My cousin May married into the family.
But her people were from the Vilnius area too. Or Trakai or Ukmerge or someplace nearby, it did not matter. The whole region was a map of the heartbreak that was Jews living in Eastern Europe in that time, that place. If you came from there, you knew what was what. And even though May was born in Brooklyn, her roots back in Vilna had some kind of hold over her.
That must be the reason that, long after the war, sometime in the 1970s even, May decided to return to the area near the Letz ghetto as a kind of pilgrimage. She was not particularly nostalgic, not religious at all, and had hardly any sense of history, destiny, or any other mystery that might compel such a journey. Plus, her husband was gone by that time and her daughter had a family in Seattle and it seemed that no one else was interested in going. It was all too long ago, they said, too forgotten and too sad.
So she went alone.
Vilna was a city again by that time and for a few days she wandered the shops and streets, uninspired and doubting the whole venture. But then a casual remark by someone at the desk of her hotel sent her on a trip outside the city to visit a local monument. May bought a cheese sandwich in a paper bag at the local store and took a bus to Ponary.
The woman in the hotel must have assumed that everyone knew the name; it was famous after all. Ponary was an old oil storage facility that was taken over by the Nazis during World War II. Ever efficient, they decided to take advantage of the large pits that were dug for the oil, to dispose of the bodies of those they meant to exterminate. Something like one hundred thousand people, many of them Polish Jews, were executed there, shot mostly, then dumped into the pit. But as Soviet troops advanced in 1943, the Nazis tried to hide the crime. They brought in inmates from the nearby concentration camp to form Leichenkommando…corpse units. Their job was to dig up bodies, pile them on wood and burn them. The ashes were ground up, mixed with sand, and buried again.
I guess there is no such thing as being buried too well and people say that the ground there is still hot when the air is cool.
This was the Ponary to which May, who knew about none of this, casually took the bus, sandwich in hand.
When she arrived, May walked to one of the small monuments. She stood in front of it for a while but not understanding Hebrew, could not read the plaque on it. Nearby was a low circular retaining wall around a flat plot of ground. It was empty inside, there were no other visitors that day, and May thought to go in there and have her sandwich. She opened the gate and walked inside. There was nothing much there, just some grass, and the stone wall all around, and the trees beyond the wall, and the sky beyond them, and the sun. It was a burial pit, one of those flat places in which the unthinkable becomes humdrum, but she did not realize this.
Having had only a muffin for breakfast, May began to open the bag but suddenly, for no clear reason at all, she felt uneasy there. As though the wall was heavier than it seemed or maybe the ground flatter. Or the sky darker. Something convinced her that this was not the place for her picnic and she walked quickly to the exit to leave.
She put her hand on the gate but it would not open.
She tugged at it, pulled, examined the clasp, all to no avail. She put both hands on the metal and yanked, dropping the bag on the ground. The sandwich fell out and instantly was covered in dirt and ants…the cheese now grungy and spoiled. May pulled the gate again but it still would not let her out.
The gate was only a few feet tall, she could have climbed over it in her younger days. The spaces between the bars were wide, could have slipped through in thinner times. But there and then, in that spot were so many were lost, she felt trapped and could not breathe. Heart attack, she thought, or something much worse. She grabbed her chest and looked up, the way many others must have done, clinging to the sky in the end.
She began to sob.
“Rudys,” said a voice.
“What?” she gasped.
“Rust,” the voice said, translating.
She took the first of several new breaths and realized that this was one of the groundsmen standing on the other side of the gate. Nice older Lithuanian fellow with overalls and a jaunty hat. He pulled the gate open with a stiff jerk and motioned for her to leave.
“Stuck, yes yes. But open,” he said and he kindly held it wide for her.
May stepped out, dropped her hand from her neck, and walked back to the bus.
The sandwich remained.
She could not look back.
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