Vanished Lands

Foreword: A Historian’s Look at Memory and Its Discontents

←xx | xxi→Saulius Sužiedėlis

Historian Robert Gellately has fittingly designated the post-1914 period of Europe’s multiple crises as the “age of social catastrophe,”¹ a cataclysm which Lithuania entered in June 1940 when the Soviet Union occupied the country. During the ensuing decade, foreign occupiers murdered nearly a quarter of a million citizens of the once-independent state. The Nazi-led Holocaust, the most violent event in the nation’s history, incomparable in scale, accounted for about four-fifths of the victims. This ←xxi | xxii→ultimate horror, which rightfully occupies much of Laima Vincė’s study, had a timetable. Before the first week of August 1941, an estimated 90 per cent of Lithuania’s Jews were still alive. Less than three months later, almost three-fourths were dead. This unprecedented bloodbath stuns the imagination: in Lithuania, more Jews were killed in a single week in 1941 than in all anti-Jewish attacks over the preceding (and, one should note, markedly turbulent) three centuries of the country. Less than 10 per cent of Lithuanian Jews survived. According to official Lithuanian estimates, between 190,000 and 206,000 Lithuanian Jews died in the Holocaust, including most of Samuel Bak’s family. Aside from the government officials and police who organized persecution from their desks, at least several thousand indigenous collaborators took a direct part in the murders. The Lithuanian perpetrators, a minority of the population to be sure, were not a tiny rabble of misfits and lowlifes, but represented a different strata of society. This history is well known and is accepted by mainstream academics as well as by Lithuanians willing to own an unvarnished past. The rhetorical conflict over the responsibility for crimes committed during the Nazi occupation continues to agitate Lithuanians and has become a significant factor in the society’s ongoing cultural and political struggles. The fact that Lithuania has the second highest ratio of rescuers (after the Netherlands) to the general population on the list of Yad Vashem’s Righteous Gentiles cannot cloak the dreadful reality.

←xxii | xxiii→Unfortunately, the post-war experience tended to deflect attention away from what had happened to the Jews, an all-too-human failing which compounds a harsh reality: in effect, Lithuanian Jews and their Gentile neighbors inhabited different worlds of mass violence in the 1940s and, thus, acquired divergent, even contentious, collective memories. These issues can evoke strong emotions among the “defenders of history,” for whom only one of the above narratives/memories is the most important or correct. The work of Samuel Bak and Algirdas Landsbergis’s play Five Posts in a Market, deal with different realities in the same land.

Vincė’s work confronts the historian with the dilemma inherent in the relationship of history and memory. One cannot exist without the other, but because they capture the past in different ways, the link between the two is rarely straightforward. To be sure, memory is indispensable to both collective and personal identity. Amnesiacs do not know who they are because they cannot recall who they were. Common sense tells us to ←xxiii | xxiv→believe that the memory of what has been directly experienced takes precedence in establishing the truth: the shouted, “I was there, and you were not,” effectively ends many an argument. However, this assumes that the memories of the past, that is, much of what constitutes a person, are inherently reliable. Social scientists have proven time and again that this is not the case.² The relationship of history as an academic discipline, and memory, both collective and personal, can be difficult, even contentious.

Historians search for answers in the specific conditions of time and place. They privilege evidence closely linked, in time, to historical events, such as contemporary documents and diaries. They often analyze the social and political context of the traumatic events of the past century. Unfortunately, such an approach can create, even if unintentionally, the impression of a tragedy wreaked on society by impersonal forces. The “age of social catastrophe” was not a natural disaster. Historic circumstances may have set the stage; however, it should go without saying that the mass murders of that period were, above all, premeditated crimes of staggering scale, the results of decisions involving moral agency. During the Holocaust, a myriad of moral choices faced the non-Jewish populace. Some became killers, looted Jewish property, and/or turned over Jews in hiding; others were indifferent. Many people reached out a helping hand, if only for a moment. Hundreds of brave souls attempted rescue. It is precisely the moral response which the arts and literature can best portray to the reader, revealing the criminals’ “heart of darkness,” as well as the pain forever imprinted on the minds of those who suffered the unimaginable. Memoirs and vivid depictions in literary nonfiction can bring to life valuable lessons about perpetrators and victims. This is essential wisdom, even if gained by methods, which differ from the craft practiced by the historical profession. Truth is not merely a collection of facts.

The contrast between history and literature should not be reduced to simple notions of supposed differences in the “objective” vs. “subjective” modes of knowledge. This does not mean, however, that literary nonfiction ←xxiv | xxv→in particular should be exempt from respect for the historical record and honest attempts at historical accuracy. The generations which emerged from the D.P. experience in the U.S. and Canada will recognize Antanas Sileika’s and Daiva Markelis’s depictions of the diaspora’s continuing adjustments between tradition and assimilation. Rita Gabis’s work employs numerous interviews with specialists and archival documents, which undergird the emotional indictment of her collaborationist grandfather’s role in the destruction of the Jews of Švenčionys, but which also reveal the multiple nuances and contradictions of Jewish and Lithuanian interactions during the occupation. Was this perhaps a counterpoint to her own blended, but conflicted Lithuanian-Jewish family? Professor Julija Šukys’s experience in teaching creative nonfiction and her research on the important aspects of foreign occupations inform her own “granddaughter’s reckoning,” as equally wrenching as that of Gabis. From a historian’s point of view, Ellen Cassedy’s journey into the past through the Yiddish “portal” is different. The Jewish ghetto police, of which her uncle was a member, were in a uniquely dreadful circumstance: the only indigenous security force which the Nazis targeted for annihilation. Therefore, any comparison of their situation with that of other native collaborators would be simplistic and unfair.

As historian Peter Hayes has pointed out, there is, increasingly, “a gap between what specialists know and what much of the public believes about the Holocaust,” or as Paul Levine has noted, a growing divide ←xxv | xxvi→between scholarship and public memory, a “veritable clash between ‘town’ and ‘gown’.”³ Other important historical issues, which involve memories and postmemories of trauma reflect the same problem, as in the case of the current American culture wars over slavery, race, the Civil War and Reconstruction.

In May 2001, Samuel Bak returned to Vilnius/Vilna after more than a half-century after his departure, the first of three visits to the Lithuanian capital. He visited Paneriai/Ponar where five members of his immediate family perished. Bak returned to America, “filled with fresh memories, old and new impressions, and feelings of impossible contradictions.” Bak was grateful for the “warmth and generosity” of the Lithuanians who welcomed him, but acknowledged the “very dark shadows…[which] mar the mythical landscape of my luminous childhood.”⁴ The memories of trauma endure, even as historians busily produce more troubling texts.

Saulius Sužiedėlis, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus of History at Millersville University

1 Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (New York: Vintage Books, 2008).

2 See the study by Daniel L. Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), which are: transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence.

3 Peter Hayes, Why? Explaining the Holocaust (New York: Norton), p. 317.

4 As cited by Samuel Bak, “Memoir: Wilno, Vilna, Vilnius: The City I Come From,” in Lawrence L. Langer, Return to Vilna in the Art of Samuel Bak (Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2007), p. 109.

Dalia Leinartė

Foreword: Towards a Common Understanding

In her introduction to Vanished Lands: Memory and Postmemory in North American Lithuanian Diaspora Literature, Laima Vincė claims: “My life has been a process of searching for identity, attempting to understand from the distance of time and geography, an inheritance that is not mine as a birthright, but has come to me through the echoes of Lithuania’s collective trauma and family stories.” Her search for identity led her—and many other second and third generation North American Lithuanians—to the most painful historical events experienced by their parents and grandparents in Lithuania: Soviet occupations, deportations, the resistance, and the Holocaust. However, while some of these historical events became the subject of endless conversations in Lithuanian diaspora families, the Holocaust, and the émigrés’ role in the Holocaust, were left out of the discussion.

The Holocaust and Lithuanian participation in the killings of Jews was shrouded in silence in Lithuania as well. However, unlike in Soviet-occupied Lithuania and later in independent Lithuania, after World War II, Holocaust studies were initiated in the West along with programs to educate the society as a means of preventing genocide in the future, and to memorialize those who had died. In Western societies, including the Lithuanian diaspora, scholarly work on the Holocaust was then initiated, educational programs and study centers were launched, literature was written along with other methods of employing the arts and pedagogy to formulate a universal code that taught each individual to bear responsibility towards victims of genocide. These initiatives led the second and third generations of the diaspora to take a close look at the most painful events in Lithuanian history. The experience engendered a sense of shame mixed with anger, repentance towards the murdered Jewish communities, along with disbelief over their parents’ and/or grandparents’ long silence on the subject. Laima Vincė reflects: “Most shared in their interviews with me that they experienced a sense of outrage when they first realized that the first generation had omitted the tragedy of the Holocaust in Lithuania from the diaspora’s cultural memory narrative.” A universal western moral responsibility for the victims of the Holocaust made the Lithuanian diaspora reevaluate their parents’ and grandparents’ unconditional romanticized view of the far-away homeland and its history. This emotional journey for most diaspora Lithuanians uncovered trauma, led to post-traumatic growth, and helped form a productive, creative, and authentic historical and cultural memory surrounding the most painful events in Lithuania’s history. In the Lithuanian diaspora, postmemory plays an essential role, just like it has in other world cultures: “According to Hirsch, postmemory describes the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the trauma of those who came before to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. Postmemory, thus, may be considered the memory of another’s memory, so much so that the memory of another’s memory become memories in their own right, creating a deep personal connection of memory, notwithstanding generational distance.”

As Laima Vincė explains, after the end of the Soviet regime and the collapse of the Iron Curtain, two separated halves of the nation, one in Lithuania and the other in the west, built a bridge of connection: “The two halves of a divided generation—those who lived through the Soviet occupation of Lithuania and those who fled, seeking shelter in the democracies of the West—were separated by the Iron Curtain for half a century and were brought back together when Lithuania reinstated independence in 1991, thus bound by the political and the social.” Nonetheless, one of the most painful events in history—the Holocaust—up until now has not yet evolved into a shared historical narrative between Lithuania and the North American diaspora.

Historical events and political and social cultural phenomenon of the past are better understood when their interpretation is based on several sources—archival documents, memoirs, epistolary documents, eye-witness accounts, and interviews. Reflection on traumatic experiences and on the results of trauma cannot be adequately completed without one more source—postmemory, when the second or third generation relives and considers the events that they did not live through themselves, and often did not even suspect had occurred in their parents’ or grandparents’ lives. It is interesting that in Lithuania and in the North American Lithuanian diaspora, the discussion on Holocaust memory was influenced (and continues to be influenced) by different sources. In the Lithuanian scholarly community and in the popular media, without a doubt, archival documents are used as the basis for studying the Jewish genocide and to construct its narrative. Meanwhile, the diaspora’s understanding about the Holocaust as it played out in Lithuania, and the participation of Lithuanians in the killings, is formed by several layers of sources, including postmemory, which takes on special importance, and which to date practically does not exist within the Lithuanian context.

The entirety of sources—archival facts, subject witness accounts, postmemory—shape individual, familial, and collective memory and also form an ideologically unified national narrative. Eliminate one of these sources and the historiography that is formed is incomplete and the historical narrative becomes fragmented.

For these reasons, it is of the utmost importance to emphasize that Laima Vincė’s book, Vanished Lands, is the first academic monograph to find a common space between the Lithuanian diaspora and Lithuania and lays the groundwork for discussion of the different interpretations of the historiography of the extermination of the Jewish community and the role that Lithuanians played in those killings. By doing this work, this book creates a unified history and collective national memory regarding the Holocaust in Lithuania.

Dalia Leinartė

UN CEDAW member and former Chair

Fellow Commoner at University of Cambridge, Lucy Cavendish College

Professor of History at Vytautas Magnus University