And now, late at night, my father could see smoke. Surely the men from the village had thrown a torch into the barn. He thought only that he had to rescue the animals. So he ran into the barn.
I don't know when my mother first realized what had happened but she suddenly called out. ‘Meir?’ Then she saw the first orange flames. ‘Meir!’ When there was no reply she threw Rivvy aside as if she were a rag doll and ran down the stairs. We watched from the window as she fled out of the house towards the barn. I was so frightened that I stopped crying.
We saw her tugging at something, bent double, as if she were dragging a sack of seed from the barn. In the dark it was almost impossible to see that she was, in fact, pulling at the ankles of a man. Hannah made out the shape first. ‘It's Daddy,’ she said.
We never knew for certain what had happened. Perhaps the smoke was too much. Perhaps he had hit his head on a wooden beam. Maybe one of the thugs conducting the pogrom had followed him into the barn and beaten him. Whatever had happened, our mother had been too late.
She was never the same person after that. Her hair went grey and she let it fall loose; her clothes were sometimes dirty. She would wear the same skirt and blouse for days on end. She no longer laughed and if she smiled it was a strange, misshapen smile, crooked with regret and sadness. And she never again sang the lullaby.
She decided we could no longer live in that place, whose name she would never say out loud. She had a cousin who had once lived in Kovno and so we moved there. She felt we needed to be in a big city, a place where we would not stand out. A place where there were not just a few Jews, but thousands of us. I suppose she thought there would be safety in numbers. So we headed to Kovno. If you look on a map now you will see no such place. Today they call it by its Lithuanian name: Kaunas.
We arrived when I was eight years old and I have happy memories of our first two years there. My sisters and I went to school and I discovered that I was good at learning languages. The teacher said I had an ear for it. Russian and, especially, German. I found it easy. I only had to hear a word once to remember it. Of course ‘bread’ was Brot. What else would it be? The pieces clicked together like a jigsaw puzzle. I learned and learned.
In Kruk, we had followed only the essentials of Jewish tradition and – as my own penis testified – not even all of those. We lit candles on Friday evening to mark the start of the Sabbath, but we did not do much more. In Kovno it was different. Nearly a quarter of the people of this city were Jews and in the area where we lived, everyone. There were synagogues on every street, Yiddish schools, Hebrew schools, a famous religious academy, the yeshiva at Viriampole, even a Jewish hospital. There were people to teach me how to say Kaddish for my father. We did not feel like outsiders here, even if I now looked like one.
I wish I could say my mother was happy, but she was not. We lived in a couple of rented rooms on Jurbarko Street. I do not know how she paid for them. The rooms were dark, even when the sun was shining outside. During this time, I remember my mother's eyes were always empty.
And then, one day in 1940, a different flag was flying.
It was hot that day, the sun so warm it felt as if it would dry out the damp of what had been a long winter. We were playing in the street, as usual, me trailing behind Hannah while my sisters played a game of hopscotch. I was the first to notice it. I pointed upward at the deep red flag, billowing in the breeze. I couldn't quite work out the gold shapes in the top corner; I wondered if it was a letter in some foreign alphabet. Later I learned that these were the tools of the industrial worker and the farmer, the hammer and sickle.
The Russians had arrived to make Lithuania part of the Soviet Union.
At school, the teachers seemed nervous. My Russian teacher vanished. Hannah explained to me that the Russians were arresting people. They were shutting down some of the Jewish buildings because they were against ‘the revolution’, whatever that was. Hannah heard that some of the men were taken away to Siberia. She said it was the coldest place on earth. I imagined the men standing on a huge sheet of white ice, shivering like penguins.
We were frightened of the Russians but it was not they who frightened us most. Because we soon heard that there was a resistance to the Communists, local Lithuanians who were determined to kick the Soviets out of their country. It was these people who scared us. We remembered from Kruk how these men could behave once they were angry and stirred up.
One day I saw the girls whispering. At first they would not let me see what they were all looking at. ‘No, he'll tell Mama,’ Rivvy said.
‘Tell Mama what?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What have you got there?’
Eventually, they gave in. Hannah made me swear to secrecy and then she showed me. It was a leaflet she had found on the street. It said the Jews were to blame for the Communists occupying Lithuania. Without the Jews, we would be a free people!
In whispers, Hannah issued our orders. ‘We must not let Mama see this.’ I was not yet eleven years old and I knew nothing of Communism or occupation but I understood that my mother was frail, like a cup that had broken once before and must not be dropped. We succeeded too. She never did see that leaflet.
A year later I thought our troubles were over. At school, the headmaster announced that the Russians had gone. They had simply run away. Good, I thought: now the Lithuanians won't be angry with us, the Jews, for bringing the Soviets into their country. But the headmaster seemed more worried than ever.
This was June 1941. It was only after the headmaster stopped speaking, when I heard the boys in my class talking, that I understood that the Russians had not just left because they wanted to leave us in peace. They had vanished because they were frightened: the Germans had begun an invasion of the Soviet Union.
The next day I was in the street, playing catch with two other boys from school. Suddenly there was a noise, distant at first: the sound of faraway whistles and faint drums. We thought that people were celebrating, a marching band parading through the streets because the Russians had gone. But then there were new sounds: women screaming and children crying. My friend took his ball and ran. I stood there on my own for four or five seconds before a man grabbed my wrist and told me to get out of the street. ‘Go home,’ he said. ‘Go home now!’ I must have looked dumb and uncomprehending because he stared at me hard. ‘Pogrom,’ he said. ‘Pogrom.’
I ran as fast as I could back to Jurbarko Street. The screams were getting louder: the Lithuanians were marking the great occasion of the Russian withdrawal the best way they knew how, by attacking any Jew they could find. On Kriščiukaičio Street, I saw a man pulled out of a shop by his ears; three men began to beat him, hitting him on the head over and over. I saw other Jews dragged off. I don't know where these Jews were taken or what happened to them afterwards. But I can guess.
The Lithuanians were wearing strange uniforms, ones I had never seen before. They were black, with the flag of Lithuania on their sleeves, like an armband. These jackets were not all identical, like the uniform of real soldiers. And the men did not march in columns, but rampaged through the streets, shouting slogans: ‘The Jews and Communists have brought shame to Lithuania!’ They called themselves the Lithuanian Activist Front.
Later we found out that they took dozens of Jews to the Lietūkis garage, in the centre of Kovno. They killed hundreds of men there. Afterwards, in a book, I learned that on that night of June 23 1941 and on the three nights that followed, they killed more than three thousand eight hundred Jews. They used axes and knives, as well as bullets; they burned people out of their houses and out of any hiding place. They drowned others in the Neris river.
