We arrived in Vilnius in the middle of the afternoon. The flights were easy but early, and as soon as we landed in Warsaw, it was clear that the pandemic measures are pretty much nonexistent in Poland and Lithuania. Our first flight was fully masked, our second, only we were wore masks. It takes some getting used to.
We’ve been treating time the way one does on vacation—as a scarce thing, from which every moment must be wrung—and it caught up with us yesterday, so we mostly ate and napped. I both feel a little guilty about this and recognize the necessity of it. After all, we’ve been at this for two months.
This morning, while Dominik got a little extra sleep, I walked around the Old City, particularly the smaller historic ghetto. It’s mostly upscale shops and restaurants advertising traditional Lithuanian food now. As a friend on Facebook said, “Looks like a very nice ghetto.”
And that’s the thing (problem?). It does look lovely, with it’s expensive shops and quaint cafes. It’s also not a ghetto any longer, of course. Here is an everyday, not particularly traumatic, image of what it looked like as a Jewish ghetto:
There are more difficult pictures, and stories, online. Here is a virtual tour of the ghettos you can take, provided by the Office of the Chief Archivist of Lithuania. I encourage you to do so. It’s very well done.
I got angry during my morning walk, not only because of what was done then, but because of how little presence we have in that space now. Later today, we’re going on a tour of Paneriai Memorial Park and Trakai Castle, hopefully with a side trip to the the Turkish Jewish museum there. (Because neither of us speaks the language, we’re doing more with formal tours here than we have in other places.) Tomorrow, we’ll take a tour of Jewish Vilnius, and then on Sunday, a local guide will take us to Linkuva, where my great-grandfather and his family lived before emigrating.
One of the things about doing this research in Vilnius is that it’s possible to find thriving Jewish culture here alongside the remnants of history. I’m very much looking forward to going to Beigelių krautuvėlė when we return this afternoon. I’ll post a report and pictures!
Which brings me to a warning about the next few days: I’m going to be posting A LOT. Maybe multiple times a day. This is both the heart of my book research and the things I’m finding that have the most importance/resonance with the members of my family following along here: this is where we came from. (And for my Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Lake’s family, double so, since the Lewis side is from right here in Vilnius.) I apologize in advance to those of you for whom this amount of email will be overkill.
I might not read your posts right away but I’ll treat them like postcards that have travelled a long way to reach me…
Whenever I think of Vilnius, I always think of the term I’ve heard it described ( for Jews) as “the New York City of Europe.” Which makes what happened to Jews there shockingly away real to me.