AN UNFORGETTABLE HAPPENING

I have always been something of a musical snob and only interested in classical music. I therefore missed out on a great artist of our times and only discovered him after he died,  when listening to his prophetic swansong “Hineni”. Nineteen days before his own death, Leonard Cohen issued the album “You Want It Darker”, whose prophetic words were matched to music which was the deepest, darkest and slowest of his career.

After my interest was awakened I discovered that Leonard Cohen”s ancestors came from a village in Lithuania called Moletai, just outside of Vilna. The list of people who trace their ancestry to this small town, those who the Nazis and Lithuanians wanted to annihilate, includes many of the greatest Jewish minds of our time. It includes Nobel Prize Laureate Bob Dylan; Canada’s great international human rights lawyer Irwin Cotler; former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin; New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg; painter Marc Chagall; foremost American composer Aaron Copland; Nobel Prize Laureate Nadine Gordimer, present Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; Israeli writer Amos Oz, American writer J. D. Salinger, well-known screen actors, directors, comedians, etc. How many other future leaders, thinkers, artists, teachers, and productive citizens did they kill?

Irene Angelico is an acclaimed film director, producer and writer. She is the recipient of numerous international awards for directing and producing, as well as a Gemini for best writing in a documentary. In 1980 Angelico and her husband formed DLI Productions. Together, they produced and directed “Dark Lullabies” about the effect of the Holocaust on the next generation of Germans and Jews. This highly regarded film has been shown worldwide and has garnered many prestigious international prizes. Irene’s parents were imprisoned in the Vilna Ghetto after fleeing Warsaw. She and her husband were invited by the human rights festival, Inconvenient Films, to show their documentary Dark Lullabies. The following is a description of her pilgrimage to her parents’ past. 

“Every year on Lithuania’s Independence Day, the neo-Nazis march in Vilnius from the Cathedral up the city’s central boulevard. Like the other former Soviet bloc countries, Lithuanians placed all the blame for the Holocaust on the West and on the Soviet Union. Although Lithuanians collaborated in killing over ninety per cent of their own Jewish population, they never acknowledged any responsibility. For 75 years and three generations they said nothing, learned nothing and changed not at all.

Then, last August, the Jewish community organized a march to commemorate the massacre in Moletai. There, in the summer of 1941, the Lithuanian police rounded up all the Jews of the village, locked them in a synagogue without food or water, then forced them to march to their deaths. They shot over 3,400 Jews into a pit – an atrocity followed by 75 years of silence.

The Jewish community organized the march to mark the anniversary. They expected 200, maybe 300, people to come, including the victims’ relatives from other countries. But then something unprecedented occurred. It began with an article the beloved Lithuanian writer and film director Marius Ivaškevičius wrote about the event.  

‘I’m not Jewish, I’m Lithuanian ….I don’t know, perhaps I am naïve, but for some reason I believe our generation can end this nightmare…. That time in Molėtai. Four o’clock. August 29. We will go visit those who have been waiting for us three-quarters of a century. I believe they knew the day would come when Lithuania would turn back to them. And then they would return to her. Because Lithuania was their home. Their only home, they had no other.’

Three thousand Lithuanians came out to march with the Jewish community. They came to recognize those murdered as their own – their own loss, and their own pain.

There were many young Lithuanians, priests, monks, and high-ranking officials including the president, ambassadors, ministers, the army chief and the 83-year old first president of post-Soviet Lithuania. There were people from Poland, Russia, Latvia and Belarus who came to march with the loved ones of the massacred Jews.

Some non-Jews wore yellow Stars of David. Afterwards, everyone waited patiently to light a candle and place a stone on the memorial.

It took three generations for Lithuanians to begin to come to terms with their country’s role in the Holocaust. There were two emotional screenings of Dark Lullabies in Vilnius and the festival organizers ended up adding a third. The audiences that attended were almost all young people, who evidently felt they could not move forward without facing their past.

After one screening, a beautiful girl in her mid-twenties stood up and said, “We always thought this happened to the Jews. Now we realize that this happened to our own citizens, to us.”