Days 8-10
I have never felt more Jewish in my life. This immersion into the history of the Jews in the Baltic countries has made me really understand emotionally for the first time how the Christian communities in Europe saw the Jewish community as “other” and forced them to be separate in space and custom. Even those Jewish families who assimilated to a great degree and moved into upper level Christian society after the period of “enlightenment” in the late 19th century must have always felt the underlying tension that they would be judged and treated differently. With numerous small communities spread across the country, Lithuania may have felt a safe haven for a people ostracized from many parts of Europe but history proved otherwise.
Kaunas, formerly called Kovno, is a name I associate with occasional references by my Simpson family when I would ask genealogical questions. I had found and read a copy of letters written by some Simpson relative when he went back to the “old country” in the mid 1930’s, after recovery from WWI, to see if any family members were still there. That is where I learned that the name as shown on tombstones in the Jewish cemetery in either Salanta, the village of my great grandfather, or in Kovno was “Sampson” in Yiddish and understandably converted by the Ellis Island immigration authorities to Simpson. Below is a map of a part of Jewish Lithuania showing the names of some of the many villages containing a Jewish population at the beginning of WWII indicating approximately how many died in the early 1940’s in various communities. For Salanta, in the upper middle, the code says “100-1000”. The total, I believe, was at least 70,000 killed outside Ponary.
In Kaunas, once a center of Jewish learning, we visit the historical center and the old Synagogue where there are now about 12 regularly attending members. We happen to meet their youngest local male adult who became b’mitzvah, the only one in his generation, in 2011. Very few survived the German concentrated efforts in the early 1940’s when Jews were rounded up into ghettos and then taken out to the woods and slaughtered. There were convenient pits earlier dug by the Soviets in the course of military encounters which were then repurposed for this grisly use..
In Kaunas, we also visit a memorial to a Jewish woman, Leja (Leah) Goldberg, who with advanced ideas championed and wrote poetry in Hebrew at a time when it was not used as a modern language.
A Japanese diplomat, Chiune Sugihara, is also remembered as here as one of the “righteous” providing, without disapproval from his government, thousands of Jews safe passage East officially through Japan, from where they scattered all over the world. His house has become a museum to honor him. He had a Jewish friend he wanted to help and from there he recognized his opportunity as the need grew to provide safe passage. He was dismissed from government service when he returned to Japan.
There is a change in style as we approach Vilnius, the largest city on this tour and the place once of great Jewish culture where famous rabbis taught. Our historic hotel, the Astoria, is in the center of this famous area.
But I forgo the next day of our tour of the historical city of Vilnius and also a journey to Ponary, a forest location of a mass killing in Ponary of approximately 70,000 Jews plus other unwanted people. Instead, I went to an appointment at a private medical clinic in the suburbs of the City, the Baltic and American Clinic, to try to address my high blood pressure. This was arranged by our Lithuanian guide who recommended this clinic and it was my first of two adventures into the realm of East European medicine. I was seen by a local doctor, who spoke some English and whom I could understand but with difficulty. I was taken to a private room and bed where I received IV fluid of unknown composition for four hours. And then released with prescriptions for new medications, none of which were familiar to me by name. The information I received when I left was all in Lithuanian. The cost for this service was a total of about $350. Very fortunately, I had my daughter, an MD, to rely on for direction and confirmation of reasonable treatment. At the end of this my bp was still very high — but no longer in the dangerous level.
Back at the hotel, I had lunch at a local vegetarian restaurant and then headed out by myself for a self-guided walk around the old Jewish ghetto area, all of which was clean and well maintained but there was not anything obviously Jewish about it any more. My first impression of Vilnius is that it is a bigger, not as well maintained, less elegant, less wealthy, version of Riga. There are also Ukrainian flags flying here but not as many or as obviously as in Latvia. When I hear people speaking as they walk by, I think they are talking Russian but they are actually talking Lithuanian, although the cadence and sound is similar. Vilnius has typical big squares and of course big churches.
This is in contrast to the only remaining working synagogue we visit the next day, out of the 100 existing pre-WWII. Built in 1903, the Choral Synagogue was once restored but now has leaks in its roof. Like all the other synagogues we have visited, it has a separate upstairs for the women. What stands out in this synagogue is the impressive matzo-stamping machine, created during Soviet times for the new immigrants and some returning people celebrating Passover.
I also remember being surprised by the state of the buildings on the street near to the synagogue, some deserted and some covered with graffiti. The amount of graffiti has increased as we moved from pristine Estonia, with very little unwanted markings, although some scrawled walls in the historic center, to Riga which displayed more unplanned “art” on its walls, down to Lithuania in Vilnius where it is obviously a problem. This may be an economic factor or reflect something of the changing cultures in the former Soviet states.
This day also included a museum dedicated to displaying Jewish life from pre WWII through the Soviet occupation. It was well curated and led by a sympathetic young man, but the display put little emphasis on the numbers involved in the annihilation of the Jewish populace with the complicity of the local populace and more on the suffering of all the Lithuanian people at the hands of the Nazis and then their Soviet occupiers. When I asked the docent leading our group about this disparity and why the massacre at Ponary was not included in the exhibit, he replied that they couldn’t include all the incidents of shootings in the forests of Lithuania.
Our Tiyul tour, with a very good and compatible group of people, ended today with a farewell dinner. It was an in depth tour of the Jewish history of the Baltic States with powerful lectures by our on-tour historian. However, it was far more psychologically stressful than I anticipated perhaps leading to my current very high blood pressure which I will not only need to address now but will need to consider in planning travel in the future. Life goes on and change must happen.