The Intelligentsia Roundup

The Intelligentsia Roundup is the Nazi deception in the Kovno Ghetto in which the Germans called for a hundred intellectuals to volunteer for special work as curators and catalogers in the city archives, only to truck them out of the city to an old fort by the river and shoot them to death. The event is pivotal in Yehoshua's testimony because it likely claimed his parents, who disappeared after his father argued for volunteering while his mother warned against trusting the Germans. The roundup exemplifies the murderous deceptions of the occupation and becomes a touchstone for the novel's later legal and archival quests for justice, connecting the ghetto's history to the postwar pursuit of Commandant Schmitz and the recovery of Barbanel's archive.

The Deception and Its Announcement

The roundup began with a notice posted in the ghetto, a routine administrative act that masked a death sentence. The Germans were calling for a hundred intelligentsia for special work as curators and catalogers in the city archives, a request that seemed to offer educated Jews a chance at safer, more dignified labor. In Yehoshua's household, the notice provoked a sharp division. His mother was against volunteering, arguing that the Germans could not be trusted. His father took the opposite view, believing it was a reasonable risk to take and that he should sign on. He reasoned that if he had such a job he would see people he knew and could make contact with the Resistance. His mother said she wanted them to survive. His father replied that while any decision they made could be the last, of one thing he was certain, and that was how it would end for everyone who remained in the ghetto.

The Murder of the Volunteers

The roundup was, as Yehoshua later put it, another of the Germans' murderous deceptions. The intelligentsia who had given their credentials for archival work were trucked out of the city to the old fort by the river and shot to death. The fate of the volunteers was not immediately known to those left behind, and the uncertainty tormented Yehoshua. If his father was among them, what about his mother, who would not have volunteered? Or had she after all? That would have been too reckless, both of them taking a chance with their lives and leaving a small boy behind. Perhaps if he had volunteered, she had been implicated in some way and taken off too before she could flee. Perhaps they had been murdered for other reasons having nothing to do with this question. He did not know. But there was another possibility—that they were still alive, that they had managed to escape and join the partisans.

The Disappearance of Yehoshua's Parents

The roundup is inseparable from the disappearance of Yehoshua's parents, which occurred in the period after the burning of the ghetto hospital, perhaps two or three months later, when emotions had become numb and the shock had worn off in the routine of work, secret meetings, and secret prayers on the part of the religious. There had been rumors of the defeat of the Nazi armies in Africa, and the return once more to the hope of outlasting them, to hanging on until liberation came. It was in this period that his parents failed to return home from their labor. To this day Yehoshua does not know the circumstances. One morning at dawn, as usual, his father helped his mother with her coat, she turned up his collar against the cold, they both kissed their son. They gave him the usual instructions for the day. And they opened the door into the dark morning and closed the door behind them and he never saw them again. That cry of despair he will never forget, not only for the clenching of his boy's heart that his father was, truly and in fact, without the resources to protect them, but for the piercing illumination it brought to him of his physical self as game for a predator. He went on about this effect of their history: that they had lived among the Christians for generation upon generation, only to see themselves bent and twisted to the shape of their hatred. They had been turned into Jews so that they could be Christians.

The Aftermath and the Orphan's Uncertainty

On the very evening his parents did not return, Rabbi Grynspan from next door came to him. "Come quickly, you must not stay here," he said. "You are technically an orphan, though of course your parents are alive in the forest and will come back for you, may the Lord, Blessed be He, show them the way." The rabbi's words offered a fragile hope—that the parents had gone with the Resistance—but they also confirmed the boy's new status. Yehoshua was left to wonder whether his mother had been implicated in his father's volunteering, whether both had been taken, or whether they had been murdered for reasons having nothing to do with the roundup at all. The uncertainty itself became a permanent wound, a question that the recovery of the archive would later reopen without ever resolving.

The Roundup's Place in the Archive and the Legal Quest

The roundup is one of the events documented in Josef Barbanel's ghetto diary, the secret archive that Yehoshua helped preserve. Barbanel kept a diary in which he reported everything that happened, along with the relevant documentation, the latest regulations, the execution orders, the deaths, minutes of the council meetings, orders signed by the infamous Commandant Schmitz, proscriptions, dicta, identity papers for the work details—every imaginable item went into this history of his. The diary, by the time Yehoshua was aware of it, must have run into thousands of pages, volumes, a whole trunk full of material. Since neither Barbanel nor Greta Margolin was to survive the destruction of the ghetto, to this day those papers are hidden there in the earth of Eastern Europe, in its rubble, in the wreckage and ruination and dust of its Christian tradition. The roundup's victims are also recorded in the typed lists of those who have died in the ghetto and those who were taken from the ghetto and never again seen, which Sarah Blumenthal later holds in her hands after the chest is opened at JFK. Each name has a date and place of birth next to it, and not infrequently the names of entire families are listed.

The roundup also shadows the postwar legal quest to identify the ghetto commandant. The archive's documentary proof of the identity of S.S. Major Schmitz was meant to resist a challenge in court, and so the circumstances of the unsealing of the material had to be irreproachable. Yet the legal machinery ultimately failed: Schmitz, or Schmid, whatever his name was, died in his sleep in a home in Yonkers two months before Pem learned of it. "We had him good and nailed, too. Damn!" Pem said. "He never had to stand up in court and let the world take a look at him for what he was." The roundup, like the larger history it belongs to, thus ends not with justice but with the frustration of a closure that never comes—a deception that outlives its perpetrators and leaves only the archive, and the testimony of a boy who became an orphan, to bear witness.