My Grandfather, the Secret Policeman

Poet and writer Rita Gabis grew up surrounded by grandparents with accents—Russian, Yiddish, Lithuanian. That makes it sound like a familiar Jewish immigrant tale, but it was far from that. While Gabis’s father came from a family of Russian Jews who immigrated to the United States well before WWII, her mother was born in Lithuania. She and her family emigrated in the 1950s. And they were Catholic.

As a child, Gabis was vaguely aware that these two different family backgrounds were at odds with each other. It was as an adult, however, that she came to understand that the divide went much deeper, and that her mother’s father, her beloved Senelis as she called him, had been the chief of security police under the Gestapo in a Lithuanian region that was the site of two massacres—one of Jews and one of Poles.

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