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JEWISH AFFAIRS Chanukah 2015
who had just published a book of translations
of Yiddish articles, including one on Birzh,
that appeared in the Afrikaner Idishe Tsaytung
between 1952–1954. She had subsequently
gone to Lithuania and visited Birzh (where she
had found the lake as beautiful as her Birzh
grandmother had described it). 13
The question was what would be the most
appropriate form for such a commemoration
to take? The number of monuments and
memorial spaces dedicated specifically to
the mass murder has begun to reach into the
thousands, some occupying the former sites of
destruction and including hundreds of unofficial
memorials erected by Jewish families to mark
the killing fields in the forest. James Young,
who has examined and analysed the meaning
and significance of such memorials, believes it
likely that as many people now visit Holocaust
memorials every year as died during the
Holocaust itself. Memorials by themselves, he
contends, remain inert and amnesiac. Whatever
memory they finally produce and how viewers
respond to them depend on how they are used
politically and religiously in the community, who
has seen them and under what circumstances.
Memory is never shaped in a vacuum. Some
memorials are erected because of the Jewish
injunction to remember. Others are built to
educate the next generation and to inculcate a
sense of shared experience and destiny while
others are designed to expiate guilt - even to
attract tourists. 14
Bennie and his group did not want their
contribution just to be another heap of stones
visited by families on a once-in-a-lifetime trip
to der heim. Or, in the words of the French
philosopher Pierre Nora, “Under the illusion
that our memorial edifices will always be there
to remind us, we take leave of them and return
only at our convenience. To the extent that we
encourage monuments to do our memory-work
for us, we become that much more forgetful”. 15
Lithuania has done more than any other
country to distort the history of the Shoah and
the role of its nationals. Its government has
rewritten the past, considering themselves to
be the victims of a double Holocaust - firstly
by the Soviets, who occupied the Baltic States
through the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact at the
outset of the Second World War, and secondly
by the Nazis, who invaded in 1941. With
Germany’s defeat in 1945, Russia took over
again. It erected memorials to acknowledge the
massacres, but classified the victims as Soviet
citizens, not as Jews.
There are no Jews living in Birzh today.
One lone Jew returned to Birzh and continued
to live there, dying in the town a few months
ago. He was Sheftel Melamed, who escaped
by fleeing across the border into Russia with
some friends in a car belonging to one of their
parents. He joined the Russian army and returned
after the war.
In 1991, Lithuania regained its independence
and a Vilna Museum of Genocide Victims was
established. But its genocide victims are the
Lithuanians; the perpetrators are the Communists.
Lithuanian perpetrators who killed Jews have
been hailed as national heroes, with statues
erected and schools named in their honour. The
current government emphasises Soviet crimes.
Horrible as the Soviet occupation was, the
largest group of genocide victims in Lithuania
were the Jews murdered by the Nazis with the
help of the local population. These, of course,
were Lithuanian citizens and had been for
centuries. The government fails to acknowledge
the scale of the Holocaust in Lithuania or the
role of Lithuanians in the mass shootings on
Lithuanian territory. 16
Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel Office
of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, has complained
about the ongoing efforts of Lithuanian
governments to minimize the role of Lithuanian
Nazi collaborators in Shoah crimes, including
the nearly total annihilation of Lithuanian
Jewry - 96.4% were killed, more than in any
other country. He points out that every single
Lithuanian government has failed to acknowledge
the complicity of their own citizens in the
killing of the Jewish citizens or to punish a
single Lithuanian war criminal, including any
of the more than dozen deported there from
the United States. In addition, a list of 2055
local perpetrators compiled by the government’s
Center for Genocide and Resistance Research
Center three years ago, which only named a small
number of the criminals, has been suppressed,
rather than being acted upon. 17
Knowing this, the team decided that
any memorial they erected in Birzh should
be designed to contribute to educating the
Lithuanians themselves about the Jews who been
living among them for centuries before their
grandparents had helped to murder them. Abel
and Glenda had seen and established tolerance
education centres in schools and met with the
co-ordinators of the Birzh Ausra High School.
Students at that institution had collected names
of former Birzh Jews and painted them on stones,
which they took in a procession, accompanied by
the deputy mayor, from the Birzh ghetto to the
mass grave, where they were solemnly placed.
The school had also been engaged in cleaning
the old Jewish and Karaite Cemetery together
with a Christian-Jewish society from Lippe,
Germany, and members of the Lippe Reformed
Church. The Ausra School had identified a
large classroom that could be used for such a
tolerance centre. It would require multi-media
facilities to enable the students to be taught
about the Holocaust and life in the town before
the war. The Ausra School co-ordinator had
mentioned to the Mayor that it was a pity that
in the Birzh Town Museum was no mention of
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