the head of the FPO and later commander of the Avengers and other Jewish partisan units in the Rudnicki forest, wrote in a manifesto only six months after the German invasion that “All roads of the Gestapo lead to Ponar…and Ponar means death,” but the Germans were so crafty at manipulating the Jews’ thoughts and psyches that the impassioned pleas of Kovner for the ghetto not to go like sheep to the slaughter fell mostly on deaf ears.

Today, as I leave the car and stand at the trailhead of the Ponary memorial, I struggle to understand the magnitude of the crimes committed here, and I know I would have resisted believing the rumors too. A freight train rolls by only a few feet from us, its brakes squealing as it slows down for a stop somewhere up ahead. I do not think I am breathing; the chilling sound from the past is so fearsome.

As we walk toward the first pit, I look into the woods. Ponary’s ghosts are there—or at least for a moment I think they are, when the leaves begin shaking without a hint of a breeze. But it’s just aspen saplings, a tree uncommon enough in Southern California to spook a visitor born and raised there.

But then again, why could it not be ghosts? Late in the war, when the Nazis wanted to cover their crimes, they forced Jewish prisoners to exhume the rotting corpses from the pits and, after cremating them on pyres, to scatter the ashes in the woods at Ponary. Today the dead are part of the soil into which these aspens sink their roots, gathering the strength to reach upward for a patch of open sky.

I hurry to catch up with Fania and the others. They have reached the first of the visible pits at Ponary. It takes a minute to understand that this grassy amphitheater is the earthworks for the execution site. It is round, and about the size of a baseball infield. The killers stood at the top of the embankment, while the victims marched down a wooden ramp into the pit. There they lined up in front of the ditches they fell into as they were shot. We move on to another pit, about twice the size of the first, then a third. Regina tells me that altogether there were twelve pits discovered at Ponary.

We walk in silence back toward the entrance. Regina, who has endured my asking dozens of questions over the last few days about the names of trees and birds and plants, steps off the path and picks a flower. This one, she volunteers, is called a forget-me-not.

I have a vision of the forsaken, standing at the edge of the pits, spending their last seconds in a world that has not cared about them.

Forget us not.

As I type this in my hotel room in Vilna, the flower is on the desk beside me.

END


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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.