Three Kids In 1941

Anele Astrauskaite lives in Seirijai. She's my age: fifty eight.

Our perceptions of the world are different. Although I was born in and have always lived in the Philadelphia area I have had the choice to move around with a freedom that was more dependent upon "means" than by the limits of externally applied restrictions. Of the latter, they were few and political climates that inhibited travel because of the wars of our time were never sacrifices forced on my own agenda. When I got a passport (1979) those few, Albania and Cuba and North Korea and Vietnam and any others on the short list of proscribed places didn't short circuit my plans.

In my life I've set foot in only four countries: my own and Canada and England... and Wales if flags count. I've known people elsewhere and would like to have visited them in their homes in Ireland, in Norway, in Italy, in Poland, in Russia, in Germany, in China. I don't have the resources to allow that.

Anele was in a queer circumstance that limited her freedom. She's lived in only one town but in her life, the same time as mine, she's lived in four different countries. The convulsions of twentieth-century warfare took away her native Lithuania and after a brief annexation to Soviet Russia it was gobbled up by nazi-Germany. Its liberation from the Reich was ruined by a return to Stalin's hegemony and suppression of Lithuanian culture. Now in the post-soviet era, Lithuania has separated from its vassal-lords and is a newer creation. It's another country that young children accept as different from earlier designations and babies will inherit it as their only motherland of memory.

Our memories too are dependent in the United States upon our birth heritage. The worst plights that couldn't be alleviated by the wave of a hand or the wink of an eye are the stuff that fell upon native Americans (Indians) and upon blacks. Jews who didn't disguise themselves were (and are) always at the mercy of individual nastiness. Even Catholics could live in the wrong place. But however bad the worst treatment visited upon these Americans was, none could be equal to the horrors of nazi polity. Individuals though could find unthinkable meaning to suffering.

Our society is not without stain. It bungled its foray at genocide earlier 'though the "red man" was reduced to inconsequential and incapable of resisting a "white" tide.

Today there are many who view the holocaust as an invention of Jewish propagandists. There are others who, while admitting its monstrous affection, are annoyed by Jewish persistence in prosecuting old nazis or even reminding later generations of its toll which, by the way, they view as extremely exaggerated.

What was done by the nazis in their era (1933-1945) was to organize the wishes of average people. They had camp-followers wherever they went: in Poland, in France, in Romania, in Ukraine, in Lithuania. What these people did to please their masters was what they would have wanted someone to do anyway. Now, in an extreme repressive state they found an extreme license to assert themselves in a way that civilized nations could never condone. They were the children of Christian doctrine gone perverted: by Luther's obsessive hatred of Jews, by the Czars' pogroms against the Jews, by the Dominicans' persecutions and murders of Jews, by (the Church of) England's class exclusion of Jews — reinforced by literature's slurs. Even Calvin the Swiss, while protecting Jewish flesh (and their property as well) in his protestant haven, excluded their souls from God's mercy and heaven. All of the subtle approaches matched the disenfranchisements: the treks to exile, the pitiless beatings and the murders. Christians, theologically at war with each other, would visit the same miseries on each other when times were ripe and their only common point of agreement labeled Jews as the Christ killers. It became the canon of many households long before any of us were born. Its residual secular wash has, even today, more philosophical impact on moral judgement than the simple prayer of christian charity that little children recite saying "Our Father, who art in heaven..." Like anything else, reciting or reading doesn't necessarily guarantee that the student will learn or even remotely understand the message.

Fen Montaigne's essay in The Philadelphia Inquirer on 27 July 1992 kicked up some dust about the holocaust that's boring to those who are unaffected by outrages committed upon other people in other places at other times. Anele Astrauskaite and I were eight years old when the Jews of Seirijai were marched off to be murdered at pits in the forest. A little boy, perhaps our age, objected to the fate ordained him by old neighbors and new landlords who saw the pits as more convenient than deportation to Madagascar. "I am Catholic. I can say my prayers." His protest was cut short by a bullet to his head.

I thought of the little boy perhaps eight years old like Anele and me. He's been disregarded to the dust of history with no one's protest but his own. Bums get better monuments. His is but a forgotten spot on the road. Anele and the others who didn't have to march off away to their own graves were not to recover from the echo of the gunfire of that time for fifty years. Life was suspended for a half-century. It's incomprehensible to all of us and I, once eight years old, am simply unqualified to understand it beyond being reminded that eight year olds deserve better than that.

We're at the mercy of accidents: time, place. The adults who make decisions were once our age: kids like me and an unknown other boy.

He was eight years old. So was I. I got a gold star from my teacher now and then. It was a reward.

He didn't have a luxury like that. Still, there was a star for him. But it was different.

It was yellow.

The same man who picked that boy out might have found me and upon a glance might say" "You! I think that you are a Jew."

I thought of this little boy...

He's been disregarded to the dust of history with no-one's protest but his own. Bums get better monuments.

~ author at eight