Church of St. Theresa on Kaunas Street

The Church of St. Theresa on Kaunas Street is a modest stone church in Vilna, located in a neighborhood not far from the railroad station, with a small graveyard in the front. Though not as grand as the cathedral in the central square, it seemed formidable enough to the young Yehoshua, who found the moment of entering through its oaken doors the uneasiest moment of his journeys. Inside, it was dark, with banks of flickering votive candles that reminded him of the yahrzeit, or memory candles, that were lit in the ghetto for the dead. The church had gates, like prison bars, separating the altar from the people praying in the pews, and a large, painted, and very realistic plaster Christ hanging on a crucifix in the apse behind the altar, with blood dripping from his forehead and hands and feet. The worshippers were usually women, elderly women with babushkas over their heads, and sometimes a German soldier or two. To Yehoshua, the women and the candles seemed very Jewish, a puzzling thought given the setting.

The Secret Role of Father Petrauskas

The church's true significance lay not in its public worship but in its hidden function as a way station for the forbidden archive of the Kovno Ghetto. Father Petrauskas, the priest, was known to Josef Barbanel as a trusted friend and had taken an enormous risk for what, given the exigencies of the times, might have seemed an almost abstract cause: the cause of the historical record, the helpless cause of no redress but memory. When Yehoshua arrived, the procedure required him to kneel and cross himself and then repair to one of the confessionals off to the side, on an aisle. There he would wait for a few minutes until, having seen that the coast was clear, Father Petrauskas opened the door and led him to his rectory. The father was a kind man who would nod and smile in genuine friendship when he greeted Yehoshua. Some of his teeth were missing, his head was shaven, and his face was so wrinkled with grooves, folds, and crosshatches that it seemed made of parchment. His eyes were slitted in his cheeks, and his black suit was tight on him and very shiny. After Yehoshua removed his shirt, the father would unwind the adhesive tape, always taking care where it had to be peeled from the skin, and accept the packets of material. When Yehoshua was again buttoned up, the father would give him something to eat, a piece of bread with jam, or some soup, and sit across the table from him and watch him eat. Yehoshua later reflected that he did not mean to libel the Catholic Church, but it occurred to him from time to time over the years that this father may have been a Jewish convert to Catholicism, though he had no evidence this was the case.

The Preservation of the Archive

The documents Yehoshua smuggled to Father Petrauskas were part of Barbanel's secret archive, a vast collection that by the time Yehoshua was aware of it must have run into thousands of pages, volumes, a whole trunk full of material. Barbanel kept a diary in which he reported everything that happened in the ghetto, 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, and identity papers for the work details. He used whatever paper he had on hand, including unused student exercise books, and wrote in a neat Yiddish, like stitches sewn into the page, the characters very small, the words flying off his pen line after line in his passion to say what happened each day, each moment, of their lives as captives. The Germans were quite aware of their culpability and forbade unauthorized writings or photographs, having confiscated all cameras, but as the chief aide to Dr. Koenig, Barbanel had always to be writing something, and it was relatively easy for him to enfold this within his formal duties. The diary was kept safe by Greta Margolin, whose position as a nurse helped conceal it until it could be smuggled out of the ghetto, across the bridge, to a hiding place in the city or perhaps in the countryside. Since neither Barbanel nor Greta Margolin was to survive the destruction of the ghetto, the papers were hidden in the earth of Eastern Europe, in its rubble, in the wreckage and ruination and dust of its Christian tradition.

The Fate of the Chest and Its Recovery

Years later, the church's role in preserving the archive came to light through the investigation of Thomas Pemberton, who had traveled to Vilna to understand the death of Sarah Blumenthal's husband, Joshua Gruen. Pem spoke to the caretaker of the burned-out synagogue where Joshua had been fatally beaten, an elderly Lithuanian woman who remembered Father Petrauskas as her own priest from the Church of St. Theresa on Kaunas Street. She crossed herself when she spoke of him. Pem then tracked down Josip, the priest's son, a tile setter in his fifties, who told him that the Russians had come to loot Father Petrauskas's church and discovered a battered wooden chest that the father kept in the closet of his own room in the rectory, where he slept. The chest was padlocked, sealed with tape, and wrapped around with thick rope. The soldiers, with their arms full of candlesticks and silver, called for an officer, who seemed very civilized, smoking a cigarette with a holder and wearing a quite clean uniform. The officer questioned the father politely, and the father told the truth, that what was in the chest were writings of Jews. The officer, with a black crayon, wrote a description of the contents in Russian, then signed his name and serial number right there on the top of the chest and ordered the soldiers to remove it without disturbing the seal. That was the end of the matter.

The Chest in New York

The chest eventually made its way to New York, where Sarah, Pem, a young woman from the U.S. Attorney's office, and various customs people watched as an inspector took up a hammer and chisel to open it. The chest sat on a steel table, larger than Sarah had understood from Pem's description, larger and deeper than a footlocker. It looked homemade, hammered together with big heavy nails and metallic corner pieces, painted white, but where the paint had flaked off there was raw lumber. The customs man found the rusted locks impervious and asked if he could pry off the hasps, which would splinter the wood. Sarah nodded her approval, yet the sound of the splitting wood made her wince, as if her father's history were seeping into the room. The hasps were pried off and the thick rope cut. The attorney took a small camera out of her bag and snapped three or four pictures of the Russian writing across the top of the chest. The inspectors carefully lifted out packages of various sizes wrapped in oilskin, with an oilskin lining against the inner sides of the chest, the fierce preservation of these materials unmistakable and, to Sarah, itself an urgent message that brought a sob to her throat. The inspectors unwrapped the packages to find sheaves of paper bound in twine, booklets, manuals, folders, rolled-up blueprints, diagrams, stapled documents, and envelopes of various sizes, each labeled in a small, neat Yiddish script. They opened every packet, every envelope, and having run their hands along the inner walls of the chest, agreed among themselves that there was nothing here of interest to them. They replaced everything, more or less as they found it, and excused themselves. Pem and the attorney then dove in, finding in notebooks, students' bluebooks, and unbound pages a diary in one increasingly familiar hand covering a period of three years, from 1941 to the date in 1944 when the ghetto was dismantled and the survivors marched to the railroad station, along with reams of documentation, rules and regulations issued by the Germans, and innumerable orders with the signature of Commandant Schmitz, confiscating all domestic animals, then all wagons.

The Church's Narrative Significance

The Church of St. Theresa on Kaunas Street embodies the novel's central theme of the sacred as a site of both concealment and preservation. It is a place where the ordinary rituals of Catholic worship—the kneeling, the crossing, the confession—become the cover for an act of profound moral resistance. The church's unassuming exterior, its dark interior with votive candles and prison-like gates, mirrors the hidden depths of the human capacity for both cruelty and compassion. Father Petrauskas's willingness to risk everything for the historical record, for the helpless cause of no redress but memory, stands in stark contrast to the Nazi campaign of erasure. The church thus becomes a testament to the idea that even in the darkest times, individuals can choose to preserve the truth against oblivion. The recovery of the chest, with its oilskin-wrapped packages and neatly labeled Yiddish script, represents the triumph of this preservation, bringing the voices of the dead back into the light and allowing Sarah to confront her father's history. The church, though it may have been destroyed or looted, lives on through the archive it helped to save, a quiet monument to the power of memory and the enduring human need to bear witness.