Lithuania starts to pay respect to its murdered Jews

ALL THE Jews of Seduva are dead. The lucky ones who died ordinary peacetime deaths lie beneath simple gravestones in a windswept cemetery outside this unremarkable village. The unlucky ones were dragged out of town, forced into a ghetto in the next village, and then, in August 1941, marched into the woods and shot to death in their hundreds by their Lithuanian neighbours, overseen by the invading Germans. Their corpses were dumped in pits.

Most traces of centuries of Jewish presence were also obliterated, as they were in hundreds of other shtetls (small Jewish towns or villages) throughout Lithuania. The town’s synagogues are gone. The old shtetl’s square, where Jewish artisans traded and debated, is desolate. Until recently, the ancient cemetery was an overgrown mess of weeds and rubbish; the more ornate gravestones were plundered. With no Jews left to tend to the graveyard, the rough-hewn tombstones were worn blank by wind and weather.

Yet today the cemetery is well-kept and dignified. The gravestones have been put upright and restored, and the names remaining upon them carefully recorded. At the three mass-murder sites in the surrounding forests, there are solemn new memorials to the dead. And opposite the cemetery, construction has begun for a museum of Jewish village life, the Lost Shtetl Museum, set to open in 2020.

It comes as a surprise to find signs of renewal in this remote town. The country is itself a cemetery for Jews: out of some 250,000 Jews living in Lithuania before the second world war, some 90% were killed—one of the worst rates in Europe, due to the thoroughness of the Germans and the widespread collaboration of Lithuanians, who rounded up and murdered Jews.

Anti-Semitism remains common: in a Pew poll in 2015, half of Lithuanians said they would not accept Jews in their family. Almost a quarter said they would reject them as neighbours or citizens. Nationalists love talking about Lithuania’s struggles against Russians or Poles, but are reluctant to discuss their compatriots who collaborated with the Nazis. In downtown Vilnius, a showy Museum of Genocide Victims is not about the Holocaust, which is strenuously downplayed, but about the post-war Soviet occupation of Lithuania, during which tens of thousands of people died in labour or prison camps over the decades.

The memorials in Seduva are not the work of the government (although the prime minister and other officials attended a groundbreaking ceremony for the museum in May), but of a small private foundation, the Seduva Jewish Memorial Fund, which seeks to remember Jewish life in one typical shtetl. “All you can find is fragments,” says Sergey Kanovich, a Lithuanian-born writer who emigrated to Israel and is a founder of the organisation.

For some six centuries before 1941, Lithuania was a centre of Jewish civilisation and learning. Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, was renowned as “the Jerusalem of the North”, most famous for the 18th-century teachings of Rabbi Elijah son of Solomon, who was celebrated as “the Vilna Gaon”—the genius of Vilnius. In the countryside, the shtetls nurtured scholarship, crafts and sports teams.

In Seduva, the hope is to recall some of what was lost forever when Lithuania’s shtetls were annihilated. The town itself still has some of the humble wooden houses visible in 19th-century images, not much changed: walking some of its streets, it is hard to know exactly what century it is. While the museum cannot avoid discussing the Holocaust, it means to go deeper: understanding how the Jews there lived, and not just how they were murdered.