Digging up the Past in Lithuania

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More images from Kupishok

He directs me a few hundred metres past the town centre, tells me to park on the road adjacent to a supermarket. Opposite is the Freethinkers Cemetery. Grim, ashen iron gates surround the park, and inside I see a white Soviet statue, Russian tombstones. We walk to the back, and there are five long rectangle strips of grass, each enclosed by foot-high cement walls. In late 1941, local white-banded Nazi collaborators marched over 1000 Jewish men, women and children to this site, and brutally murdered them. Babies were hit against trees to save bullets. The shots could be heard by everyone in town, the mass graves themselves are in clear view of houses and the church steeples. Ike and Abie put a hand each on my shoulder, steadying me.
“I don’t…I don’t understand. Tell me, what goes through a person’s mind when they kill children, shoot an old lady through the head…?”
They remain silent, but tears have swelled up, along with anger, burning inside me. I visualize the victims, hear the ghost echoes of gunshots, look towards the town, the supermarket, walk around each grave in the soft rain. The October Sky is watching the same show, and crying too.
Finally, Ike speaks up. “Come Robin, there is more.”

We drive over to the civic center, where they introduce me to a local journalist named Eugenja. She has gray hair and kind eyes, the rain has stopped (a commercial break?), so we walk down a street alongside century-old yellow painted houses. An old Soviet-era Lada is parked by an oak tree, maple leaves are painted seasonal red. The scene is entirely picturesque, the definition of autumn charm. In the early 90’s, after Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to bravely declare its independence from the Iron Curtain, Eugenja wrote a series of influential articles examining the guilt of the country, of Kupashok, in the aftermath of the Nazi genocide. It was simply not something that could be swept under the rug. People were living with enormous guilt, and for a future to be bright, they had to make sense of a dark past. She tells me about Luva, a German in Kupashok who was taken in by local townspeople claiming to have escaped the Russians. He turned out to be a Nazi spy, organizing local militias and henchmen, and instigating the massacres of Kupashok’s Jews. Local townspeople did all the killing under his supervision. I asked Eugenja what became of this Luva.
“He died of old age in Cologne, Germany,” she tells me.
“And what became of the henchmen, the killers, what happened to them?”
She explains that many were captured, arrested or executed by the Russians. Collaborators and their families were scorned by the community, ostracised, known as “Jew Killers”.
“Their children were forced to leave, they could not have normal lives here,” she says. People, she tells me, looked back fondly on the Jews, the way they cared for each other, cut people breaks when times were tough. But with no survivors, there was nobody to rebuild a community, nobody to demand revenge or justice. And so Kupashok continued, under a new occupier, the Soviets, who later bulldozed the Jewish cemetery, and with it centuries of local Jewish presence.

There is one cobblestoned street left, Sinagogo Street, whose name recalls this history. The surviving synagogue has been converted into the town’s library. The old Jewish cemetery is now a park with a giant water tower, but a memorial has been built, and a dozen jagged 19th century Jewish tombstones lie under an ominous tree, Hebrew letter faded with time. The the descendants of Kupishik have not forgotten, and in 2004, a group of 50 people from the UK, Israel, Denmark, Australia, the US and South Africa returned to unveil a memorial plaque on the walls of the old synagogue, as well as at the killing sites. In 1997, it was discovered that a group of midwives had assembled a handwritten list of 808 Jewish residents who were murdered during the war. Why this list was compiled is not clear, but it is unique within the entire country, the only list that names some of the town’s victims and their ages. This led to a project to create a Kupashok memorial, a Wall of Memory, identifying and honoring the vanished Jewish community. It rests protected inside the library, on the walls of the old synagogue, and it is late afternoon by the time I get there. I find it impossible to make sense of a figure like six million. Six bazillion! Six Trazillion! But standing in front of 808 names, I imagine a rock concert, or a sporting event, or morning assembly at a high school. I can see the people, their faces, their tragedy. What strikes me instantly is the ages: 14, 8, 7, 1, 20, 18, 32 - my age. And then I run my fingers up the list, and find Ezrochovicius, Ezrochoviute, Ezrochas, Ezrochiene, variations of my name, all relatives, all murdered. A group of kids come out of the library, their voices echo in the gloom. I walk over to Abie and Ike, faces in their hands, and together we sit on a table in silence. Emotion strangles the life out of me. The memorial quotes Isaiah, in Hebrew and English: I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.

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