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.