In the Jerusalem of the North, the Jewish story is forgotten
Pastor Dale Morgan
In the Jerusalem of the North, the Jewish story is forgotten*
Three times as many people died in Lithuania under the Nazis than the
Soviets, but the state is myopic about the past
o Jonathan Steele in Vilnius
o The Guardian,
o Friday June 20, 2008
Follow the English signs to this elegant baroque city's Museum of
Genocide Victims and you reach a massive building resembling a
respectable prewar bank. Every granite block on the facade's lower
section now bears an engraved Lithuanian name, plus a year of birth and,
judging from the dates, a premature death.
During almost 50 years of Soviet occupation this was where Stalin's
secret police, the NKVD, and its successor until 1990, the KGB, held
sway. The high-ceiling rooms tell a terrible story of executions and
deportations to Siberia. A recording of a steam train chuffs softly
beside photos of prisoners wrapped in felt jackets and children sitting
bleakly outside wooden huts. Corpses caught by a ghoulish camera lie in
the woods.
But as I moved from room to dismal room, I had a growing sense something
was missing. Vilnius was once known as the Jerusalem of the North. What
about the Jews? Did their fate not merit remembrance? In a corridor I
eventually found a placard with a brief, though telling, mention. It
gave estimates for the victims of Lithuania's Soviet occupation and of
the Nazi one as well. The number summarily shot, or who died in prison
and during deportation in the Soviet period, reached 74,500. During
three years of Nazi rule from June 1941, those killed amounted to
240,000, "including about 200,000 Jews".
Three times as many deaths, but the museum contains no exhibits on them.
A guide assured me Vilnius also had a "museum of the holocaust". Well,
not exactly. There is a state-supported "Jewish museum", with three
sections in different buildings, but no prominent signs to help you find
them. "Ah well, the other genocide was more important," a woman at one
of the Jewish exhibition centres told me with an ironic shrug.
I asked Arvydas Anusauskas, the director of Lithuania's Genocide and
Resistance Research Centre, whether it wouldn't be more accurate to call
the former KGB building the "museum of Soviet repression". Nodding in
agreement, he said that after the Soviet collapse, historians originally
proposed creating a combined "museum of terror" to record Lithuania's
fate under both totalitarian regimes. If it could not be housed in a
single location, there would at least be a common management for
branches in separate buildings.
The state finances Dr Anusauskas's centre to research both regimes, and
it has produced three volumes on Soviet and three on Nazi repression.
There is also a subsidised International Commission for the Evaluation
of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania. But
even-handedness disappears when it comes to museums. They have a higher
profile, so politicians put in their oar.
The fact that anti-Communist emotions are still so raw in Lithuania was
also visible during a down-memory-lane conference in the parliament
building the other day. Western Europe has been bombarded this year with
1968 anniversary reflections. Next year comes a central European
extravaganza of 1989 memoirs. The equally momentous events of 1988 have
been almost overlooked, though there is a strong case for claiming them
as the key to the later revolutions: without the peaceful Baltic
uprisings of 88, would protesters have flocked to vote Poland's
communists out of power in 89, or to call for regime change in Leipzig,
Berlin and Prague?
As this paper's Moscow correspondent I watched a huge throng outside
Vilnius cathedral in October 1988, celebrating mass and singing
nationalist songs the day after the building was handed back to the
church. Describing themselves as movements in support of Mikhail
Gorbachev's perestroika, each of the three Baltic republics set up
"popular fronts" to push for "autonomy" and "economic sovereignty". They
played their cards carefully at first - independence was not mentioned
in public and, in the first few weeks, it was not even discussed behind
closed doors.
The 36 founders of Lithuania's popular front, known as Sajudis, included
several communists and, in order not to provoke Moscow, excluded anyone
who had been deported to Siberia. Within weeks, Sajudis had a membership
of several hundred thousand. Its increasingly euphoric rallies raised
demands for dignity and freedom that Lithuania's Communist party soon
adopted. By chance I was the only foreign reporter in Vilnius on June 24
1989, when the Communist leader, Algirdas Brazauskas, recommended to his
central committee that they break with the Soviet party. No other
Communist party in the Soviet Union's 15 republics had gone so far.
Arguably, this was the moment when the USSR's collapse became
irreversible. Until then, amid the rebellions going on below, Gorbachev
expected the Soviet party to hold things together. Once the Lithuanian
communists split away, everything was doomed.
Brazauskas later became Lithuania's president, and now lives in a villa
outside the capital. His study is dotted with photos of him standing
beside, or shaking hands with, world leaders. Pointedly, there are none
of him and Gorbachev. Brazauskas recalled his clashes with the Soviet
leader, which sometimes culminated in threats of force. "In November
1989 I was summoned to the Politburo. For five or six hours they
harangued me," he told me. He gave no ground.
In spite of his record, bitterness among Lithuania's independence
veterans is still so sharp, almost 20 years later, that Brazauskas was
advised by the Sajudis conference organisers not to address the
anniversary meeting. I listened in amazement as a professor who praised
the Lithuanian Communist party's role was barracked and prevented from
finishing his speech.
Now a member of the EU and Nato, Lithuania tends to be a tougher critic
of Russia than its Baltic neighbours, Latvia and Estonia. It insisted on
a strong mandate for the EU's negotiations with Russia and demanded
changes before accepting the other 26 EU members' draft a few weeks ago.
But however clear-eyed Lithuania's decison-makers claim to be about
today's Russia, many seem myopic about their own country's past. Anger
over 48 years of Soviet occupation clouds their judgment about the
Communists' recent role. Worse, it blocks discussion of Nazi mass murder
and the fact that too many Lithuanians eagerly supported it.
Next year will bring yet another big European anniversary, the 70th
since the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that "gave" the Baltic states to
Stalin. It should be a time to remember two tyrannies, not just one. And
for the Baltics, the longer one was not the more brutal.