Deported-SharonWriting#1

Banging at the door. It’s 3am.

“Yoselis Zilberas” Someone is shouting my father’s name.

He opens the door. Two officers in NKVD uniforms wait there.

“Yoselis?” They ask.

My father nods. What else can he do? They will want his papers.

“You are marked for evacuation. Prepare your suitcase. You can take one bag” one of the men says gruffly in Russian.

“Where am I going?” my father asks.

“Our instructions are just to bring you. You are accused of anti-Soviet activity.”

“What do you mean? I am a doctor at the University Clinic, completing my internship.”

“Were you ever a member of”… The officer looks at his list. “Kedainiai Betar?”

My father is silent. They motion for his papers and he hands them over. It seems ridiculous to him. Kedainiai is his hometown,yes. And Beitar was the Zionist summer camp he went to to grow vegetables, sing songs. They had uniforms and marched but still.

Can it be? He knows people have been disappearing off the streets of Kaunas for the past year. He knows Beitar is considered the most nationalist of the Zionist groups, the most anti-revolutionary. Still he wasn’t even an officer. He thinks for a flash of the hospital where he works with its rows of patients, its pretty nurses, its shiny instruments. He thinks of the friends he left at the cafe earlier this evening, other Jewish doctors, living in Kaunas. He realizes he is about to be one of the disappearing ones.

The other officer, who has a pleasant face, says, “ Hey don’t look so worried. Do you really want to stay here in Kaunas?.”

My father knows what the man means. There have been rumors for the past several months that the Germans are on the verge of invasion. And as bad as the Russians are, the Germans would be catastrophic. Joseph has no faith that the Lithuanians will do anything to fight the Germans. Rather, the propaganda from the Lithuanian Activist Front, passed around surreptitiously but seeming to be found everywhere, actually seems to be printed in Germany. It has been become ever more hateful and virulent, calling for a Lithuania for Lithuanians, calling for Jews to be expelled with their Russian masters.

“I have enlisted in the army, says my father. “Six months ago.”

“Well we may all end up there”. The officer hands the papers back to my father.

“You have ten minutes to get your stuff. You can’t have much, a young man like you.” My father is 26 but looks younger. “Then we put you on the truck.” He pauses. “Any family members? We have a quota to fill”.

Suddenly my father is aware of the sound of shouting coming from the street from many different directions, other names being called, others being taken. This must be a big operation. He thinks with a thumping in his chest of his mother in Kedainiai. He shakes his head no. “No” he says “just me.”

After he quickly packs, the officers march him out to the truck. It is filled with 20 or so people. Young, old, a wealthy looking family, workers. Not just Jews . There are Lithuanian Christians here, and even a few Poles. It seems a cross section of Lithuanian society.

He does not know where he is going. And as unlikely as it seems, the two NKVD officers will turn out to be the angels of his deliverance. In little more than a week, the Nazis will overrun Lithuania. And as soon as the war begins, my father will be taken from prison to serve in the army. He who has never gone further than an hour or two from his hometown will now travel across thousands of miles and see so many things, unimaginable things. He will never live again in Lithuania after this night. He will never see his mother or any of his family alive again.