[Pages 1659 - 1662]

“At the Vilnius Cemetery”

By Layzer Ran

Translated by Judie Goldstein, Miriam Gershman Kovitz, and Sonia Kovitz

The city of corpses is Jewish, the only living Vilna today. I go to the Vilna cemetery.

The shul [synagogue] and taharah-shtibl [hut for ritual cleansing] at the cemetery are torn down. The houses of the Jewish gravestone carvers around the field are plundered and destroyed. All the footpaths and walkways leading to and between the graves are overgrown with weeds. How many the victims who fell here – and yet the entire congregation is gathered as in former times, wrapped in taleisim [prayer shawls] of marble and stone, frozen in the magnificent Sh'ma Yisroyel [Hear O Israel] from the Sh'mona-Esrei of the Yomim Noraim [Eighteen Benedictions for the High Holidays]. There they stand among the snow-covered high dead weeds, as if among a multitude of children who wait with pounding hearts for the sound of the shofar [ram's horn]. It is Neilah [closing service on Yom Kippur] in the Vilna cemetery.

And I – I walk around among relatives, teachers, comrades, friends and acquaintances.

From street to street, from house to house – my Jewish city comes to greet me, and every plank, every stone is for me a door into a living home.

I say Shalom and hear greetings in return.

“A good year to you, good and pious Grandmother Leah-Disia and the sister I never knew, Leah'le, who as a little one hid herself on her grandmother's lap in eternal sleep.

“Good morning, Uncle Yosef Renkatsishek, kiddush hashem [martyr for the sanctification of G-d's name] murdered in 1942 during a Pesakh [Passover] 'rehearsal' for Ponar [most of the Vilna ghetto Jews were taken to Paneriai Forest on the outskirts of Vilnius and killed there].

“Sholem aleikhem, schoolteacher Shaul Bastomski and Gershon Pludermakher.

“Ready, always ready, dear friends David Gurland and artist Kopelovitch.

“A greeting full of honor and respect to all of you, our life teachers: Dr. Tsemakh Shabad and Rabbi Gaon [sage] Reb Khaim-Ozer Grodzenski [chief rabbi of Vilna], Arkady Kremer [member of Jewish socialist labor Bund] and Khayei Adam [Avraham Danzig, author of “Life of Man,” famous commentary on the code of Jewish religious law, Shulkhan Arukh], Julius Shimelevitch, and also Hirsh Lekert must certainly be here, in this community for whose sake he put his head in the noose [Lekert was hanged for his assassination attempt on the governor of Vilna in 1902].

“A greeting to you, rows of heroes and martyrs who fell in all the battles for freedom in the Vilna streets during the days when freedom struggled against Ponar – a greeting to you, a bloodstained flag for a greeting that flutters from deep in the heart.”

I walk and walk, I hear Shalom and I return greetings.

I walk and walk, framed by stones and carved letters from the golden past, by eternal rest, by those who repose in fearful solitude.

I walk and walk.

I wander here alone, alone – without even a bit of fear among the dead in a dead field.

A dead field with corpses? But these are the most fully alive Vilna Jews that the city has to call its own, the community that to the great wide world today is still Vilna.

What is a corpse in a cemetery?

What is a corpse?

Who looks for a Vilna Jew in the cemetery when in the dark neighborhood not far away lies the Jewish city of death, Ponar?

A corpse, a real corpse, a dead body, a gruesome corpse – that is a dead Jew of the Nazi khurbn [total devastation or holocaust]: a “dirty Jew,” a “number,” a figure ripped from life and not even brought to a proper Jewish grave. Lived – and vanished.

A dead Vilna Jew?

This is the kind of Jew over whose bones the impure earth was thrown as if over a worm, wiped out without a trace, without a tear, without a kaddish. When all was done, an SS dog relieved itself on the place and left –

My father's grave.

A dead Vilna Jew?

This is the kind of Jew whose death agony was seen only by the fish in the Baltic Sea, who perhaps began their feast before his eyes had closed.

My brother-in-law departed this shameful world in the same way.

A dead Vilna Jew?

This is a Jew who was set free from an intolerable burden, a life of misfortune, in the gas chamber, and was lightly carried away from the crematorium, in a little cloud of smoke and ash, on the wind –

Like my dearest sister with her bright little son pressed to her heart.

A dead Vilna Jew, a genuine Vilna ghetto corpse?

This is each of the eighty thousand who drenched Ponar with their blood and then fertilized the surrounding earth with their ashes –

In a congregation of ashes, in the women's section high in the shul, my mother blesses me with her last tear.

A dead Vilna Jew?

This is a Jew whose tortured body went through the full measure of torment and blazed up on a wailing pyre like a burning piller of lust for revenge, that flares up and consumes the last bit of Vilna blood, from Stalingrad through Berlin to the Negev and Jerusalem –

My brother was a wick in the flame of that pyre.

And then no more…

A dead body – a city. A dead body – a congregation. A dead body – a home. A corpse – dearest and most distant. Vanished and – no more!

The dead world.

And I – I walk in the cemetery. I walk and walk ever farther and wander deeper into the night.

I straighten a board and try to put back a stone that has fallen over. I stand for a while at the tomb of that worthy person, the pious woman Deborah Esther. I look into the Pinkus [Record Book] of Tears: a mingling of greetings, signatures, pleas, and supplications that have been accumulating for a long, long time, that blend together and cry out to this old Vilna mother for help in the suffering ghetto. In the earliest days of the ghetto there were bloody pleas for salvation and consolation filled with the old melodies – 'And you should keep all misfortune away and I should know no more heartache.' Then later, later the pleas began to sound more and more like un'tane tokef [High Holiday prayer about Judgment Day] – 'Hear the words and tears of the widows and orphans… you should be a good intercessor for our unfortunate children – a memorial for the children rounded up in the ghetto'…until – an abrupt SOS! and in the ghetto's last breath torn from this world of truth and piety, laws and justice… 'Rakhmones [have mercy], Deborah Esther!' The Vilna ghetto, September 1944. And afterward, afterward it became quieter, quieter and quieter, and only the wind whistled in the vacant ghetto streets grown blind and dumb.

“Quieter, quieter, let us be silent – graves are growing here.” *

* Opening of the Yiddish song “Shtiler, shtiler.” The lyrics were written in the Vilna ghetto by poet Shmerke Kaczerginski and set to music in 1943 by 11-year-old Alexander Volkoviski. For this music composed for a ghetto music competition, Volkoviski won first prize – food rations.

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