Church of St. Theresa

The Church of St. Theresa on Kaunas Street stands in the novel as a small Catholic parish church in Vilnius, remembered primarily through the testimony of an elderly Lithuanian caretaker who speaks of her own priest, Father Petrauskas. The church is not a grand institution but a local place of worship, one whose wartime history is preserved only in the memory of a single old woman and her son Josip, the priest's former altar boy. Its significance in the narrative is disproportionate to its modest size, for it was here that the moral choices of one priest intersected with the fate of the Kovno Ghetto's hidden archive and the life of Joshua Gruen, the American rabbi who came to Vilnius seeking the ghetto's journals.

The Church and the Wartime Priest

The caretaker, an elderly Lithuanian woman who speaks broken English, describes Father Petrauskas as her own priest from the Church of St. Theresa on Kaunas Street, crossing herself as she speaks his name. She recalls that everyone knew what he had done during the war: he hid people, sheltering Jews from the Nazis. He was, in her words, a Jew lover, a man who said openly that the business with the Jews was not right, that it was not right what was being done to them. Nobody informed on him, she insists, because he was a good man who meant well, a better priest than most. The war destroyed his church, and he was never the same afterward. He survived the war but lived out his later years in a home for retired clergy, where the caretaker would cook him a meal now and then and her son Josip would bring it to him. Josip, her youngest and only surviving child, had been an altar boy for the father; all her other children were killed in the war.

The Beating of Joshua Gruen

The church's doorway is the site of a pivotal and violent event. It was dark when the caretaker, in her cottage behind the synagogue, heard shouts and screams. She went out and found Joshua Gruen bleeding in front of the doors, and it was she who called the police. Before the shouts, she had heard someone knocking on the synagogue doors, and had she not been interrupted she would have gone around to the front of what she called the Jewish museum and told whoever it was that it was closed. Pem, visiting the ruined synagogue years later, realizes that Joshua had never talked to the old woman, that he had not had the chance. Pem tells her that the American who was beaten was a rabbi who had come to Vilna to seek journals from the ghetto that had been held for safekeeping by a priest in Vilna. The woman immediately identifies the priest as Father Petrauskas, her own priest from the Church of St. Theresa on Kaunas Street.

The Ruined Synagogue and the Archive

The church's story is intertwined with that of the ruined synagogue where Joshua was beaten. The synagogue, preserved by the city as a ruin, stands in the poor part of town. Pem pays twelve litas to stand inside its doors and see the remnants of dark wood reading desks and pews arranged in a square around a central table, with a wrought-iron frame with sconces hanging over the room. Sunlight pours through the fallen-in roof, lighting up dust suspended motionless in the air, as if set in place permanently by the conflagration of years before. The caretaker's testimony connects the church to the larger story of the ghetto archive: the journals Joshua sought had been held for safekeeping by Father Petrauskas, a detail that links the small parish church to the vast, hidden history of the Kovno Ghetto and the diary of Josef Barbanel.

The Church's Narrative Significance

The Church of St. Theresa on Kaunas Street functions in the novel as a counterpoint to the institutional churches that Pem, an Episcopal priest, must reckon with. Where the larger church hierarchies are implicated in the century's catastrophes, this small parish church and its priest represent a faith that acted rightly without institutional sanction. Father Petrauskas hid people, spoke against the persecution of the Jews, and kept the ghetto's journals safe, all without the approval of any authority. His church was destroyed by the war, and he was never the same, yet his actions stand as a model of what Pem's own theological crisis demands: a faith that risks itself for others rather than one that merely administers comfort. The church's memory, preserved by a poor old woman and her altar-boy son, becomes part of the novel's meditation on how the righteous are remembered and how their deeds outlast the institutions that failed them.