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Part VI, June 10, 2004
By Laurel Corona
 VILNA, Lithuania—We are off again this morning, armed with some new addresses. Michael has figured out where his mother lived in the ghetto, and we are soon looking up from the street at the windows of her building. Regina, our guide, asks us if we would like to look inside. I wonder if she knows the American expression, “no brainer.” She sees our eagerness and says, “Wait here.”
She walks across the street to where the tenants of one apartment are airing out bedding on their window sill. She calls up to them in Lithuanian, and the tenants disappear into the apartment without saying anything. Regina rejoins us, surprised that we are laughing at her chutzpah. “No luck,” she says. “Let’s try in the back.”
We go through an entryway and stop in another courtyard. It was through here, based on an address Michael has procured, that Zenia would have walked every day to and from work. Did Leizer drop her off here with a kiss goodnight when they were courting? Was it through the front door of one of these apartments that the soldiers burst in and rushed upstairs while her grandmother Bluma shook with fear as she hid in her maline?
A teenaged boy is going into one of the units. Regina calls to him and asks if it is all right if we look around his apartment. I can’t understand what he has said, but he goes inside and shuts the door. Regina shrugs, and we turn to leave. Suddenly the door opens again. He motions us in, and we ascend the stairs. My heart is racing because we are going to get to see an
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apartment probably much like the one Zenia’s family and dozen of other people crowded into for two years.
The layout of the apartment is exactly as described to us by a cousin who had lived with Zenia in the ghetto, whom we had visited in Connecticut at the beginning of our trip. The parents are not home, and the whole time we are there the boy’s younger brother does not look up from a computer game he is playing in the living room.
I go to the window and look out onto a small park across the street, carpeted with newly mown grass and shaded by linden trees. The scene I am trying to imagine took place more than sixty years earlier, on September 6, 1941. On that day, Zenia had been among the first to reach the ghetto, and that afternoon she and her cousin stood in a window somewhere in this building watching as thousands of Jews carrying suitcases streamed through these streets and across this park, toward the ghetto gate just around the corner.
Today a few people move quickly through the park on their way to somewhere else. A woman walks a dog, and two teenagers sit smoking. A truck and a small car try to pass in too small a space on the street below. A car alarm shrieks somewhere down the block. The ghosts of sixty years ago vanish into the mundane details of the present.
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From there we go through a side gate and find ourselves in an open courtyard about half the size of a football field. It is the large, enclosed yard of the Judenrat, which was also the site of the police residence, where Leizer lived. I look around wondering which of the several hundred windows was the one in Leizer’s room. If I knew, I would also know where Leizer and Zenia had been married and where she would have come to live with him after the wedding.
I will have to content myself with knowing I am walking on the same pavement and looking through locked and deserted doorways at hallways and staircases that once had echoed with their voices.
One doorway is open in the part of the building that now serves as a community theatre, and I rush up a staircase, hoping to see something interesting before I am inevitably told to come down. The stairs disappear into total darkness, forcing me to stop, but through the walls of the story just above me I hear a group of singers warming up. I stand in the deep shadows and listen to their voices running up and down the scales, imagining they are the voices of the ghetto’s Hebrew Choir singing to me across the years.
The voices of today drift up the staircase, telling me that yes indeed, I must come down immediately. I am, as I expected, not supposed to be there. But I know that isn’t right. I am exactly where I am supposed to be.
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This is the sixth 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. 