kauno.diena.lt
As US archaeologists continue their research in Lithuania in search of traces of Jewish culture and history, a group of Canadian filmmakers have arrived and plan to release a documentary in fall of next year.
An international team of archaeologists led by professor Richard Freund of Hartford have been working at several sites in Lithuania over the last few weeks, including the Kaunas forts, the Great Synagogue site in Vilnius and the Jewish labor camp on Subačiaus street also in Vilnius, where they are looking for malinas, or hiding places. They also studied a Nazi POW camp in Šilutė, Lithuania. For some of the sites they employed non-invasive techniques enabling them to make discoveries without tearing down existing structures. The archaeologists are wrapping up their work in Lithuania this week.
The archaeological and documentary teams traveled together to Vilnius where the Canadian filmmakers concentrated on the HKP labor camp on Subačiaus street in Vilnius. The HKP repaired Germany military automobiles.
Freund told BNS Nazi engineer major Karl Plagge set up the HKP camp and also saved over 1,000 Jews from the Holocaust.
Freund said he was in charge of the automobile repair enterprise and had 1,257 Jews kept in the two buildings there. He said he saved them when the Vilnius ghetto was liquidated. The Jews repaired uniforms and vehicles, according to Freund, who called Plagge the Oskar Schindler of Lithuania who was “without equal.”
The archaeologists found a malina under one of the buildings using non-invasive techniques and the documentarians recorded the find.
Award-winning Canadian documentary filmmaker Felix Golubev told BNS his team had interviewed a survivor from Boston, Sidney Handler, who hid in an attic there as a child. He was 10 then and is now 85, according to Golubev. He said they wanted to find two things at the HKP site: graves and malinas. “Today we found one of them,” he told BNS.
Golubev said they interviewed others including Litvak painter Samuel Bak. Their film will be shown in Canada first and will include some footage from the United States. Golubev hopes it will be shown later on BBC, the UK’s national broadcaster. Although they’ll conclude filming in January next year, producer Golubev thought it would be aired only in the fall fo 2018.
Thousands of Impressive Discoveries
Freund and an international team of experts from the US, Israel, Canada and Lithuania did work at the Great Synagogue site in Vilnius last summer as well. The Great Synagogue stood at the site from the 17th century to the 1950s. Last summer they removed a layer of top soil to determine the exact boundaries of the building. This summer they confirmed the existence of a ritual bath facility there.
Freund told BNS the group discovered two ritual bath structures, or mikves. They also found artifacts in the changing rooms for the baths, including coins, glass, glass bottles, perfume bottles, personal items, metal, ceramics fragments and clogs, covering all aspects of daily life, according to Freund.
The archaeologists replaced the earth moved back into the digs to protect the fidns under what is now a playground adjacent to a primary school built on top of the ruins of the synagogue by the Soviets.
In Kaunas the group investigated the Fourth, Seventh and Ninth Forts and the Jewish cemetery, determining cemetery boundaries.
Freund said they also did work in Šilutė, Lithuania, at a POW camp set up by the Nazis in WWII. He said the site is important to the USA and Great Britain as well as Lithuania, and that almost 5,000 aircraft pilot POWs from throughout Europe were sent here. He didn’t say whether they had discovered the remains of the American airmen they were hoping to find there.
The professor said there had been three American POWs who died at the camp. They searched the American section of the cemetery there trying to find them. Freund said it was the most northern and eastern POW camp to imprison Allied British, Australian, Belgian and Canadian pilots.
Full story in Lithuanian here.