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Part VII, June 11, 2004
By Laurel Corona
 VILNA, Lithuania—Regina has arranged for Victor, a friend who is a taxi driver, to be on call for us the whole time we are in Vilna. As on other days, he miraculously appears within a minute or two of Regina’s cell phone call.
Now after an hour in the car, Victor has turned off one narrow, barely paved country road onto one even narrower. Along the roadside, tall stalks of velvety purple lupine poke up over the grasses. Just beyond, hundreds of sapling birches poke skyward. Spruce branches sag to the ground, as if the new, lime-green needles are finally more than the tree can bear. We have picked up Fania earlier and she and Regina are chattering in Russian in the back seat next to me.
As before, her responses to my questions go off on a ninety-degree tangent from what I have asked, but I am learning to let her decide what she tells me and when.
Regina tells Victor to stop. We are in what remains of the Avengers’ partisan camp in the Rudnicki forest. A mound covered with weeds and moss is cut away on one side, revealing the entrance to the first hut. Its frame and interior walls are constructed of tree trunks, except in spots reinforced with concrete after the war, as part of the Soviet effort to maintain the site as a memorial. I already know, from research for several of my other published books, that the Soviets saw wartime resistance as an honorable struggle against fascism, and therefore I am not entirely surprised to learn that this camp was maintained as just such a memorial, with scarcely a mention that the fighters were Jews.
Since Lithuanian independence, the formal markers and exhibit have disappeared, the road to the site is completely unmarked, and the site is no longer kept up. Several of the huts are collapsing, returning to the earth from which they were made.
Fania motions to us to come see where Michael’s parents slept. It takes a minute to register that each of the grassy mounds in front of me is a separate hut, but as I walk farther into the compound I begin to pick out three or four, then seven or eight different structures, each with its door frame pointing a slightly different way. Sticking up from one is a small, metal ventilation pipe, topped with a jaunty looking conical hat. I pull back the weeds in front of the wooden steps
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of one hut and go down to join Fania, who is pointing to one patch of air on the right side of the empty hut, where Leizer and Zenia had slept, and to another on the left, where she had slept directly across.
The multi-levelbunks are gone, and nothing remains except pieces of floor board. Toward the far end is an oil drum turned on its side, so corroded I think it would crumble if I touched it. That was the stove that kept them warm—a much easier prospect here than in the ghetto, because, as Fania points out with a wink, there was always plenty of firewood in the forest.
Fania wants to show us the great luxury of their camp—a bath house. The roof has sagged so drastically that it is possible only to peer inside. Beyond the bath house is the most famous hut in the camp—the Avengers headquarters, where Abba Kovner lived with Ruszka Korschak and Vita Kempner, one of whom he married and the other who remained with them for much of the rest of her own life.
We wander among the other huts, and from each angle, I can see how well camouflaged the camp is. During the war, tree branches were thrown haphazardly over the roofs of the huts to complete the illusion of undisturbed nature, should any Germans come looking for them by plane. Soviet planes could parachute supplies only into the general vicinity, so complete was the illusion from the air. Only once during their ten months in the woods did the partisans have to evacuate because Germans were close enough to stumble upon them by accident. They didn’t.
At that time the Rudnicki forest was much swampier than it is today, and the partisans had to build camouflaged bridges and stepping stones to get to the camp. This was a key element in remaining safe because to penetrate this deeply into the woods one would have to know the way to the crossing points. Today the only reminder of the swamps around the camp is the swarm of mosquitoes that formed around each one of us before we were even out of the car.
I think of something Fania previously told me—that they sat around the campfire at night with a gramophone and four scratchy 78 RPM records. Someone would crank the arm of the gramophone and they would listen to the same four Russian hits over and over. They also sang songs such as the famous Partisan Hymn, which begins with the line, “Never say that there is just one road for you.” As they sat in the darkness looking up at the stars, relaxing in the arms and in the company of a group of people they trusted with their lives, they must have reflected on the road they took when they joined the resistance, and perhaps on the irony that choosing the path of greatest danger had left them among the few still alive.
Their families were for the most part dead or missing, or in such peril that it was hard to imagine they would survive. Many partisans would discover after the war that, like Zenia, as she wrote in her first letter to relatives in the United States, they were “left one of all my family.” Their road was indeed not a much traveled one.
I leave the others and wander around the woods for a few minutes, trying to get a sense of what it would have been like to live here. Bird song filters down with the sunlight through the branches. It is a beautiful, mysterious, vibrant, intoxicating place. I hope Zenia found time during her day’s work at the camp to look up and marvel at how beautiful the world insists on being, even while humans do their best to ruin it.
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This is the seventh of eight installments of a journal by author Laurel Corona describing her 2004 research trip to Vilna in connection with the award-winning book Until Our Last Breath: A Holocaust Story of Love and Partisan Resistance (St. Martin’s Press, 2008). While writing the book, Corona traveled to Lithuania with coauthor Michael Bart to gather information about his parents, whose activities in the Jewish resistance form a major element in the book.