A Guest at the Shooters' Banquet; My Grandfather's SS Past, My Jewish Family, A Search for the Truth

New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. First U.S. Edition [stated]. First printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xix, [1], 435, [9] pages. Illustrations. A Note about the Text. Maps, Notes. Bibliography and Archives Consulted. Inscribed on the page facing the title page. Derived from a Kirkus review: Gabis brings her sensibility as a poet and indefatigable energy as a historian to this engrossing memoir. The author's family spoke little about their past. Gabis knew that her maternal grandparents had come to America after World War II; that her grandfather had fought bravely against Russian invaders; that her grandmother had been arrested and sent to labor camps. However, several years ago, she found out more: her grandfather had been a Nazi security chief in a town where at least two mass slaughters had occurred. For the next several years, she became obsessed with one question: was the man she had loved a murderer? The author's research involved repeated trips to Israel, Poland, and Lithuania. She interviewed Holocaust survivors whose persecution she recounts in moving detail; in Lithuania, she talked with witnesses to Russian and German occupations. Gabis petitioned for information from Lithuanian archives, discovered documents at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and eventually amassed some 400 pages of archival material. Her journey was frequently interrupted by obstacles such as a destructive flood in her apartment that damaged documents and food poisoning. But the greatest obstacle proved to be the blurred, slippery past, which continually frustrated her. An eloquent testimony to the war's enduring, violent impact. It wasn't until she wrote her book A Guest at the Shooter's Banquet, that Rita Gabis learned the truth about her family's complicated past. Gabis is Lithuanian Catholic on her mother's side and Eastern European Jewish on her father's side. Her Jewish grandmother had left Ukraine after pogroms in the early 1900s and ended up in the Philadelphia in the 1920s, while her Lithuanian grandparents had each survived the Russian occupation and oppression of Lithuania before World War II and immigrated to New Jersey after the war. The two sides of her family did not intermingle very often, however, and over the years Gabis noticed signs of deeper conflict within her family's past. Though she always knew her Lithuanian grandfather as a joyful, gregarious man, who was hailed as a hero for fighting against the Russians as a partisan and saving his family, he told Gabis to become Catholic and not "be like her father" - anti-Semitism that Gabis didn't understand as a child. She also never knew what he did during World War II. But after her father, at the end of his life, urged her to embrace Judaism, she started to question the "heroic myths" about her grandfather. "Several years after my father's death, I finally asked my mother what her own father did during the war, not after or before. She told me he had been 'a policeman,'" Gabis said. "I asked her if he worked under the Gestapo and she quietly said 'yes.'" Gabis's initial research confirmed that her Lithuanian grandfather had not just been a policeman, he was Chief of the deadly Security Police (or Saugumas) in the Šven ionys region of Lithuania where two major massacres took place. In the fall of 1941, 8,000 Jews--men, women, and children--were rounded up in barracks, then taken to a large, nearby pit and shot (the "Poligon massacre"). A ghetto of useful Jews (Vertvolle Juden) was established in the heart of what had been the Jewish community of Šven ionys. In addition to the ongoing killing of smaller numbers of local Jews, in the spring of 1942, over 1,000 non-combatant Poles were massacred in the region as a show of retaliation after the ambush and assassination of the local German commander. She felt compelled to find out if her grandfather had played a role in these atrocities, and decided to write a book about her grandfather and how the Holocaust really played out where he was, in Lithuania between 1941 and 1943. This was a region that experienced a "Holocaust by bullets" - very different from the more well-known narrative of concentration camps, gas chambers, trains and ghettos - that has only recently gained more attention among scholars. I wanted to give the dead a voice, as best I could," Gabis said. Gabis said she hopes A Guest at the Shooter's Banquet offers readers the chance to look deeply at what men and women can become capable of. Her grandfather "was a human being, not an animal," she said, and his story inspired her to think about the meaning of family, how she has been affected by hate, what she can take responsibility for and what she can and cannot forget. She hopes it inspires readers to consider their own legacies.