ghetto archive chest

The ghetto archive chest is the material heart of the novel's engagement with Holocaust memory: a homemade wooden trunk, hammered together with big heavy nails and fitted with metallic corner pieces, that carried Josef Barbanel's secret diary and his vast collection of ghetto documentation out of the Kovno Ghetto and into the earth of Eastern Europe. Painted white, with raw lumber showing where the paint had flaked off, the chest was larger and deeper than Sarah Blumenthal had imagined from Pem's description — she had pictured it as the size of a footlocker, but it exceeded that measure. Its survival across decades, through the liquidation of the ghetto, the Soviet occupation of Vilnius, and the collapse of the KGB's archives, makes it the novel's central object of recovered truth, the physical proof that the testimony of the dead could outlast their murderers.

Origins and the Archive Within

The chest was the culmination of Josef Barbanel's obsessive documentation of ghetto life. As the chief aide to Dr. Koenig, Barbanel was required to write constantly as part of his formal duties, which made it relatively easy for him to conceal his illegal record-keeping within his official work. Whenever he received reports, he either wrote down verbatim what he was told or asked the person reporting to write a statement. He 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, and identity papers for the work details. Every imaginable item went into this history. He used whatever paper he had on hand — unused student exercise books, for example — and wrote in a neat Yiddish, the characters very small, the words flying off his pen line after line in his passion to record each day, each moment, of the captives' lives. The Germans, quite aware of their culpability, had forbidden unauthorized writings or photographs and confiscated all cameras, making Barbanel's project a capital crime. When the young Yehoshua asked him one day if he was by profession a historian, Barbanel looked surprised, then smiled and shook his head. "You are one smart kid, Yehoshua," he said. "Yes, I'm a historian, by necessity. But you wouldn't tell anyone, would you." This was a statement, not a question, and Yehoshua swore he wouldn't; they shook hands on it.

By the time Yehoshua was aware of it, the diary had run into thousands of pages, volumes, a whole trunk full of material. The archive was kept safe in part through the position of Greta Margolin, Barbanel's companion, whose nurse's role helped protect 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. Neither Barbanel nor Greta Margolin was to survive the destruction of the ghetto, and so the papers remained hidden in the earth of Eastern Europe, in its rubble, in the wreckage and ruination and dust of its Christian tradition. The chest thus became a kind of buried testament, awaiting a recovery that would not come in the lifetimes of those who had assembled it.

The Soviet Seizure and the Road to Recovery

Decades later, the chest's recovery began through a chain of unlikely circumstances. Pem, tracking down a man named Josip — a tile setter in his fifties, described as the best in Vilna — learned that the Russians had come to loot Father Petrauskas's church and discovered the battered wooden chest in the closet of the father's 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. When the officer arrived he was unlike the men, seeming very civilized; he smoked a cigarette with a holder and his uniform was quite clean. Josip was afraid the father would be taken away, but 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.

Pem's training as the Divinity Detective stood him in good stead in interpreting this scene. He recognized that the officer had been an intelligence officer questioning the father; the Russians swept up anything that might conceivably be of importance, even though ninety-nine times out of a hundred they would never look at it again. The vaults of the KGB, Pem observed, were like a flea market — it took some time, but they would sell anything if the price was right. This sardonic assessment of Soviet archival practice framed the chest's journey from a Vilnius church rectory into the KGB's holdings, and eventually into the hands of those who could return it to its rightful heirs.

The Opening at JFK Airport

The chest's final recovery unfolded in a small office in the International Arrivals Building at JFK Airport, where Sarah, Pem, a young woman from the U.S. Attorney's office in New York, and various customs people gathered to witness its opening. The chest sat on a steel table, larger than Sarah had understood from Pem's description. It looked homemade, hammered together with big heavy nails and metallic corner pieces, painted white but with raw lumber showing where the paint had flaked off. Sarah sat in one of the bridge chairs lining the wall. The customs man found the rusted locks impervious and asked if he could pry off the hasps, warning that this would splinter the wood. Without quite realizing the proprietorship she had been granted, 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 was 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. Then the inspectors moved forward, carefully lifting out packages of various sizes wrapped in oilskin. There was in addition an oilskin lining against the inner sides of the chest — the fierce preservation of these materials was 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. Then, having run their hands along the inner walls of the chest, they 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.

The Contents and Their Meaning

With the customs officials gone, Pem and the attorney dove in. In notebooks, students' bluebooks, and unbound pages, they found 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 were marched to the railroad station. Alongside the diary were reams of documentation: rules and regulations issued by the Germans, innumerable orders with the signature of Commandant Schmitz, confiscating all domestic animals, then all wagons, and more. The chest held not merely one man's testimony but the administrative apparatus of genocide itself, preserved in the very hand of the perpetrators.

Sarah held in her hands typed lists of those who had died in the ghetto and also those who were taken from the ghetto and never again seen. Each name had a date and place of birth next to it. Not infrequently, the names of entire families were listed. There was no time or distance in Sarah's apprehension of these pages; they were not historical but, in their simple exact notation, a curve of the universe's light flashing through her, lasing her consciousness into these leaves of paper, letter by letter, as if the newly dead were being written down as she read, with the thunderings of jets and the drone of passing traffic in her ears. And then Pem handed her an envelope of forbidden little black-and-white photos: a line of men and women marching to work behind barbed wire; a husband and wife and their child on a bench having their picture taken, the cloth stars sewn to their coats; simple pictures, calm, expressionless faces; a woman on her knees in the vegetable garden; the members of the council posing in business suits with stars; a body in a business suit hanging from a gallows, the head, awry, staring heavenward; winter, snow on the ground; and seven little boys in front of a wood cabin, standing at their idea of attention on the steps, wearing military-school caps and stars on their breasts that might possibly be imagined as insignia of their office as runners for the council. Unsmiling little boys, one with shoulders hunched up in the instinctive posture of self-protection, or perhaps he was cold; they were all underdressed, with short pants and sweaters and jackets they had outgrown, but each of them at attention, feet together, arms pressed against his sides, looking into the camera in the full knowledge of death. Sarah found her father in the first row.

The chest thus delivered not only documentation but a face — the face of Sarah's father as a child, one of the council runners, preserved in the full knowledge of death. Its recovery transformed the archive from a buried secret into a living inheritance, and its opening at JFK became the novel's central scene of historical reckoning, the moment when the dead were written down anew and the past was made present.