Rita Gabis comes from a family of Eastern European Jews and Lithuanian Catholics. She was close to her Catholic grandfather as a child and knew one version of his past: prior to immigration he had fought the Russians, whose brutal occupation of Lithuania destroyed thousands of lives before Hitler’s army swept in.
“In my memory my Lithuanian grandfather (senelis) is tall and wide. I’m four or six or seven. It’s that lazy Sunday after church time, in the spring.Everywhere we go he introduces me: ‘This is my grandaughter.’ In the bakery I choose the flaky sweet pastry called ‘butterfly.’ Senelis says, More, choose more.’ I ask him how much more. He sweeps his arms across the small room. “Anything, he says.”
Much later she learns that he had a hand in the murder of 8,000 Lithunian Jews over a three day period in 1941.
Rita Gabis comes from a family of Eastern European Jews and Lithuanian Catholics. She was close to her Catholic grandfather as a child and knew one version of his past: prior to immigration he had fought the Russians, whose brutal occupation of Lithuania destroyed thousands of lives before Hitler’s army swept in.
Five years ago, Gabis discovered an unthinkable dimension to her family story: from 1941 to 1943, her grandfather had been the chief of security police under the Gestapo in the Lithuanian town of Svencionys, near the killing field of Poligon, where eight thousand Jews were murdered over three days in the fall of 1941. In 1942, the local Polish population was also hunted down. Gabis felt compelled to find out the complicated truth of who her grandfather was and what he had done.
Built around dramatic interviews in four countries, filled with original scholarship, and mesmerizing in its lyricism, A Guest at the Shooters’ Banquet is a history and family memoir like no other, documenting “the holocaust by bullets” with a remarkable quest as Gabis returns again and again to the country of her grandfather’s birth to learn all she can about the man she thought she knew.
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Five years ago, Rita Gabis discovered that her Lithuanian Catholic grandfather had been a
district police chief under the Gestapo between 1941 and 1943. She remembered him as a generous man who took her to a local bakery, and told her to order everything she wanted: “More,” he said, “choose more!” She called him Senelis. Svencionys, the town where he worked, was close to the killing field of Poligon, where eight thousand Jews were murdered in the fall of 1941.
Rita Gabis’ father was descended from Lithuanian Jews. Lithuania belongs to the borderlands of Eastern Europe that the historian Timothy Snyder called the Bloodlands. In this area during World War II, Lithuanians seeking nationhood collided with Germans seeking Lebensraum, Russians seeking to extend Soviet power, and Jews seeking to survive. Frontiers were flexible, power changed hands, ideologies came to blows. Lithuania had been independent between the wars, but it was invaded by the Soviets in 1940, the Germans in 1941, and the Soviets again in 1943. It finally regained its independence in 1991.
In Vilnius, the Museum of Genocide Victims, also known as the KGB Museum, stands midway between the Cathedral and the Parliament on a sleek shopping street. The museum has been unforgivingly curated with the Nazis on one floor, the Soviets on another,and the KGB prison in the basement. Memorial stones on the outside of the building commemorate young partisans who died in 1945 and 1946. The Lithuanians have done an excellent job. It is a harrowing place. “This is how it was,” says a red placard near the end of the exhibit. “We are showing all this so as not to allow it to sink into oblivion.”
At times it seems as though Rita Gabis would like nothing better than to allow her grandfather’s past to sink into oblivion. At the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, faced with what could be hard evidence, she writes, “A little bomb is busy constructing itself in my chest.” There’s a cough stuck in her throat, and her hands are sweaty. Instead of delving into the reports on her grandfather, she looks at other files instead. Later, in Lithuania, on the point of gaining access to a prison where her grandfather was imprisoned for ten days in 1943 (it’s not clear why), she allows herself to be talked out of going in.
Tracking the activities of dubious forbears has become a familiar literary genre. Martin Davidson’s The Perfect Nazi, published in 2010, is organized on chronological lines,and relates his SS grandfather’s career from start to finish. But Davidson makes documentaries for the BBC, while Rita Gabis is a poet. Linear vision is not her thing: “My father once described my reading habits as a ‘vacuum cleaner’ – I collected anything in my path.” Her book is a mosaic of people and places, skipping from Vilnius to Svencionys to Israel to New York. She injects stories of genocide survivors into the account of her own research. She dwells lovingly on family reunions, childhood experiences, scents and sights and suspicions. She recounts in detail a flood in her apartment that prevents one trip to Lithuania, and an attack of food poisoning that jeopardizes another.
The truth is hard to face up to. She admits it: “I’m hoping Senelis will be an exception to the slow accrual of information circling around him.” How far inside the circle is he? Hard to say. She finds a letter he wrote to the German police chief requesting sterner treatment of Jews, and a complaint from his Lithuanian subordinate citing over-lenient treatment of Jews. An eye-witness places him at the scene of a massacre of Poles. His treatment of his son points to a streak of violence. A disturbing incident during a fishing expedition is recalled towards the end of the book. Was Senelis merely a guest at the shooters’ banquet, as the title implies? Was he intrinsically a good man, as the family narrative would have it? Or did he have a darker side that the family either didn’t know, or didn’t want to know?
Nothing in Rita Gabis’ research makes Senelis out to be a monster, but nothing suggests that he has been unjustly accused. Nothing is conclusive. The only thing that is clear is that Senelis was one of those who found themselves in a world where people were struggling for survival, and everyone had to “become what … nature and … circumstances required” just to stay alive.
–Patricia Le Roy, author of Girl with Parasol