Every weekend on cspan2, book tv offers programming. Keep watching for more here on cspan2. We had the privilege of welcoming poet and my fathers pass. Shell share her journey as the daughter of russian jewish father and mission to unravel the truth who her grandfather she discovered with the chief of police in a town where 8,000 jews were murdered in 1941. Her publication includes harvard review, massachusetts review, poet the and i more, and she is also at the anthology of lit from inside 40 years of poetry. She teaches creative writing at Hunter College and is speaking about a a guest at the shooters banquet, great reception from the Miami Book Fair and washington, dc. Please help me welcome rita gabis. Thank you for that beautiful introduction. I just want to say that i love arthur miller. One of the first playwrights i ever read, so thrilled to hear about the upcoming production. Going to take a quick sip of water. Im delighted to be speaking here at the west port public library, has a wonderful authors program. I want to thank all of you for coming, and also to think cspan for being here as well to cover this event. Im just going to begin by reiterating what has already been said, i come from a blended family. My mother is first generation lithuanian catholic, and my father who passed away a little over ten years ago, was a russian jewish descent. Im going to tell you a bit about my book, and because my book contains upwards of 70 images, im going to share a few photographs with you as i talk about my book. For me as a writer, the gathering of images and archival material that ended up in pectoral form in my book was a way of anchoring myself to a long sixyear journey that involved many trips to Eastern Europe to israel, many surprises. My hope is that youll come away from our gathering obviously wanting to know about my book, but also perhaps youll leave thinking of the stories in your own lives that are as yet untold, or questions perhaps that family members that you havent asked yet. If i learned anything in the process of this journey, its that particularly now, as so many survivors are passing on, its crucial that we ask the questions that perhaps we havent asked yet. So, in a sense what im talking about are opening those doors that havent been opened yet in our lives, and the first picture i want to share with you is a door. This is the doorway to the Police Station and prison in lithuania, at the time that i took this photograph, the new Police Station was being built right next door to it, but i could see the bars of the old prison cells on the windowses of the first floor, and when i opened the door, which i wasnt supposed to do, but i did anyway, it led up one flight of stairs to my lithuanian catholic grandfathers office when he was chief of the security police, one of the deadliest co lab racingist forces in lithuania during world war ii. My grandfather is one of three lithuanian commanders for the entire region, and i should say that its a town the name of a town where his office was based, where this prison is, but is was also an entire region that contained many different towns and many different it was region that prior to the russian occupation, which many of you know predated the german occupation, had actually been part of poland. The russians came in, they delivered part of the territory to the bella russians and the germans delivered it to the lithuanians and remains part after lithuania today, though many pols still live in the area. How did i come to open this jail house door . The answer is a simple and complex a question i asked my mother in a cafe over six years ago. I knew about the heroism before the war when he far as a partisan in the woods of light wayney against the russians and had been told men times about his bravery tend of the war when he rode a horse and buggy that held his older sister and three children over nine bridges, through bombings and fires, and ultimately to safety. But in the cafe, on the Upper West Side of new york, i finally sat before my lithuanian mother, whose war story had very gradually run the camp passion and sympathy of my jewish grandmother, the matriarch of my family. Her story was the dominant war story in our lives. We didnt talk about the people who visited my jewish grandmother with numbers tattooed on their arm. We didnt talk about extended jewish family members who ended up in the show of victims database, or simply vanished off the face of the earth from memory, from conversation. In the cafe, i asked my mother the stunning livors, and i always say stunningly obvious, and i always say it is my great embarrassment it took me so many years to ask the question, which was what did my grandfather actually do during the war . My mother said, he was in the police. I said, you mean under the ss . And she said, yes. I had known my grandfather well, i loved him. My own father was a reader, a philosopher, a quiet man, kind of absent minded professor, my lithuanian grandfather was loud, he fished, hunted. I was a tom boy. He took me with him. I adored him and he adored me. When my mother told me that my grandfather had in essence been a collaborator and at that time i certainly knew nothing about this door or the fact that he had been actually given a position of some importance, two visceral feelings ran through me. The first, which has stayed with me to this day, was that i had to find out if he had brought harm to anyone. And it was an overwhelming feeling, and has compelled me continually and even with the publication of this book, has not ended. Secondly, i thought of my jewish grandmother, rachel davis. Here she is, on the righthand side here as the young beauty that she was. She this was taken some years after her family left the ukraine, for london, then the United States. And here she is in her 80s. She lived to 104. Keeping her own house until two weeks before she died. And she was my favorite family member. So the second feeling i had upon my mothers delivery of this information, was that i was grateful that my grandmother was no longer living because if she had known this information i felt that it would have destroyed her. With my grandmother actually, who although i came from a blended family, informed me how i was to think of myself, and im going read but a very small passage, one of two very small passages from the book today, that illustrateds that particular moment. Ill begin here. I was raised in a secular household. We went to mass without my father on holidays with a lithuanian catholic side of my family, and celebrated the jewish holidays with my fathers side of the family. Yet when asked what i was, i always responded jewish. Technically i was not. My father had married a nonjew. However, my jewish grandmother, rachel gabis, believed her will and wishes superseded rabbinical law, and gave me the nation of how to think of myself. She made her pronouncement the summer i was 12 on marthas vineyards where she lived the last half of her life and where, along with my parents, various aunts and uncle each summer. It was a hot da and i was hanging out by the side of a local movie theater. A new poster was up advertising a movie i wanted to see. What was it . Jaws comes to mind but probably different movie. The sun was bright with the salty white glare that only happens near the ocean, i was wearing a tiny gold cross around my neck i bought the drug store, because my girlfriends, polishing catholic tours of plumbers and rooming house owners, all wore them. Absorbed in the movie poster at first i didnt see my grandmother drive up in her used goal impala. Ignoring the traffic, she put her car in park, threw open already door, and made it to the curb where i stood before i could completely register the fact of her. She reached for me, towards the little necklace with the cross off my instinct and through it on the sidewalk. I never want to see such a thingdown neck again, she said. I looked down at my ruined necklace and back up at her red face. She was always firey, loving, dominating, but id never seen her so angry before. Youre youish, she spat. Then youre jewish, she spat. Then jumped into the impala and sped away. That was my grandmother. I knew in the cafe with my mother that actually over 95 of the jews of lithuania had been killed primarily by lithuanians. I knew that my paternal jewish relatives had lived just over the border. The question, did my grandfather harm anyone . Which perhaps might sound naive to some of you, turned inside of me the first year of my research about him was intensely private, and i want to say i had no idea writing a book at the beginning. This was a personal search. The notion of a book came later. I felt somehow that if i didnt learn what my grandfather had or had not been party to, it would destroy me or at the very least i would never understand who i was in the world. And more importantly, never be able to make an amends to a possible victim or relative of a victim. I didnt expect to find a paper trail on my grandfather. I didnt expect to spend five years traveling to Eastern Europe and israel, as i said before, and i certainly didnt expect beautiful redheaded woman in a small apartment in lithuania, whose father had been killed partially upon my grandfathers order to say when i tried to apologize, what is your crime . I found out that my grandfather had worked for the gestapo, who, by the way, with many a lithuanians he hated. The lithuanians largely thought the germans initially the first two week of the german occupation, as a ticket to lithuanian autonomy, which is what the germans promised them, and of course as soon as they reneged on their promise, many of the lithuanian collaborators, including my grandfather, began working underground against the generallans but this is not the same as working on behalf of the Jewish Population. This is very important to make that distinction. So, in addition to that, the germans were allies with the lithuanians, in theyre hatred of what they called the bolshevik jews, and im hear many of you heard of this. A conflation of communism and judism, that the statistics in lithuania proved were it arely untrue. In fact right before the beginning of the war, statistically on paper, the number of nonjewish lithuanians who are members of the communist party was far greater than the number of jews who were in the communist party. So, as one of the survivors from the ghetto, i interviewed over several years, said to me, even as a cried growing up she was familiar with the phrase, kill a jew, save russia. The myth of the communist jew, while not a complete fiction, was a deadly rationale, if you will, for ridding lithuania of the Jewish Population once and for all. And my grandfather as it turned out certainly shared the view that all jews were communists, and they were in the words of one of his daughters, his scapegoat. But lets take a brief look at the town where i was many times over five years and where he worked from 1941 to 1943. So here is the beautiful town green as it exists today still. It is a place that used to be of course full of jewish life, a place of sin no going synagogues. You cant see it but the Catholic Church that my mother went to as child is just out of view of this scene. Here is the green, the village green, as it used to look like, at a time when there were still jewish shops that lined the square, and traders and the 3,000 members of the Jewish Population still alive there, still running their businesses, still raising their children. One of my interviewees remembered being very young and at the market, and remembered the smell of fish and horses, the overwhelming crowds, the noise of people, selling and trading, smoke, and the scent of bread. I love those particular details. Then here oops. Somehow that got mixed up. The next map i wanted to show you, which is out of order here so i will skip it but the next snap shows a division of the region by the german administration, and let me just probably singing to choir but let me just say that the germans were tremendous administrators. They were constantly updating their maps. They were constantly updating their kill lists. They were constantly sending out memos and then destroying the type writer ribbon the secretary time on so no one could steal the ribbon and from the imprint of the letters understand what had been cement secret. However has been sent in secret. However in addition to that, administration skill, if you will, in regions like where my grandfather was one of three commanders, they had two german commanders present, neither of which spoke lithuanian, polish, or yiddish, which meant they were entirely dependent on the lithuanian commands to carry out their orders. And also, this, of course, influenced the wartime layers of intrigue, rebellion, graft, and betrayal. Bribery was a part of wartime lives, and really all over lithuania, and we could say all over Eastern Europe, particularly where there were so little germans present, and the command was basically handed over to those who knew the local language. So, this now is the right image. This is a picture of my grandfather as a young man in the early 1920s, when he was accepted into the Lithuanian Military Academy for officers training. He was the first of his family to go to secondary school. He grew up in a tworoom, dirt floor shack. His mother, barbara, was a mid wife and a caster, nonjewish lithuanians were initially all pagan. Her cell of choice was a cure for snake byte its turned out, and i mentioned the this not to invoke pity for him but to say that, as i began my research, it was very important for me to understand as well as i could who my grandfather was before i knew him, and even before the war. What were his aspirations growing up . Who did he want to be . I want to show you another image now. This is closer to how i remember him. This photo was taken just around the time that he emigrated. This is how he would have looked to a passerby during the time of his work there. He began his military career really as a as chief of Border Police on the latvian border. There in 1941, when the russians came in, they arrested his wife, my lithuanian grandmother. She was taken to the prison in the soviet union in russia. She was tortured. She was asked to give up information about where my grandfather was, where my mother and her siblings were. She was put in a death cell numerous times. A standing room only dank place, where you were told if you dont confess youll be shot the next morning, and then ultimate hill she was sent to various camps in siberia, hard labor, prison, for 15 years. This information is important not only because its part of my blended family story, but because the germans were very astute in the way they cherrypicked the lithuanians they put in power. They picked those people who had been damaged in some way by the russians. They picked the people who had the largest grudges. The people whoa wanted revenge of the worst kind, and certainly my grandfather fell into that category. So i treasure in particular the photo of my grandfather as a young man. He wrote about his military aspirations early in his life. I treasure it as i treasure this photo, because the word collaborator to me is a very inadequate word. He certainly was a collaborator, but what does that mean . Its an umbrella term, and i say in my book that the word erases the moment of, yes, when someone says, yes,ll do this, and the terms of, no, when someone perhaps refuses. And says, i will not do this. So, every collaborators story was different, and if we lump them all together, the sing alert of moral choice the sing alert of moral cheese is lost, and personally i feel thats something for all of us that is tremendously important. Ailes avoided words such as monsters, beasts, and animals in relation to the actions of accomplices or initiators or the horrible crimes of the holocaust, pickerly in lithuania, because those words to me, too, abstract the fact of the Human Capacity for violence and complicity, and certainly we know that there were psycho paths and saidists who used the opportunity of he holocaust to enact there pathology but many people were like us, some like us, who made choices, and im not implying we would make the same choices but its important to remember the spectrum of humanity. At least for me. In terms of my grandfather, but also in terms of all people who are players in genocide around the world. So in to the region two major actions took place. The first was september of 1941. All of the jews, aside from those who were declared useful jews, those who had perhaps bribed their way into the relative safety of a ghetto, and often those who bribeswe are sent meetly back to what became a killing ground, 8,000 jews were rounded up. They were taken in carts. They were marched to a police about seven kilometers outside of the city. It was called polygon, which means shooters range. It had been when they area was a polish control, a place for polish officers went to practice their shooting and to house their horses. They were taken there. They were shoved into make shift barracks, kept there for a period of days, and then they were taken first the men, then the women, and then the children, and they were shot. This next image is an image of the covered tip of poly grand. Its difficult to get the sense of the size of it, which is to say that heap of ground stretches as far as you can see and beyond, into the woods, and then this next picture is what i call the killing trees. This was a tree that was the bark was carved out so that infants and Young Children could be smashed against the trees in order to save bullets. Shooters were part of a lithuanian squad that traveled, recruiting locals at each stopping point. The germans on hand were few. This next photo is a very rare photo that came from one of my interviewees, and its actually post war, young men who came back after the war, many of them had been serving the soviet soviet union on fronts as far away as japan, and came home to find their entire families killed, and theyre holding a box of remains, and trying to, with some dignity, rebury them. And the first man on the left is the husband of my interviewee, a very brave woman who gave me this photograph for the book. So, of course, was desperate to learn if my grandfather had a role in this massacre. You might say, well, of course he did. He is chief of security police. He is seven kilometers away from this. How could he not . One thing i was very careful of in my research was to double and triple source every piece of information, so proximity for me was never enough. In order to really substantiate the narrative of with wartime life. Im going to read a small passage, the last one ill read the second to the last one ill read from the book chill straights the first built w