Holocaust Legacy in Post-Soviet Lithuania

People, Places and Objects

Shivaun Woolfson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781474276443
• eBook ISBN: 9781472527059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Once regarded as a vibrant centre of intellectual, cultural and spiritual Jewish life, Lithuania was home to 240, 000 Jews prior to the Nazi invasion of 1941. By war's end, less than 20, 000 remained. Today, approximately 4, 000 Jews reside there, among them 108 survivors from the camps and ghettos and a further 70 from the Partisans and Red Army. Against a backdrop of ongoing Holocaust dismissal and a recent surge in anti-Semitic sentiment, Holocaust Legacy in Post-Soviet Lithuania presents the history and experiences of a group of elderly Holocaust survivors in modern-day Vilnius. Using their stories and memories, their places of significance as well as biographical objects, Shivaun Woolfson considers the complexities surrounding Holocaust memory and legacy in a post-Soviet era Lithuania. The book also incorporates interdisciplinary elements of anthropology, psychology and ethnography, and is informed at its heart by a spiritual approach that marks it out from other more conventional historical treatments of the subject. Holocaust Legacy in Post-Soviet Lithuania includes 20 images, comes with comprehensive online resources and weaves together story, artefact, monument and landscape to provide a multidimensional history of the Lithuanian Jewish experience during and after the Holocaust.

1

Towards A Multidimensional Approach

Lithuania, long regarded as the once vibrant heart of Jewish intellectual, cultural and spiritual life, has carried a weight, in terms of its impact on world Jewry, disproportionate to its relatively small size (Levin 2000: 10). Before the Nazi invasion in 1941, the country was home to 240,000 Jews, with Vilna long referred to as Jerusalem of Lithuania or Jerusalem of the North; 6 months later that number had been drastically reduced. By war’s end, less than 20,000 remained, with Lithuania recording, at 95 per cent, proportionally among the highest massacre rates across Europe. The swiftness and extent of eradication were attributable, in part, to the active participation of local Lithuanians in the marching, guarding, transporting and shooting of the country’s Jewish population (Atamukas 2001). Although the extent of anti-Semitic sentiment and the resulting outbreak of ‘spontaneous’ pogroms, even before the arrival of the Germans, remains a fraught issue in Lithuanian historiography, the murder of more than 60,000 Jews between July and September 1941 could not have occurred without the active participation of local policemen, administrators and civilians. Historian Christoph Dieckmann estimates that by 1942 there were some 8,000 Lithuanians serving in mobile police battalions of which at least ten were killing units (Dean 2004: 122). Incidents such as the massacre of Jews by Lithuanian police and civilians in front of a crowd of cheering onlookers at Lietükis garage in Kaunas, June 1941, attest to the active involvement of locals.¹ Today, 70 years on from these events, some 4,000 Jews reside in Lithuania, among them 108 survivors from the camps and ghettos and a further 70 from the partisans and Red Army.

Like many of the Irish Jews among whom I was raised, my great-grandparents hailed from Akmene, a shtetl (small Jewish town) in northern Lithuania close to the Latvian border. In 2008, following the death of my parents, I conducted a series of research trips to Vilnius to explore what might have been for my own ancestors had they not managed to escape the pogroms to Ireland in the early 1900s,² and to discover what remained of its centuries-long Jewish heritage. From the survivor group, I met with ten individuals (some of whom were presented at the Katz seminar) and asked them to share their stories and memories with me, to take me to the places and spaces that mattered most to them, and to show me biographical objects of special personal significance. In the following introductory section, I will outline the conceptual framework through which I approached this task, that is, the thinking behind why I elected to focus on people, places and things and the methodological practices through which it was carried out, while, at once, making a claim for the inventiveness of the adopted approach as a unique contribution to an already crowded field: that of Holocaust study.

Although I had not originally intended to explicitly address the Holocaust in this book, it became clear, in my initial contact with the narrators, that the topic was unavoidable. Everything they had done and become since 22 June 1941, when the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads, launched Operation Barbarossa (Nazi invasion of Russian territories) across Eastern Europe, was drenched in what they had left behind: their homes and belongings, their loved ones, their identities, even their names. Spanish author Jorge Semprun, himself a survivor, has written that only those who survived can remember for ‘they alone know the smell of burning flesh and a day is coming when no one will actually remember this smell, it will be nothing more than a phrase, a literary reference, an idea of an odour. Odourless therefore’ (Forty and Küchler 1999: 6). Each of those whom I met lost most, if not all, of their family members to the Shoah. As the last Litvaks to have known a pre-Holocaust world, they are among the only remaining carriers of the essence of Jewish Vilna, of which so little now remains.³ W. G. Sebald, whose work repeatedly calls up the presence of the dead, laments the fact that the world is ‘as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on’ (2002: 31). It was to capture how history is lived and experienced from the inside – to uncover those spaces in which the public and private lives of catastrophe intersect and to discover the material legacies of Jewish Vilna, embedded in its objects and places, before they are drained away – that I embarked on this journey.

When I first mentioned my intention of travelling to Vilnius, I was informed by others who had ventured on similar heritage journeys of their own: ‘Don’t bother going. There’s nothing there to find’. It is true that evidence of Lithuania’s glorious Jewish past is hard to locate. Its former shtetls, once numbering in the thousands, are marked today, if at all, by overgrown cemeteries and massacre sites. Vilnius’ 109 synagogues have been reduced to just one. Even in the city’s Museum of Genocide Victims, the only acknowledgement to specifically Jewish suffering is one small, partially obscured placard which gives estimates for the number of victims of both the Soviet and the Nazi occupations: 74,500 for the former and ‘about 200,000 Jews’ in the latter. There is no other mention.

This lack of acknowledgement is not confined to the museum. Evidence of Lithuania’s dismissive, sometimes hostile stance towards the perpetuation of Holocaust memory abounds. At the time of my first visit in 2008, much media attention was focused on the ongoing judicial inquiry into the wartime activities of Jewish anti-Nazi resistance fighters who had joined the Soviet-led partisans in the forests, among them the historian and former director of Yad Vashem, Yitzhak Arad. In March of that year, to celebrate Independence Day, a neo-Nazi group, chaperoned by the police, paraded through central Vilnius chanting ‘Juden Raus’ (Jews Out) and ‘Lithuania for Lithuanians’. A muted official response emerged only 10 days later. Similar marches have occurred in each of the years since I first visited.⁴

In August 2008, on the eve of festival of Tisha B’av, when Jews worldwide commemorate the destruction of both the first and second temples, the Jewish Community Centre in Vilnius was defaced with swastikas and images of burning smokestacks. On more practical levels, although an agreement on restitution – the return of Jewish properties confiscated by the Nazis or a monetary sum in lieu of those properties – was finally reached in 2012, at the time of my visit, the issue had languished unresolved through several successive parliaments that lagged conspicuously behind their Eastern European neighbours in this regard. The contentious Prague Declaration, adopted on 3 June 2008, promoting the Double Genocide theory – the false equation of Communist crimes with Nazi crimes – has gained much recent traction.⁵ All the while, the mainstream media continues its high-profile, overtly anti-Semitic campaign depicting Jews variously as money-grubbing, homosexual, Communist and anti-Lithuanian.⁶

Against this backdrop of Holocaust dismissal, overt anti-Semitism and attempts to open proceedings against former Jewish partisans, the remaining survivors in Lithuania edge towards death. For them it is important not only to remember the past, but to transmit that past forward. The Polish author Gustawa Jarecka, writing from the Warsaw Ghetto, asserted: ‘When the pressure abates for just a moment we utter a cry. Its importance should not be underestimated. Many a time in history did such cries resound; for a long time they resounded in vain, and only much later did they produce an echo’ (Kassow 2007: 6). Jarecka knew that the act of writing itself ‘will not help us’, yet found consolation in the fact that future generations might benefit from her words. The record, she said, must be ‘hurled like a stone under history’s wheel in order to stop it’ (7). Some weeks later, Jarecka and her two children were deported to Treblinka, and although she did not survive the ‘days of hell’, her words have (7). In Lithuania, that ‘echo’ is fast dissolving, threatening to become subsumed under competing nationalistic agendas. Thus, while a primary motivation for writing this book was an exploration of my own ancestral links to the region, and the development of an experiential, inventive, spiritual approach to researching the lives of others, it was also born of a desire to offer up one of the first collective accounts of Holocaust experience in Lithuania, alongside a critical examination of its legacy in the post-Soviet era. In such thwarted circumstances, however, how best to gather and present the materials?

A spiritual dimension

The Jewish historian Yosef Yerushalmi suggests that the modern historian does not simply come to replenish gaps in memory, but rather to recover a total past in which no subject is ‘unworthy of his interest and no artefact or document beneath his attention’ (Kassow 2007: 11). How to draw down a total past where those who might speak it have been all but eliminated, their documents burned, their archives plundered, even their gravestones robbed and reused? Such conditions of erasure, I believe, call for the deployment of a multidimensional approach, drawing on archaeological and anthropological tools, in addition to more straightforward life-history methods that depend largely on oral accounts and written records alone. Yerushalmi’s idea of history as a way of seeing which discards nothing corresponded well with my own intention, based on my experiences around my parents’ deaths, to add a spiritual dimension to Kenneth Plummer’s call for research practices that encourage the creative, expressive and interpretative storytelling of lives (2001: 1). Given the research’s natural location within a specifically Jewish context, the overarching approach I developed is informed, at its core, by the Hasidic belief that everything in the material world has its melody and meaning; that everything – stories, places and objects – speaks.

The power of story

In regard to the value or power of story, I was drawn to cultural anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff’s reading of Hasidic master Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav’s teaching that when one speaks to one’s fellow there ‘arises a simple light and a returning light’, such that both teller and listener can ‘grow a soul’ (2007: 35).⁷ Although such notions about the power of story to spark an alchemical reaction are born of an essentially Hasidic belief, they are by no means exclusive to studies of a Jewish dimension. In addressing the parameters of research practice, Pierre Bourdieu claimed that the interview itself could be considered ‘a spiritual exercise’, wherein through a kind of forgetfulness of self, one might achieve an ‘intellectual love’ for the respondent, facilitating for them an opportunity to give vent to experiences and thoughts long unsaid or repressed (2006: 614). In the telling of stories then, we enter a sacred realm, wherein a reverence towards life is awakened in both those who express and those who receive (Atkinson 1995: 11). As the writer John Berger suggests, those who tell and listen to stories see everything as through a lens. This lens, he asserts, is the secret of narration, ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless. In our brief mortal lives, he reminds us, we are all grinders of these lenses (1984: 31).

The kind of sacred encounters that Bourdieu, Atkinson, Berger and Myerhoff invoke have the propensity to occur whenever there is a narrative interaction but are even more likely when the speaker is elderly, where the process of looking back is set in motion by the act of looking forward towards death (Butler 1963: 67). Older people strive for reconciliation and integration; they long for the healing of memories and to make final and ultimate sense of their time on earth. This becomes even more pertinent when those in question are survivors of unspeakable horror. For them, storytelling constitutes an almost existential, vital human strategy for sustaining a sense of agency, however belated, in the face of devastating and disempowering circumstances. In reconstituting events through story, reality can be re-imagined, reworked and made bearable (Jackson 2006: 15): the sorrows borne, through the sorrows told. But if it is true that survivors recount to integrate, to bring order to their worlds, to situate themselves in personal, familial and historical contexts, to confess or for any number of reasons – more than that, they recount so as to be heard (Greenspan 1998: 30) – and if there was no one listening on the other side of the narrative bridge, survivors may not, in fact, speak at all. When I asked one of the narrators if telling his story was cathartic in some way, he said: ‘For me, it does not change anything, but when you ask and if you listen, it means you care. It means that I matter to you. And that helps’. In the act of transmission then, a re-membered life is transformed into a moral document, the function of which is ultimately salvific (Myerhoff 2007: 35).

The inner life of things

As powerful as words, spoken or written, may be in the telling and redeeming of a life, they are not the only avenue available in understanding that life. The cultural historian Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, invoking the French archaeologist Oleg Grabar, refers to artefacts or material objects as ‘documents’, that is, signs that point away from themselves towards something else, towards life (1998: 25). In the sense that things can become both a metaphor for the self and a pivot for introspection, they enable a kind of self-historicizing that might otherwise prove elusive or absent (Hoskins 1998: 8). With the imminent passing of the last generation of Holocaust survivors in view, an expanded understanding of testimony is now called for: one which views the material remnants of the Holocaust as clues to an ‘opaque and haunting past’. For those willing to subject them to probed inquiry, they can serve as testimonial objects that enable us not only to question the past itself but also how that past seeps down to us in the present (Hirsch 2006: 355). Historians, suggests Leora Auslander, have much to gain by expanding the range of their canonical resources ‘beyond words’, to include material culture as a potential source of meaning (2005: 1015–16). Similarly, for Walter Benjamin, the collector, caressing his objects, is much like a sorcerer who squints through them into a distance called history, for history, he asserts, demands acts of data recovery and the souvenirs we recover help us to hold and tap lost experience (Leslie 1999: 119).

The approach that I am advocating here calls to mind Wilhelm Dilthey’s concept of testimony or expressions as ‘sensible objects that convey a spiritual meaning’, that is, manifestations of a mental content which they enable us to know (Owensby 1994: 146). These, Dilthey suggests, are typically signs and symbols which ‘gather together’ and ‘fix’ lived experience, such as gestures, facial expression and words, but can also include more permanent forms of expression such as works of art, architecture, written texts and personal objects. Following Roland Barthes’ notion of punctum, it is also possible to read the testimonial object as a point of memory: a space of intersection between past and present, between individual and the larger collective and, in the Holocaust context, between life and death. For Barthes, the punctum would first announce itself as a minute detail in an image that only he might notice, a pair of shoes or a lace collar in a family photo perhaps. The sharpness of a point, or punctum, he discovered, can pierce through layers of oblivion and hazy recall, and because the detail identified is miniscule, it is capable of conveying the fragmentary nature of the vestiges of the past that come down to us in the present (Hirsch 2006: 358). Why was I, for example, given an amber pendant, a torn journal, a faded powder compact? Why these objects? The specificity of the lives there embedded and the social, collective experiences that they allude to became available to me only through tapping these objects for meaning. Because objects are charged with the psychic energy of those whose passions they express, whose purposes they enfold, they hold keys to understandings not always present in words (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 1981: 24). These ideas surrounding the capacity of material culture to hold and convey meaning find a compelling counterpart in the Hasidic teachings which suggest that during creation, God lost control of the process and sacred elements – sparks of his being – spilled from the delicate shells of light that encased them into the created world of matter below. There they became trapped, diminishing the being of God, thrusting the Jewish people on a path of exile and persecution. The righting of this wrong is, according to Hasidic teaching, the task of the Jews who, through the practice of Tikkun Olam – repairing the world – can activate the sacred energy embedded in each material object, in each human action, releasing it back to its Creator (Dorff 2005: 7; Potok 1991: xi). In this manner, everything – a song, a sunset, a stone, a flower – is thought to be imbued with the essence, the spark of the divine.

Speaking of the ways in which man experiences his world, the influential philosopher Martin Buber writes in his landmark text I and Thou.: ‘Man travels over the surface of things. . . . He wins an experience from them. He experiences wha...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: A Double Mourning
• 1 Towards A Multidimensional Approach
• 2 Jerusalem of the North – An Historical Context
• 3 My Journey Begins in Ponar
• 4 The Mourner: Chasia Spanerflig
• 5 The Memory Bearer: Fania Brantsovsky
• 6 The Memory Bearer: Berl Glazer
• 7 The Memory Bearer: Rachel Kostanian
• 8 The Creative: Dora Pilianskiene
• 9 The Creative: Josef Levinson
• 10 Living with the Past
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright