Politically incorrect...

Try this anywhere else in the world: Jew Street (!)

The Soviets (I think) put up a monument to a famous Jewish scholar of the far distant past:The Vilnius Genius, as he was called. Ths was one of many bizarre ways of honoring Jews (a mystical, albeit vanished species, like gnomes or fairies or leprechauns) in order to show how 'enlightened' they were.

The Gaon of Vilne

But here's the problem- Orthodox Jews are not allowed to create any graven images, as in a statue of a human being. In Jewish Law, a person is not allowed to be shown in any art form.  This most famous of mathematicians would have been insulted and horrified to know that he has been immortalized in the form of a stone and marble monument of his head.

The Girl in the Window

Please click on photo to enlarge it.

We seem to have veered in all directions without really talking about the original purpose of the trip: to look for our ancestral roots in Lithuania. Maybe the subject is too painful to talk about all the time; maybe we don't want to dwell on the horrors of the past; maybe mabye maybe...

In order to find ourselves in this country, we have to see the places our relatives may have lived.  Here is a big vacant building in what used to be the large Vilnius Ghetto. It was a jeweler's shop, with an apartment upstairs for the family. It was a prosperous business and the family was comfortably wealthy, and they were prominent citizens of the Jewish Community of Vilnius. Most of the family was rounded up and killed along with other members of the Ghetto. But a young girl survived and subsequently moved to Israel. She returned as an adult and found the building still vacant. There is no real explanation for this this, since either the Nazis or the Soviets would normally have claimed it. But they didn't. The young survivor went inside and wrote in Hebrew and Lithuanian (in thick dust) that the building belonged to her family and that she now lived in Israel. This message still exists after all these years. Others have written in the dust on the window panes, and these notes still are visible. No one has yet moved into this large, well situated building.

What is very odd is how the photo turned out. I was standing in a group of around 15 people, directly across the street when I shot this. No one is reflected in the windows, except for what seems to be a young girl who looks nothing like any of us. No matter how much we look at it and try to explain the face in the window in some logical way, we can't.

Here is an example of the Lithuanian government's mixed message regarding Jews. It's a sign for a museum called 'The Green House' which houses photos, documents, personal objects of Jews in Vilnius before, during, and after the Holocaust.

The sign is virtually invisible. Becca and I walked up and down the street (the sign is in a short alley off the main drag) and decided the musuem didn't exist. But later, with others in our party, we see that there is the tiniest of signage. The musuem is here, but we don't really want people to know about it, the Lithuanians seem to say.

Here are some popular things in Lithuania:

1. Jazz

I learned from Erika, one of our excellent guides/translators/generally awesome coordinator of activities, that Lithuanian people really love jazz music. When Lithuania was part of the Soviet Union, playing and listening to jazz was a quiet way to rebel. She mentioned that jazz is really important to Lithuanians. After our bus trip to Trakai, Erika mentioned a new jazz club opening in Vilnius. Ho-hum, I thought, conjuring up the sounds of Kenny G or sleepy elevator music. But then I went to the new jazz club, Soulbox, and found a completely different scene than what I thought I might be expecting. Young people (maybe Russian movie stars again!) packed the small bar. The music was a happy, danceable improvised blend of indie rock/jam band/jazz. At any time during the songs, people from the crowd would come up and sing along on choruses. At the end of each song, people merged from the crowd to take over various instruments.

borrowed from soulbox's page

2. Basketball

Okay. So neither one of us knew that Lithuanians love basketball. We had no clue, until we noticed all the basketball trinkets and t-shirts for sale. Apparently, the Lithuanian basketball team is one of the best in Europe, and has been quite successful during Olympic games as well. We were eating beetroot soup in our local cafe when the Lithuania/Moscow game was on. The crowd was rowdy but also polite, so I guess Lithuania was winning.

3. 999

So, I heard about 999 from some of the people on our bus rides. They were discussing the bars they went to and how much they had been drinking each night. I heard them mention something called "Three Nines," and how delicious it was. So, at the next outdoor cafe, I scanned the menu for nines. We asked the waitress, and she said that there are two kinds of three nines: red and green. Which is better, we asked. Green. Definitely. So we ordered the green. What arrived was not actually green at all, but a kind of murky maroon. It was delicious--like Nyquil and honey and plums. Okay, so that's an exaggeration. I couldn't taste plums. Just Nyquil. Regardless, it was delicious. For our last week in Vilnius, we probably had a couple shots of 999 a day. I think we'd had quite a lot of it on our last full day in town, too. I finally realized that a bottle of 999 would be a perfect souvenerai, so at 8 am, an hour away from our taxi ride to the airport, I dashed over to the Rimi, our local supermarket. I grabbed three pint bottles (green label, not green liquid), and rushed to the register.
"Labas," the cashier said, which means 'hi."
"Labas!" I chirped back, happy for a practical use of Lithuanian during my last few hours there. I handed her some crumpled litas. Back at the apartment, I tucked them carefully into my rolled clothes in my suitcase and hoped they wouldn't break in transit.
Now that we're back home, no one is getting the 999 for a souvenerai. We've decided to keep it for ourselves.

disclaimer: this is actually not our own 999. i had to borrow it online. we'll put up some pictures of our own personal collection of 999 soon.

The head of Frank Zappa

One of the oddest things about our meanderings around Vilnius was the discovery of a monument to Frank Zappa. He was not Lithuanian and he never visited there. Somehow, he is some sort of cultural hero. And there is a monument to the late great musician in a courtyard of what looks like a grim state hospital.

Living Outdoors

One huge difference between us in the States and them in Europe is how life is lived outside of the home. It's a tremendous adjustment to make after only two weeks in Lithuania. Americans stay inside, a lot. Yes, I know those of you lucky enough to live in a lively city like San Francisco or New York walk a lot and take public transportation everywhere. But in Vilnius, and other European cities, people are out walking and eating and socializing until late at night, every night. That's what we did while we were in Vilnius. Now, here I am at my computer at 7:30PM, wondering what will be on the tube later on that's watchable. This is not the right way to live.

The photo above this one is a common sight: a bachelorette party. The women in the wedding party go out in their chic clothes and have a lively night out. This photo is a plaza at the intersection of two main streets where Becca and I would stop sometimes and have a coffee or a Baltus- a delicious wheat beer- or a bottled water. For water, you are asked "gaz or still?" And they serve it to you in a stemmed wine glass. I miss this neighborhood. Nothing even remotely like it in Medford, Oregon.

Looking for a restaurant, we stumble on the most amazing architecture. Always a surprise, just turn a corner and there it is.

An interesting lunchtime parade in Old Town Vilnius. We were sitting at an outside table having blinyis or potato pancakes and heard music and chanting.

Trakai!

Last week, we had a nice break from discussing dead Jews. Most of the participants loaded up on a bus (with air conditioning!) and headed to Trakai, which was advertised in our welcome packet as being the only castle in Eastern Europe to be surrounded entirely by water.

Our group had become pros at bus travel, but the short ride to Trakai wasn't quite long enough for some. As the bus crawled through slow, touristy traffic, someone near us called out, "Do we have to get off the bus yet?"

People piled out of the bus, and gathered in a circle around Laimos. Even though our day was entirely free of tours or dead Jews until six PM, and he was off duty as a tour guide, people were lost without his direction. He explained how Trakai was home to the Karaims, (and I'm a little fuzzy on this) some sort of Babylonian sect of people who are Jews, but not quite. As in not quite Jewish enough to be disturbed during the Holocaust. At this point, with the mention of more Jews, we decided to check out the castle.

According to Laimos, the castle tour was very touristy and fake, but we decided to investigate anyway.

There were a ton of people at Trakai--mostly Russian tourists, it seemed, as Trakai is a bit of a resort destination in Lithuania. It was also interesting to note how the lake had none of the tourist destination troubles that a lake in the United States might. People seemed content to just loop around the paths.

We crossed over the far bridge in the picture above to get to the castle. Once there, avoided the snaking line inside the castle and opted for a boat tour around the lake instead. We tried to piece together some puzzling signs and then found the correct dock for the cruise. Our tour boat showed up a few minutes later, and let out  its previous passengers, including at least forty children and nuns--orphans, we decided.

The cruise took us around the back of the castle. At one point, we nearly hit some people on paddleboats.

Back on the shore, we decided to get a bite to eat--the local and famous cuisine, little pockets of pastry and pork called kibinyis. The outdoor restaurants were crowded everywhere, and the only table we found was in the direct sun. So, we ordered kibinyis, beer, and Greek salad.
We shared our table with this nice guy:

We noticed that there were an absurd number of wedding parties--and, being our second Saturday in Lithuania, we'd noticed a pattern. Saturdays were wedding days, when brides and grooms and bridesmaids in shiny dresses were out in droves.

There were some seriously shiny bridesmaids dresses that didn't quite come out in these few pictures--amazingly tacky purple and gold dresses. From our outdoor cafe vantage point, we watched one shiny wedding party get into a rickety boat and sail away:

Blinded by the light....

This next entry is somewhat of a confession. At my advanced age, I have fallen into a state of teenage crush. In order to describe the object of my swoon, I'll use a passage from a book by David Rakoff: essayist and contributor to "This American Life" on NPR. I'll substitute my own terms for those few phrases that don't quite fit and put them into italics.

The lecturer and Vilnius guide is an almost ridiculously handsome Baltic God- tan skin, silver blonde hair, and ice-blue eyes. He resembles one of those cyborgs from the movies, developed in a secret mountain enclave laboratory who, as his wrappings are taken off, is introduced by the evil genius who created him with a portentious "Gentlemen, may I present the Perfect Killing Machine!"

Laimos! Not really a cyborg or a killing machine, but an academic who lives in Vancouver, B.C., most of the time, teaching at the university, writing books, and is a native of Vilnius who returns each year to work for the university in his birth city. His manner is warm, humorous, and smart beyond normal mortals. Everyone has fallen for him: young women, older men, young guys, everybody with a pulse.

Overhearing conversations behind me on the bus, I have heard men and women speak of his chiseled features, 'like sculpture, like marble.' When he leads us down unfamiliar streets and forest trails and cemetaries, there is jostling to be the closest to the glow that emanates from his golden presence. The only comparison I can make is that it would be similar to being in close proximity to Robert Redford in the movie, 'The Way We Were,' which I know dates me, or Brad Pitt in 'A River Runs Through It.'  This may help to describe how his beauty is almost painful to be around.

In one city, I walked with him (alone!) for two full blocks. I watched the other members of our party either glare poisonously at me or whimper to themselves. I felt for a moment an almost mystical, out-of-body ecstasy at my good luck. Becca tells me he paused for a second to walk with me on this walk of joy. Of course, I was too giddy to notice this, but now I feel pride at being Chosen.

More later.....

Paneriai

There won't be any photos accompanying this entry. A couple of reasons for this. First, I haven't uploaded (Downloaded? Can't keep it straight.) any pictures in the last two days because our problems with the internet make me want to use any available time online, not fooling around with cameras and wires. And second, well, I was pretty much incapable of taking more than one or two pictures in Paneriai.

This place. Nothing can ever be the same after you've been here. I've been accused more than once of being an exaggerator. Maybe so, but I assure all of you that exaggeration is impossible for a description of the events at Paneriai.

In 1941, Jews in Vilnius were kept behind walls in two separate ghettos: the big ghetto and the small one. None of the residents of either ghetto had any clear idea what would happen to them. Both places were autonomous communities, with their own schools, medical facilities, police forces, leaders. Life was terrible but the citizens made it work well enough to keep alive. There was always the debate about whether it was better to be 'good' so that the Nazis would reward them with food or goods or freedom. Or whether it was better to arm themselves and fight back against the German invaders. Neither, as it turned out. Nothing would change their horrible fate, no matter what how well behaved or rebellious.
A while before events at Paneriai occurred, the Russians had dug seven or eight huge pits close to the trains, for the storage of fuel. The soil around these parts is sandy, like beach sand, and extremely difficult to work. When the Germans came to Vilnius, they found these gigantic holes extremely well made and useful for their work. Saved them a lot of time, these ready-made craters.

Paneriai was a train station situated in a forest, 10 kilometers outside Vilnius. The land was sometimes used, in much better times, as a place for Jews and anyone else to leave the city and enjoy nature. There were Lithuanian as well as Jewish resorts here in the woods. Families could enjoy a picnic on a warm, sunny day, while their children could play in the woods and have a relaxing, fun time away from school and daily chores.

The Germans, without warning, stormed the big ghetto of Vilnius. They systematically removed the most able bodied in order to ship them to other countries as slave labor. The weaker ones were taken out of their homes and driven by foot to the forest at Paneriai, a long, difficult walk for woman, children, old people, men who were no longer young and strong. It still must have seemed to them that they werealso just being moved. Even when their valuables and their coats and shoes were taken away, there was no way imagine the level of destruction and evil that the Nazis were capable of. Families tried to stay together. Mothers tried to hold on to their children. Men tried to keep their wives and children safely with them. The unthinkable was about to happen.

German soldiers marched the Vilnius Jews to the edges of these large holes and began shooting. As people were shot, Nazis then threw them into the pits. As each group of people were shot, they were tossed on top of those at the bottom of the hole. This process  continued until the holes were completely filled with bodies. Then the another group would be sent toa  different crater and the same procedure followed.

Some Jews were designated as 'burners.' It was their job to pour gasoline on the bodies and set them on fire, knowing that when their job was done, they were going to be shot and thrown on the flames themselves.

Pictures of this abomination survived. Photo of the burners. Bodies being thrown into the pits. Pictures of a special pit for children. There was a young girl who survived by staying beneath the dead, pulling herself loose, and then escaping into the forest when the Germans were not looking. We watched a short film of her telling how the Germans threw people into the pits dead or alive 'like laundry, like shirts and clothes, something not human.'

100,000 were slaughtered at Paneriai. 70,000 were Jews. The rest were various kinds of undesirables: Poles, Lithuanians, Russians- anyone who rebelled against the ruling Nazis.

This place, Paneriai, is considered to be a more difficult place to visit than Auschwitz by some of our group who had been to both sites.It must be the pristine setting. It's a forest, strangely quiet, without visible birds or insects. (Or maybe we were too shellshocked to notice.) There are many varieties of beautiful trees and edible berries. There are just a few stone monuments with engravings in Hebrew or Lithuanian. Not much English

The pits vary in size and the bottoms are covered by with grass; some are circled by stones. They are bigger than I thought they'd be. Spaceship sized. Football fields underground. They are far apart; the walk from one pit to another is on a series of well-groomed forest paths. There are no signs leading from one hole to another.

I didn't think I could write all this. It difficult to think about being there today without forcing my brain to go a place it doesn't want to be. There are not a lot of words to tell how it felt. At least not yet.

My body reaction (like a lot of our group) was to burst into tears. Others went limp, unable to talk. Becca will have to give this blog her own reaction to Paneriai- if she wants to and is able to. All I can say now is to repeat that nothing will be the same for me- I have seen evil as I never imagined it. Nothing in my experience, in my life, can ever explain how it is possible for human beings to do this.

I've been hunting through the touristy souvenier kiosks to find the most "Linglish" (Litguish?) shirt or trinket possible. I haven't found many. I had hopes of finding fun shirts from various bars or restaurants with funny logos and interesting combinations of either English or Lithuanian words, but nothing yet. Since Lithuania is a relatively new country, only 20 years old or so, there probably aren't enough tourists to really inspire crazy slogans and weird Lithuanian-English hybrid language shirts just yet. So far, all I've seen is "I AM BASKETBALL FAN," which is okay, but not wonderful. Apparently, Lithuania has a really great basketball team. Who knew!

I have seen these neat instances of graffiti around Vilnius and the surrounding areas, though:

This one comes from near the Old Town gates.

Near the University.

Also near the university; an amazingly crumbled building.

 

In Uzupis.

Bernardinu Gatve, Old Town.

In Ziezmariai, the town with the dilapadated synagogue.

This one is pretty amazing and horrible. It's amazing that it's survived since 1939. It's hard to read, but it's a few lines in Polish written on the walls of the wooden synagogue in Ziezmairai. It was supposedly written when the Jewish Ziezmairi residents were rounded up and held in the synagogue, later to be taken elsewhere and killed. One of our group members is Polish, and she translated this for us. It was basically a curse: that there are terrible things in store for Lithuania, that the pain they caused will come back to haunt them.

Disclaimer and Apologies!

It is a little humiliating to reread our blog posts and see such horrible examples of bad grammar and dumb misspellings. Becca and I are both masters of the English language, with papers to prove it! All that means is we know better.

Here's the deal: we have a tricky internet connection in our apartment. It comes and goes at random. I might write forever, such gorgeous prose and astonishingly artful photos, only to have an error message show up when I try to post. Speed is of the essence.

So. to those of you who notice such things (and I am one), nothing is edited! Whatever typos and strange punctuation appear here are are put directly online, never to be seen again until the post appears.

Achiu and prashom!

Vilnius is filled with amazingly ornate churches and cathedrals. Each one is more lavish or gothic than the next, it seems. Here's a small selection of some that we've seen on our loops around town.

Uzuzpio!

I'll stop for while on the depressing stuff. There is a lot here that is delightful, and one area in particular makes a person want toi stay forever in this strange and conflicted place.

There is a neighborhood in Vilnius, which is like all artsy places anywhere in the world. It starts off being cheap and accessible so all sorts of artists and musicians and writers can live there pretty well and work at their craft. Others come to see this new and upcoming hip place. They bring money and galleries and cafes, and later on, boutiques. Soon everyone wants to live here and rents go up. Renovation and gentrification set in, and most artists have to move away to a new and cheaper place.

But the aura is still one of beauty and art and culture and a lot of humor. Such is the People's Republic of Uzupio, which has its own constitution with rights and rules such as 'If one of you dies, then the other one has to take care of the dog.' 

Apparently, this statue used to be a big egg. One morning in 2004, the Uzupis residents found that the egg had hatched this creature.

Throw the Jew down the well so my country can be free!

Here is the beautiful village of Ziezmariai, about 20 or so kilometers north of Vilnius. In 1939, there were 2000 or so people living here. A thousand, half the population, were Jews. There was a rabbi, a doctor, a few teachers, a school for Jewish chilrdren- all of whom lived on three sides of the town square. On the fourth side was a Catholic church.

In the tiny Jewish sector, there was a wooden synogogue. It was a stately, ornate house of worship. The richest man in the village had a luxurious house in front of the synogogue. This house was so large that one half was able to include an actual movie theater. The Jews here were prosperous enough to be able to live comfortably and practice whatever professions were still allowable for Jews in the 1930's.

1939, even before the Germans 'invaded,' Lithuanians became enamored of the idea of their Final Solution. The 1000 or so people in Ziezmariai who were Gentiles decided that the other half of the population, those uppity Jews, had a whole lot of shit that they, the non-Jews, didn't have. So one day they shot and killed them all, women, children, whoever was Jewish, and took everything for themselves, including the big white house with the movie theater. All the religious items, as well as anything not completely nailed down, was moved from the synagogue into the church across the street, where it remains to this day.

Here is the synogogue today. It is somewhat of a mystery why the structure hasn't fallen completely down into broken timbers. As you can see, there has been no attempt to reconstruct the Wooden Synogogue. There has been no committee of people dedicated to its renewal. It stands as it was left in 1939.

One small ray of light fell on a man who was in the synogogue the day we visited. His family was also a ray of hope for six families whom they helped escape into the forest the day of the massacre. These families all survived, and their descendents are happily living in the US and Canada today.

This is the man in the photo. He still feels the necessity of keeping the synogogue standing as a tribute to the memory of those who were slaughtered by their own townspeople. So far, this is the only tale I have heard of ANY Lithuanian who came to the aid of Jews in this country. Of course, there may be more stories of humanity here, but we haven't heard any so far, except for this one case.

I've emptied my camera of pictures, so here are some for context:

These are the stairs to our apartment. They vary in steepness, width, and height. Also, there's no light until the top floor, which makes coming home after dark potentially difficult for some of us.

While much has been lamented over the lack of air conditioning in Lithuania, our apartment does have the fabled machine. It's pretty amazing, and it's maybe one of two in the whole country, it seems (I saw another one in an ice cream shop). I have to dump out a tray full of water every few hours. The hose goes out through our window:

Here is our street, Stikliu Gatve:

This street above is actually Dijoiji (not sure on the spelling, lots of i's and j's...but it's pronounced like 'de-joy'), and it's a main street in the old town where people constantly loop back and forth. The souvenier shops (souvenerai) all sell amber trinkets and linen. Those are the main souvenierai to be found in Lithuania.
More later--our internet has been spotty at best!