My nephew has just visited Lithuania in search of ties to the
various strands of his family – one strand being my wife’s parents’ family. This
prompted me to contemplate (again) the fate of my own ancestors and the
communities in which they lived.
Most of the Jews of South Africa came from Lithuania – as did
three of my four grandparents. At one time there were 250,000 Jews there, much
smaller than the 3 million in Poland, where reportedly ninety percent of the
world’s rabbis lived and died in the holocaust; but it was a great center of
Jewish learning and of Jewish commercial achievement, notwithstanding that many
Jews lived impoverished lives in very small villages (like Varna from where my
paternal grandparents came). Pretty much all of the Jews who were there in 1941
were murdered and there are very few left there today, maybe a few thousand.
What may not be widely known is that the Jews of Lithuania
did not die in the gas chambers. The Nazis started systematically exterminating
Jews (and other "undesirables") before the “final solution” of the gas chambers was put into effect. Instead,
hundreds of thousands of east European Jews (not only in Lithuania) were lined
up in the woods in front of their own graves that they were made to dig, and
shot by groups of soldiers and local collaborators known as einsatzgruppen.
A couple of things strike me about this.
One is that for every one Nazi there were five local
collaborators. The Lithuanians were particularly culpable in this – worse even
than the Poles. Without their collaboration the project could not have been
carried out.
Second, it is testimony to the effectiveness of old-fashioned
(low-tech) technology in achieving a high death count – something that became
quite evident later in the case of Ruanda. The Nazis moved from hands-on, face
to face murder to gas chambers reportedly not for efficiency reasons, but
because of the “emotional stress” that the firing squads caused the Nazi
soldiers. [Ultimately the einsatzgruppen killed between 5 and 6 million people, of which about 1.3 million were Jews. The most famous atrocity occurred at Babi Yar.]
There is not much left of a once great Jewish civilization
in Lithuania. In the 1950’s the Soviets destroyed most Jewish cemeteries to
make room for development and those that remain in the small villages have been
badly vandalized and defaced.
As far as I know there has been no Truth and Reconciliation Commission
in Lithuania and reportedly anti-Semitic sentiment is still quite common. [But see also here.]
