Today, we took our first tour guided by a local. Andres, who will also be our guide to Linkuva, was the right mix of knowledgeable and maybe a little willing to fudge it when ge’s not for a tour guide. I feel confident he’s the right person to take us to Linkuva, if only because he already knew—and wanted to ve sure I knew—that we woukdn’t find many traces of the Jewish community that once made up more than half the town. That’s okay, because the goal is truth, not nostalgia. Our family was not nostalgic about life in Lithuania.
The Paneriai Memorial Park was, as these things are are, a monument to horror, both Nazi and Soviet. But it was also an interesting lesson in propaganda, which Andres wanted to be sure we understood. The clearest example involved a pit.
Below is a sign that says in Lithuanian and Russian that the pit is 8 meters deep. (You can see the 8 is the first symbol in the top inscription, and the second in the bottom.) Andres’ theory about this, and many of the numbers that we saw in the park about number of people killed, who they were, etc., is that you can trace the propaganda purposes of the park by finding out who is exaggerating, and what.
This is the pit. The thing is that it’s clearly NOT 8 meters deep; it’s more like 4 meters deep. But according to Andres, in every instance when they could exaggerate something the Nazis did, the Soviets did so to make their occupation of Lithuania seem more like a “liberation” than it was.
The story of the pit itself is horrible. It began, during the pre-WWII Soviet occupation, as a fuel storage tank for a nearby airport. When the Nazis took over this part of Lithuania, they turned this area into a prison camp—one of the deadliest of the war, because there was no housing of any kind, people were simply kept in the woods—at first for Soviet prisoners of war, and eventually for the Jews, Tartars, Roma, etc. who were rounded up for forced labor or extermination.
As the war was coming to a close, and Allied victory was inevitable, the Nazis brought 90 people (86 men, 4 women, or so Andres says, but remember he told us never to trust the numbers we are told, so who knows how accurate that is) to serve as a “burn brigade,” gathering corpses from the woods (of which there were many) and incinerating them to hide their war crimes.
The members of this burn brigade understood that they would not, after the work was done, be allowed to live. So over weeks and weeks, they surreptitiously dug a tunnel from just the point where the camera cuts off the wall at the bottom of the photograph to the nearby woods. On April 15th, 1944, they escaped into the woods. Of the 90, only 11 survived. They made it to the woods only to discover that the woods were full of land mines. Or, again, so Andres said.
The stories of tour guides are surprisingly like the stories families tell… hard to pin down as accurate, and perhaps most effective in their emotional content and in the reasons the teller has chosen the story they have. So I will do some research, and see what I find, but either way, this is the story Andres told us.
We then went to the Trakai Castle, which is very much a tourist destination. In warmer weather, there are lots of people on holiday enjoying the surrounding lakes. Today, it was just a little gray and initially seemed a little beside the point.
But there were hints through out the castle of Jewish history in Lithuania. Invited, along with people of all religious faiths, to settle in the region in the 15th century, Jews were an important part of Lithuanian cultural development, making up as much as 10 percent of the population. Unlike the other places we’ve visited, they were expelled only by foreign invaders, never by the Lithuanian nobility or, later, government.
A constant of the tour was that Jews were not only welcomed in Lithuania from medieval times, but they helped to build and shape the culture here. It was a lovely acknowledgment, after having only heard in Austria how important Jewish MONEY had been to building Vienna and Graz, to hear cultural contributions acknowledged as well. Again, maybe Andres just new his audience. But I’ll take it.
Finally, I decided to do a little solo walking around the city, mostly because I can (really everybody we encounter speaks excellent English), and that’s kind of thrilling. I stopped a few blocks from our hotel to catch up on emails and do a little last minute, end of the semester administrative work. As I sipped my cappuccino at this outdoor cafe and worked on my iPad, I kept waiting for someone to pop up and say “Well, someone sure if fancy!” In case you were wondering if I was still also pondering the “am I Appalachian” part of the project—I am and I’d say that worrying I was being too fancy just for sitting outside having a cup of coffee is a good argument to suggest that I am pretty Appalachian.
Again, sorry for the flurry of emails. While we’re in Lithuania, I want to capture as much as I can, and get any feedback from you about things you think we might be missing, questions you wish we were asking, etc.
Tomorrow, we take the walking tour of Jewish Vilnius. I’m particularly excited about the Choral Synagogue and larger ghetto.
Best,
Sarah
hi, here is a link to a Nova program about the Paneriai Memorial Park and the escape tunnel. https://www.kpbs.org/news/arts-culture/2017/04/17/nova-holocaust-escape-tunnel
I guess that’s the nature of stories told over time…a grain of truth and hyperbole to fit the narrative of the story tellers.