Digging up the Past in Lithuania

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The three of us are sitting at a wooden table at Brodvejus (pronounced Broadways), which one moment was just another bar, and the next a better-than-average high school talent show. There is singing and dancing, all tongue-in-cheek, the dancers flirting and flapping on the dancefloor. A short, squat guy with a goatee, looking very much like a repressed computer programmer, steps forward with a microphone, and commences to sing Yesterday, by the Beatles. The bar sings along with him, the scene is so Europe, so Unlike-North-America.
“Oh I believe, in Yester-Day,” we bellow, arms on each other’s shoulders, and I decide then and there that I like this country, and I don’t know why it took me so long to get here.
I walk back to the guesthouse on Bernadino St, tripping and slipping on the wet, uneven road, giving those even drunker than myself a wide berth. My new Lithuanian friends had agreed to pick me up in the morning, and together we’d drive out into the countryside to see where it all began.

“She’s a chariot, no?” says Ike, standing beside a rusted Mitsubishi minivan, the fan belt squealing like teenage pigs at a rock concert. Lithuania has the highest rate of accident fatalities in the European Union, but they’re excited for me to take the wheel, to really feel the journey. It’s an old stick shift, or more accurately, stuck shift, but after driving an East German Trabant in Berlin earlier this year, I feel confident I can drive anything. We load up, I narrowly avoid scraping a truck that almost blocks the narrow street, and we head off out the city. Although local drivers constantly pull in front of me, tailgate and overtake into oncoming traffic, I am well armed with a dented piece-of-shit diesel minivan that couldn’t possibly sustain any more damage than it already has. The speed limit in the countryside is 70 km/hr, which would be useful if my speedometer actually functioned. “If you’re in a hurry…” starts Abie.
“Yes yes yes, I know,” I cut him off, just as someone cuts me off.
It doesn’t take long to leave the streets of Vilnius, the city only has a population of half a million. Having experienced the minefields of Ethiopian highways in recent weeks, it’s a pleasure to drive on new, four-lane highways, if not to see out the cracked window with wipers that somehow managed to collect the rain as opposed to clear it. As we make our way to Kupashok, I see fertile, green fields and fat, healthy cows. Old wooden barns and signs with place names I couldn’t begin to pronounce. Ike and Abie are in the back seat, looking pensive, dark rings beneath their eyes.
“You guys look as hungover as me,” I say, trying to lighten things up.
“We’re just thinking about the recent past, you know, the things that happened in this country.”

The things that happened in this country are difficult to discuss, difficult to understand. In 1939, two of mankind’s greatest villains - men deranged by power and hate - carved up Europe in accordance with their megalomania. By the time they were finished, and after they went to war with each other, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin were responsible for hundreds of millions of innocent deaths, and the systematic genocide of people and cultures across three continents. In 1939, Lithuania as an independent country ceased to be, as Stalin, in agreement with Hitler, bullied a de-fecto Red Army coup. Soviet forces occupied the country, soon replaced by the Nazis, who took control over all aspects of the country and went to work to systematically murder Roma, partisans, intellectuals, and over 200,000 Jews - a staggering 94% of the country’s Jewish population. Although there were terrible pogroms throughout their past, Jews had thrived as a community in Lithuania, living in bustling shtetls (villages), building world-renowned Talmudic schools and synagogues that produced some of the age’s most influential religious scholars. In the space of three years - 1941 to 1944 - all that was wiped out, no mercy shown to men, women, elderly or children. Disturbingly, it was not the Germans responsible for the actual killing of these innocents, whose only crime was being born. Rather, responsibility lay with brainwashed and hate-filled Lithuanians, seizing the opportunity to murder off a population they had long envied for their wealth and business acumen. Anti-semitism has always been around, and will always be around, but it is the speed and brutality of the Lithuanians that renders many of today’s few remaining survivors unable to talk about their childhoods, or dare to consider returning to the country of their birth. There were those who saved Jews at the risk of execution, and not everyone was a Nazi collaborator. Yet entire towns of people, where Jews and Gentiles co-existed peacefully for centuries, personally watched thousands of Jewish citizens being marched into the forest, stripped, shot in the head, and pushed into hand-dug mass graves. Towns like Kupashok.

“Say, any of you guys might know how I come to be South African, I mean, why my great-grandparents ended up in South Africa? It seems a little random.”
Ike clears his throat, speaks softly with a certain amount of authority.
“From what I can gather, and I’m not sure 110% on this, there was a shipping company that took luxury goods from South Africa to London. They figured the best way to pay for the cost of sending an empty ship back to South Africa was to fill it up with people. So they sent a representative to Northern Lithuania and gave 15 free passage tickets to young Jewish men. I don’t know why Lithuania, I don’t know why Jewish men, maybe someone at the shipping company was Jewish with Lithuanian connections.”
“Sounds like, “interrupts Abie, “I mean it’s very good business. Shlomo goes to his son, asks him what two plus two is. His son replies ‘that depends, are you buying or selling?’ Ha ha ha,” and Abie has cracked himself up. “Anyway,” continues Ike, amused, “these fifteen men go over to South Africa, to the mines, and things are just about to boom there, Kimberley, the Gold Reef, and these guys make good money, so they bring their families out. Well, within a decade, thousands of Jews are leaving Lithuania and heading for South Africa. Less hardship, better weather, lots of opportunity. Men first, to save up, then they bring over who they can. That’s what your great-grandfather did, that’s why you’re South African.”
I think about this for a while. Two generations later, I’ve packed up and left South Africa for Canada. Similar opportunities maybe, but far less violent crime, corruption. Worse weather, sure, but I get Vancouver’s snow-capped mountains and beaches in exchange for Johannesburg’s inland urban sprawl. Definitely better lifestyle, hey, I’m just like my great-grandfather! Only I didn’t have to work and save up for 10 years (10 long, lonely years) before I could afford to bring over my wife and kids. It’s been a lot easier for me in every respect, but at least I can understand why he travelled to other side of the world. I wonder if my great-grandchildren will emigrate somewhere else too, and one day return to South Africa, to Johannesburg, to see where I grew up.

“Hey, this is bigger than I thought it would be,” I yell back to Abie, “by the way you described it, I thought it would a horseless one horse town.”
“Tse tse tse, today there are about 8000 people in Kupiskis, less or more,” he says, shaking his head, a little surprised too.
The two steeples of the main church are the highest points, dominating the skyline. I circle a roundabout, and pull into town. In 1897, a census declared there were 2661 Jews in Kupishik, 71% of the total population, but many were already emigrating overseas in search of better lives. By 1938, there were only 1200, 42% of the overall population. Today, there is not a single Jew in the area. Abie becomes quiet, begins to reminisce:
“My father Meyer was a grain merchant. Here in Kupashok, there was a thriving Jewish community. Everyone looked out for each other, nobody went hungry. If you couldn’t pay, too poor, that’s OK. He told me about Shabbos, Friday night, the shamos announcing “To the synagogue!”, the excitement on the street as people prepared for the Sabbath. The smell of food would float out of houses, fish from Yudel the Fishman, homemade challah, potato latkes! He spoke of boys and men constantly studying Torah and debating and arguing into the night, of celebrations on Jewish holidays, when people would sing and dance and pray, and of hunched old men and women who could still remember everyone’s names and birthdates. Like Blind Zalman, who worked for the credit union and never lost a letter. Everyone was very religious, the boys going to yeshivas around the country to learn, their mothers begging train passengers to take parcels to their children in this place and that. We got along with the Christian townspeople, traded with them - flax, grain, coal, crafts and goods from Germany - sewed their coats, we helped them out too if they were in trouble. There were problems, like anywhere, conflict between the Chassidim and the Mitnagiddim, problems with the bank, but there was always financial support from overseas Kupishokers, and no pogroms in the town itself. Jews had lived here since the 16th century. It was a pious town, a peaceful town, and then the war, and then…, well, there is nothing Jewish here anymore, just a few memorials recently built by those overseas, the killing sites. Come, you need to see.”

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