Rokiskis & Obelai
The records we have found for the Beinarts lead us to the town of Rokiskis and the nearby village Obelai, in north east Lithuania. In Yiddish, these Shtetls were known as Rakishok and Abel. Online, we find a ‘Rokiskis Special Interest Group’ in the US, started by other migrant families with a similar history. We end up having a long skype conversation with the eminently knowledgable Philip Shapiro, in Virginia, who tells us all about the Jewish history of the area.
Dad joins us in Vilnius and we hire a car to drive north. The smart city centre soon gives way to soviet era blocks of flats and older ramshackle wooden houses, and then the forested countryside. We pass storks nesting on top of telegraph poles, drive through the beautiful lakes area, and see lonely wooden farmhouses. It’s not hard to imagine this area a century earlier. We are welcomed to Rokiskis by a large road sign, a defunct factory and soviet flats. The main street is a mixture of slightly neglected 20th century concrete buildings and the old wooden houses that only seem to get more picturesque as they decay.
We visit the local history museum, housed in the grand old Tyzenhaus mansion. There’s a small section on the Jewish history of the town. It confirms what we have read in our research, and in the holocaust museum in Vilnius: that Rokiskis had a large Jewish population in the 19th century – up to half the total population. In 1941, as carefully documented by the horribly efficient SS, 4,000 Jews were ‘transported 4.5 kilometres before they could be liquidated’. It’s even more chilling to read about this slaughter in the place where it happened.
There’s not a lot of information about the Jewish families who lived in the area before the wars. We meet one of the historians at the museum, Onute, and her husband Zigmas. He offers to take us to see the local jewish cemeteries. In the area beyond Synagogue Gatve, where old wooden houses are laid out along dusty un-tarmacked roads, we find Rokikis jewish cemetery. It is overgrown and neglected, mature silver birch trees grow out of some of the graves, the most recent of which date from 1940. The Jewish population ceased to exist here after that. The graves are hard to decipher, Dad traces the fragile letters with his finger, trying to make them out and trying to remember his hebrew alphabet. Behind us is a hill, overgrown with very tall grasses and wild plants. Zigmas tells us this is also part of the burial ground. We pick our way gingerly between old graves, buried in vegetation, and half expect to see protruding bones.
As we drive out to Obelai, Zigmas tells us more about the countryside, which looks quite unmanaged. During the Soviet era, this was all collective farms and was a very productive area – particularly for flax which was exported to Russia via the railway. He sounds a little wistful when he remembers this – he says that now people can’t afford to cultivate the land, there are no jobs for young people so they leave for the cities. It’s another reminder of the intense conflict and change this region has undergone in the past century and more.
We reach the windmill on the main road, and follow a small track into what looks like someone’s allotment. Behind the vegetable patch is the Obelai jewish cemetery, marked by a wonky picket fence. It looks like a wildflower meadow. I find this place beautiful, but I wonder if we romanticise neglect. There’s something alluring in a place that feels undiscovered (although it is of course discovered) or unknowable. In the introduction to ‘Ruins’, Brian Dillon writes: ‘the cultural gaze that we turn on ruins is a way of loosening ourselves from the grip of punctual chronologies, setting ourselves adrift in time. Ruins are part of the long history of the fragment, but the ruin is a fragment with a future; it will live on after us despite the fact that it reminds us too of a lost wholeness..’
R Beinart
