My confession
and women in headscarves in the Klaipeda shtiebl could not have demonstrated greater Jewish continuity; they talked of children in Israel and Hendon, and asked us whether it is safe to wear a kippa in London.
As we drove east we left the narrow strip of what had once been East Prussia, where Jews had sought escape from the Russian Pale of Settlement. Twenty kilometres from Klaipeda we turned off after a brown heritage sign pointing to Žydu. We walked down a lane between houses, wondering what we might find in so quiet a place. Through a blue metal gate with a Magen David on it we stepped into the shady old Jewish cemetery of Gargždai. A meadow with overgrown wonky headstones and a high brick wall was a precious testament to centuries of Jewish life.
My husband read out macabre facts about the sudden ending of Jewish Gorzd from Wikipedia and JewishGen. He had one ancestor from here, but we knew nothing of the town’s fate. When we talk about the extermination of the Jews, we often neglect what happened in the Baltics, perhaps because the death camps and ghettos have taken pole position in our collective remembering of the Holocaust.
This territory forms part of what Yale historian Timothy Snyder has called “Bloodlands”. By the end of 1941 more than one million Jews had been killed there, mainly by mass shooting. Gargždai, right by the German border, was where the slaughter of Jews began when Hitler’s army invaded the Soviet Union and the Baltic countries.
We looked for the spot where on June 24, 1941, 200 men were shot by Germans and Lithuanian police. We missed it at first, then set eyes on a plaque in front of low-rise flats near a bus terminus. Its Lithuanian and Yiddish words said little about the event that ushered in the deaths of ten thousands, totally, at huge speed, and without warning.
People seemed to pass by paying no attention. The significance was surely bigger than this quiet six-foot slab suggested.
“To live in the environment where the spirit of those people is calling for remembrance and to reflect it — is not easy,” writes Lithuanian poet Antanas Jonynas on a website remembering Jewish life in Lithuania ( litvaks-lithuanian-jewish.com). “The most comfortable and easiest way is simply not to think about that.”
The provincial towns we visited in Lithuania and Latvia are inhabited, but hardly bustling. Many young people have emigrated. Life goes on, without Jews.
But perhaps the spirit cannot be subdued. In the heart of Kèdainiai, an hour north of Kaunas, stands a fairytale cobbled market square bordered by two stone synagogues, one for winter, one for summer. One is now a multicultural tolerance centre displaying objects and photos of the Jews who were once the majority of its inhabitants. “We cannot ignore the special aura of this town, as we live here,” a curator told us.
We hooked up with our Lithuanian Jewish guide, Chaim Bargman, for an intense day touring five towns
Towns we visited were not bustling. Life goes on here, with or without Jews