Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Simaite

9. Ghetto

61 chapter 9 Ghetto the period that set the course for Šimaitė’s exile, caregiving, chronic pain, letter writing, and journaling began with the year 1940, when she arrived in Vilnius from Kaunas to work at the newly baptized Vilnius University, where Lithuanian now replaced Polish as the official language of instruction. Vilnius, a city long under dispute, had been seized from Poland by the USSR in 1939 and returned to Lithuania for strategic reasons. For some six months, Vilnius found itself in a state of limbo, the legal but not yet de facto capital of Lithuania.1 Lithuanian citizens arrived in the city to take over positions in municipal and social institutions, but shortly thereafter, in June 1940, the Soviet army occupied the Baltic States, making Vilnius the capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania. The new regime abolished political parties, closed newspapers, and imposed ideological reforms in education. Isolated from its neighbors by war, the city became an uncertain refuge for thousands of Jews and Poles. They arriving maimed by bombings or frostbite, having walked hundreds of icy kilometers to escape German occupation of neighboring Poland. Soup kitchens, schools, charities, and shelters popped up to accommodate them, but lice, hunger, and filth abounded despite the hospitality effort. Between June 13 and 16, 1941, the Red Army forcibly removed some 17,000 people—teachers, politicians, military men, housewives , and children—to the Siberian steppes. Those carrying out 62 Ghetto the orders called the deportees bandits, nationalists, and fascists, but most were ordinary people, guilty only of owning a business, possessing an education, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A significant proportion of the deportees were Jews—merchants and Bundists—whose fate would later be envied because Jewish deportees ultimately fared better than those left behind. And so, people of all walks of life—including my own paternal grandmother, a farmer’s daughter and mother of three —were loaded into cattle cars and freight trains. No one was allowed to approach them to offer food, milk, or water, and sanitary conditions were deplorable as they traveled east for weeks. Some ended up in permafrost regions, others found themselves on arable land infested by legendary mosquitoes. They built, then worked collective farms for anywhere from three to seventeen years. The deportations not only proved fateful for families who lost loved ones, but for setting the course of later events. Until then Lithuanian Jews had lived in relative peace with their neighbors, free of Polish- or Ukrainian-style pogroms. As the poet and now politician Emanuelis Zingeris has put it: “Before the war, the Jew was a part of the Lithuanian landscape: wherever you went, you would find a cow, a peasant, a horse, a Jew, and a bicycle,” but the deportations ruptured the traditional co-existence (Emanuelis Zingeris qtd. in Karvelis 34). Some Lithuanians now accused their Jewish neighbors of welcoming the Soviets and taking an active role in the deportations. This, despite the fact that a higher proportion of the Jewish population was deported than of ethnic Lithuanians. Anti-Semitism was on the rise, especially among students, and the Siberian deportations tipped the scales. When the Red Army withdrew in the summer of 1941, nationalists took it upon themselves to start the Nazis’ murderous work for them. The Lietūkis massacre, perpetrated in Kaunas before the arrival of the SS in that city, has come to represent the brutality of the interregnum (Šuras 24, Greenbaum 306–07). 63 Ghetto On June 20, 1941, the Soviet Union dispatched freight trains to collect its citizens and mass flight began. By noon the next day, the bombing of Vilnius was underway. German aircraft targeted the Green Bridge fifty times, but failed to hit it, destroying surrounding houses instead. Four days later, on June 24, 1941, German troops entered Vilnius. Locals—anonymous Lithuanians—killed scores of Jews and true or suspected Bolsheviks in the courtyard of the massive sixteenth-century Franciscan Church, whose gray façade and red roof loom high on Kėdainių Street. Gates and walls, some falling and covered in graffiti surround the former monastery. They extend a full block on each of its four sides, and it seems like I walk kilometers before I find a way in. I arrive just as mass is letting out. Incongruously, cars line the square in front of this centuries-old building. Like so many churches in...