From

Lithuania

by Myra Sklarew:

...I remember a woman
who sat on the pot where the apples cooked in the cold
basement, her face black from smoke. And here, near this brick
building with a red tile roof, is one of our family, Mausa
Volpe, hatmaker. And nearby, his cousin Aaron. And
here live two killers of Keidan. When I talk to them,
I make them afraid. And here is the hill

where two sisters ran up and down in order
to lose weight. But they fell ill. And
this is the place where I accidentally killed a kitten -- it was
caught in the door. We held a funeral
near the River Nevizis in Keidan. And this is the shop
where Jewish property -- after the massacre -- was sold
very cheap, three marks for a big bag. The buyer
took his bag to his waiting cart, anxious

to see what he had got: the bag was full of tfillin --
phylacteries used by the religious Jews
for prayer. The man didn't know
what these were. Furious, he rode up on the bridge
over the river and threw the tfillin into the water, the dark straps
spreading out like hair in the river.
Here in America, if you rise early enough, in the dark,
if you go out of doors, you can smell autumn

though it it still August. Here and there leaves are beginning
to fall, a few under the dogwood tree, oak leaves, poplar. And just after
dusk, when the earth passes through the dust stream of old comets, if
you look up you will see
meteor showers, the Perseids. Are these burning songs
striking at our atmosphere like the hearts
of those who met their deaths untimely in Lithuania?
I tell you, once we have found our dead, though we cannot hear their

answering voices among the sounds of this world, we will tear
open the skin of the earth
to admit them. We will not lose them again.

*

This then is the story of my people, the story of what
became of my family -- those who had not come away
earlier, those who survived the pogroms
after the assassination of Czar Alexander II. At Keidan
after the massacre of 2000 Jews
one escaped who afterwards hit in the forest
in a bunker. Through the night and in early
morning kind villagers brought him food.

The head of the village discovered some coming
with food and offered 10,000 marks' reward for the man
dead or alive. He invited the police. Twenty of them
circled the bunker dug into the earth, a small chimney
for fresh air. They issued an ultimatum to come out
or they would set off explosives deep in the earth.
the man, half asleep, thinking he was already dead,
arose, wearing one shoe and carrying two grenades.

Pretending to surrender, he attempted to explode
the first grenade but had forgotten to put off
the ring. He fell back to the earth, repeating the episode
with the grenade, this time exploding it. Some were
killed, some wounded. Till they got their consciousness
back, he escaped. He came to the house of
villagers. What happened after, what I want
to tell -- they put him on the oven, he had fallen sick

from the cold and the snow and suddenly he saw
on the peasants' hut parchment of the Torah glued
to the walls. He knew them to be good people but
he was frightened and escaped from the oven. "I must
go," he insisted. Later he came back, he found
the Torah had been cut from the walls and replaced
with newspapers. Those who lived in the house
had understood why he had run away from them.

After the War, he considered the day of his escape
from the bunker as his second birth
and on that day each year he fasted.
Here is the house of Yankele Gross -- Pasmilga 2.
We would close the windows on Easter
when they came from St. George's Church.
They would start to drink. You never knew
what would happen. And here is the house

where the wife spent all their money
on shopping. But it was not allowed for a Jew
to go hungry on the Sabbath. All the families
would raise funds for food. And here
is the house with the thatched roof. When the
goat got hungry we would take straw
from the roof. And here is where the chief
of the firemen lived, Zodek, who dared

to resist the murders and was brutally killed.
And here Rifka, beautiful but meshugah. In winter,
normal; in summer she would go naked
through the streets. And here the Bet Midrash
with the big arch on top and the sundial withe Hebrew
letters: Yud Aleph, Yud Bet. And here we
joke with the women who have come
out to the fence to talk with us: Perhaps we

will take back you house. Startled, they laugh. And here
is the cheder lived in by a peasand and soon
to be destroyed. And here a long wooden
house where Moshe Leib Lilienblum was
born. It was also a tea house. You had to bring
your own sugar. In the bottom of this house
I was born, a man tells me. What was it like
getting born in this house? I don't remember.

But I know for certain I was born naked.
The youngest of eight children. Two weeks later my father
died of tuberculosis. And my mother lost her milk. I was nursed
by a wet nurse. I have a milk brother in Israel.
And here we used to eat mice. The purpose of a piece
of bread was to catch a mouse. Now one of the mouse eaters
is a pilot in the Israeli air force. Not poor, not rich, not drunkards
-- earth, a cow, a few cucumbers. One brother twenty-one

years old was as a father for me. All to the left
of Smilgos Street was the Ghetto. The Smilga River:
old Jewish cemetery on one shore; mass grave on the other...