1 September 2016 tol.org
Two-Speed Memory and Ownership of the Past
by Violeta Davoliute

The sensation generated by a recent book may signal a new readiness by Lithuanians to tackle difficult questions about the Nazi and Soviet eras.

On 1 August, the Russian Central Bank issued a series of commemorative coins representing “cities and capitals liberated by Soviet troops from Fascist invaders” during World War II. While the accompanying press release failed to attract much attention in Berlin or Vienna, it caused a stir in capitals ostensibly liberated by the Red Army further to the east.

In Kyiv, for example, where fears of Russia’s current military buildup are most intense, political commentators denounced the coins as a cynical and destabilizing attempt to assert that Kyiv, Chisinau, Minsk, Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn, as well as Bucharest, Warsaw, Prague, Bratislava, and Budapest, were once “ours” – and could be retaken should the need arise.

Such indeed was the unmistakable meaning of the boorish car window stickers and the slogan “We Can Do It Again,” which marked popular celebrations of Victory Day in Russia on 9 May.

So, throughout the region, some viewed the release of these coins as aggressive trolling, if not actually a threat.

The reaction in Lithuania was particularly sharp because the coin for Vilnius features the image of a Soviet-era sculpture that was taken down in 2015 after years of controversial debate.

For many, the bronze soldiers mounted on a corner of a downtown bridge had lost their ideological significance and were just another marker of the city’s complex history. But for others, especially after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and continuing efforts to destabilize Ukraine, the sculpture is perceived as a dangerous focal point for hybrid warfare.

In general, Russia’s revisionism has sharpened public debate within Lithuania over the significance of the 50-year Soviet rule, and especially on the role that Lithuanian collaborators and conformists played in supporting and sustaining the regime for so long.

Compared to some of its neighbors, Lithuania has been lackluster in lustrating its old Soviet elites. But given the widespread sense of imminent threat, there is now a growing chorus of those insisting on the need for a more thorough accounting of all ties that the political and cultural elites may have had with the Soviet repressive apparatus.

Curiously, the spike of concern over collaboration with the Soviets has spilled over into the debate over Lithuanian collaboration with the Nazis and participation in the Holocaust, in which over 90 percent of the nation’s large Jewish population was murdered.

Memory’s Many Returns

For decades, Lithuanians who survived World War II, the suppression of the armed anti-Soviet insurgency, and other Stalinist repressions, recalled the war and its aftermath through the prism of the traumatic experience that they and their families had suffered.

During the popular movement of the late 1980s, writers, artists, and poets released the suppressed trauma of deportation, collectivization, and repression through poignant narratives, essays, and speeches at mass rallies, to unite and mobilize the population against Soviet rule. But the memory of the Holocaust, also suppressed by the Soviets, never figured prominently in this discourse, and was slow to surface in the post-Soviet period for several reasons.

While several thousand Lithuanian Jews did survive to bear witness to the Holocaust, most had emigrated to Israel and beyond by the late 1980s, when the “return” of memory took place throughout communist Europe. This includes the roughly two thousand Jews who were among the 17,000 to 18,000 Lithuanians deported to the Gulag in June 1941 and thus “saved” from the Holocaust.

Accordingly, the return of Holocaust memory in the 1990s was in large part a return from abroad. Visitors from Israel, America, and West European countries visited the towns and villages in Lithuania where their Jewish ancestors had lived. More often than not, they found memorial sites that were neglected, overgrown with grass, and sometimes without even a sign showing the way to the site of a mass killing.

Notably, over time, the Lithuanian government took steps to increase Holocaust awareness and education. The Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum was established in 1989, and the first official admission of Lithuanian involvement in the Holocaust was made in 1990. In 1994, 23 September was declared the national day of remembrance for the genocide of Lithuanian Jews, and it has been commemorated every year since.

However, these steps could all be described as “top-down” initiatives, with limited impact on the attitudes of the population at large. Similarly, few people outside of academia or government read the reports of the truth commission established in 1998, which produced extensive evidence of the role of Lithuanians in the Holocaust.

That said, the truth commission also launched a number of projects supporting Holocaust education in schools and local communities. And the growing body of research on Lithuanian involvement in the Holocaust was clearly an irritant to certain circles within the Lithuanian elites.

Details are sketchy, but for one reason or another, the Lithuanian prosecutor’s office took the politically inflammatory initiative in 2008 to summon several remaining Holocaust survivors as witnesses to alleged crimes against humanity committed by Soviet partisans during the war.

The resulting scandal interrupted the fact-finding work of the truth commission, which resumed only in 2012, but educational and outreach activities continued unabated. Over the past several years, a new generation of Lithuanian youth has been raised with a basic knowledge of the Holocaust and a desire to learn more about Lithuania’s rich Jewish history.

That curiosity has fed a number of grass-roots initiatives, including one called Vardai (names) built around public recitations of the names of Holocaust victims. It began in 2011 with the recitation of the names of former residents of the Vilna (Vilnius) ghetto, and sparked similar initiatives across the country, with the aim of ensuring that the bare figure of 200,000 murdered Jews would be given a sense of real people behind those numbers.

Another of many such initiatives, called “Bagel Shop,” was launched by the Lithuanian Jewish community, emphasizing not only the Holocaust but various aspects of Jewish cultural life and the maintenance and preservation of Jewish cemeteries and sites of mass killings.

Whose People?

Against this background, the publication in January of a book on Lithuanian participation in the Holocaust created a perfect storm of controversy. Co-authored by Lithuanian writer Ruta Vanagaite and Israeli “Nazi hunter” Efraim Zuroff, the book, entitled Musiskiai (Our People), adds little to existing reports and studies in terms of known facts, but has broken the pattern of public indifference.

At a presentation of the book, Zuroff admitted his surprise at how extensively Lithuanian historians had covered the Holocaust. But as the authors note in the book, “almost everything about the Holocaust in Lithuania has been written but almost none of it has been read.” Now in its third printing, Our People has brought this painful memory into the mainstream.

In terms of public impact, one might compare Our People in Lithuania to Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners back in 1996, which focused on the role of ordinary Germans in the Holocaust, or Jan Gross’s Neighbors, which revealed in 2000 how Poles living in the village of Jedwabne had participated in the massacre of their Jewish neighbors.

Another point common to Our People and Neighbors is the use, as primary source material, of KGB records of people tried for collaboration with the Nazis.

From 1943 to 1953 more than 320,000 Soviet citizens were arrested in the Soviet Union for collaboration with the Germans, and trials took place from 1943 until the 1980s. Stored in Soviet secret archives, the records of these trials have only recently become available to historical research, and are contributing to a new chapter in studies of the Holocaust as it occurred on former Soviet territories.

Earlier, research on the Holocaust relied mostly on official German sources, which speak primarily to the actions of German historical actors. And while the Soviets published a number of reports and studies on Nazi crimes, these glossed over the Jewish genocide as a discrete event and ignored the issue of anti-Semitism. Instead, they focused on crimes against “Soviet citizens” and the responsibility of the German chain of command and their unnamed “fascist supporters.”

The Soviet trial records paint a different picture in their focus on acts of collaboration, including extended transcripts of confessions. Within Soviet Lithuania, about 5,000 people were convicted of treason under the criminal code’s notorious Article 58 during World War II.

An expert commission formed during the post-Soviet period found this group to include various categories of people – some of whom had nothing to do with the Holocaust but were engaged in armed resistance against the Soviets or in other anti-Soviet activities. The commission determined that about 1,000 of those convicted under Article 58 were directly involved in the killing of Jews, to which they added another thousand or so local perpetrators identified through other sources.

Through a Glass, Darkly

But these bare findings had little resonance with the public. Ever since the release of Claude Lanzmann’s epic film Shoah, based exclusively on filmed interviews with perpetrators, bystanders, and survivors of the Holocaust, it has become common wisdom that whatever facts we may know of an atrocity, we need help to really “see” it for what it is.

So while the fact of Lithuanian collaboration in the Holocaust was already rather well-documented, Our People broke new ground by presenting extended citations from these trials in a form accessible to the average reader. Here is one of several such fragments as presented in the book:

I took gold items. At the Ninth Fort they passed out vodka, but in very small quantities. When we went to get more ammunition, Norkus and Barzda gave us a swig from a bottle of vodka.

That day, as was said among the guards, about eight to 10 thousand people were shot. After the shooting the soldiers selected the better things from the piles of the clothing of those murdered. I didn't take anything from the victims' things, during the shooting I took two watches from those being taken to the ditches, which they gave me freely.

The second day we shot at the Ninth Fort, it was the shooting of Czechoslovaks. We were taken to the Ninth Fort, they said we would have to shoot about 2,000 people. The condemned were marched with shirt sleeves rolled up, the Czechs said they were being taken to be vaccinated against smallpox. In the ditches the Czechs tried to flee, but where can you run when you're surrounded?

Like Gross’ Neighbors, Our People has been picked apart for its uncritical use of such testimony, some of which could have been obtained under torture – a routine feature of the Soviet criminal justice system.

But while such testimony could be inadmissible in a court of law, or questioned by a historian, that does not detract from its ethical value in conveying affect, in communicating the sheer brutality of the Holocaust.

Markas Zingeris, director of the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, described the book’s publication as moral “shock therapy” for Lithuanians who see the Holocaust as something external to their individual, family, and national history. Moreover, he claimed it has been more effective than survivor memoirs in breaking through the wall of ignorance and indifference.

Indeed, the title of the book, and the extensive citations from the confessions of Lithuanian perpetrators, challenge the reader to reflect on the question of collective accountability for the event. And that question lies at the heart of the immense controversy raised by this publication.

Taking Ownership of the Past

Lithuania has been subject to harsh criticism for failing to have convicted a single one of its citizens for participation in the Holocaust. But with the passing away of the last surviving suspects, the question of individual legal accountability is losing relevance compared to the ongoing matter of collective recognition of the Holocaust as an event integral to the nation’s history.

Indeed, quite distinct from the situation just a decade or so ago, when academic studies implicating Lithuanians in the Holocaust were met with suspicion and hostility, nobody, aside from a few marginal figures, has raised any doubts concerning the culpability of the many hundreds of identified perpetrators.

Nonetheless, several commentators betrayed a deep discomfort with any suggestion that Lithuanians today should “own up” to these acts. “Those freaks are not our people,” exclaimed journalist and public activist Vidmantas Valiusaitis in a long diatribe against the book. Vilnius University historian Nerijus Sepetys made a similar argument, reprimanding the authors for oversimplifying the historical context, and insisting, “your people are not our people.”

Arturas Paulauskas, a prominent politician, described those who participated in the crimes of the Holocaust as “the scum of the Lithuanian nation,” and reproached the authors forholding all Lithuanians accountablefor the bloody deeds of a small minority.

But even while excavations of Lithuania’s murky past continue to raise passions and sharp controversy, it is clear that an increasing number of politicians, scholars, and common citizens are more willing than ever before to debate these issues in an open manner to give the memory of the Holocaust public support. For example, this week a march to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the massacre of the Jewish community of Moletai attracted wide public attention, with representatives of virtually all political parties in attendance. 

Importantly, Lithuanians are less inclined to externalize the Soviet occupation and are more willing to look closely into the role of locals in the establishment, support, and maintenance of the regime, including the commission of repressive acts.

Indeed, without the collaboration of locals, neither the Soviet nor the Nazi German occupation would have been as devastating as they were, and it is precisely the involvement of Lithuanians in each of these regimes that is at the forefront of current debates over national identity, integrity, and resilience in the face of external threats. Interestingly, it is not the state-funded memory institutions, which are often poorly supported and slow to pick up new ideas, but individuals and public figures skilled at working with local media who are leading the way, helping drive changes in public attitudes.

In the end, a heightened public interest in the nature and history of collaboration, stimulated by the current Russian threat, may well promote a more complete coming to terms with the role of Lithuanians in the atrocities of both the Soviet and Nazi regimes.

Violeta Davoliute, author of The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania (Routledge, 2013), is an associate research scholar at Yale University (2015–2016), visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (fall 2016), and senior researcher at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute.

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