Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Simaite

10. Mowszowicz

69 chapter 10 Mowszowicz when I am not wandering the streets of Vilnius, I spend my days in the university’s manuscript reading room, sifting through thousands of letters. All around students hunch over fragile Russian books and old Lithuanian texts. It is stuffy and smells of perspiration. The desks are small, and many of the power outlets don’t work, so I have to tread carefully around the computer cords that snake from one station to another. There is far more material than expected, and I have to work hard to get through it all. The Vilnius University librarians have received me with a touching kindness—women are in charge of almost every aspect of archival life here. They worry for me, these library women, offering pots of tea and scolding me when they think I have been sitting still for too long. On the second or third day of my work at the library I notice a plaque that hangs on the back wall of the manuscript reading room. It reads: Elena Eimaitytė-Kačinskienė 1906–1989 Assistant to the Director of Vilnius University Library (1940–1944) 70 Mowszowicz I photograph it a few times, though in the low light of the room, the images come out blurry. Even so, these pictures serve as my first record of Elena Eimaitytė’s existence outside of texts. Until now I have only known her name through Šimaitė’s letters, so the plaque startles and reminds me that the story I am tracking is not a secret that I share only with Šimaitė. In 1941 Eimaitytė was thirty-five years old. Like Šimaitė and Čilvinaitė, she arrived in Vilnius in January 1940 as a member of the staff whose task it was to reinvent the formerly Polish Stephen Batory University, transforming it into the Lithuanian institution of Vilnius University. In 1944 Eimaitytė left Lithuania for the United States, married a mathematician, and worked in a number of libraries , including the Library of Congress. I learned her name from Šimaitė’s Steinberg letter: In the middle of the first week of the ghetto’s creation, the head secretary of Vilnius University library, Miss Eimaitytė, asked me if would like to go to the ghetto with Miss Godliauskaitė. I jumped at the offer. I myself had already been racking my brain on the subject, but hadn’t been able to come up with any way to get through the security surrounding the ghetto to see those friends who didn’t go out into the city to work. Half an hour later, Miss Eimaitytė delivers to me an official document signed by the director of the university library and addressed to the head of the Office for Jewish Affairs, Mr. Burakas. The library requests him to permit me, as head of the cataloguing department, and Miss Godliauskaitė, as head of the reading room, to go into both ghettos with the purpose of collecting a few unreturned library books. I go to see Mr. Burakas alone. Without any discussion, he gives me a visa to both ghettos for September 14. (Šimaitė in Šukys, “And I burned” 60) Despite its walls, the ghetto was porous. Each day groups of workers exited and returned through its main gate. Soldiers subjected prisoners to searches for food, weapons, documents, or even flowers smuggled under clothes. The discovery of food usually resulted in a public whipping, but for weapons, the punishment was death. Lithuanians sold chickens through holes in the ghetto wall to starv- 71 Mowszowicz ing prisoners willing to pay inflated prices. At night, youngsters used a side gate on Mėsinių (Yatkever) Street to join the partisans in the forests. The seven narrow cobblestone lanes of Ghetto I housed the lucky ones, deemed useful for their skills. Beyond the lanes’ gateways lay courtyards and crowded apartments, barbershops, cafés, bath houses, schools, workshops, soup kitchens, and even a library. The ghetto teemed with life. Groups of children in need of stimulation inside the shrunken world interviewed their neighbors and set about writing a ghetto history, courtyard by courtyard. Ghetto II imprisoned unskilled workers. Little more than a transit point for those condemned to immediate death, it barely lasted a month. In October 1941, the road from Ghetto II, or the Small Ghetto, as it was called, led to the pits of Paneriai (Ponar). As I cross the former ghetto threshold, I study the buildings on each...