by Geoff Vasil

 First let me tell about the story, because it is positive, and there isn’t enough of that to go around in the larger story of Lithuanian responses and non-responses to the Holocaust.

The webpage of Vakarų Ekspresas, or Evening Express, has a story entitled “Caring for Jewish Graves, Healing the Wounds of Nations,” which is on-line here in Lithuanian at www.ve.lt

“This week over 30 volunteers from an organization of Jewish-Christian cooperation (Christlich-Jüdische Zusammenarbeit ) of the Lippische Landeskirche church in  Germany have been traipsing through the Jewish cemetery of Darbėnai, cutting back bushes growing along the fence and polishing grave monuments. ‘It falls to our generation to correct the mistakes of our forefathers and to teach young people tolerance, so that expressions of extreme nationalism disappear from Europe,’ the head of the organization, Miroslav Danys, said.”

 The article goes on to say young people from the charitable organization Nojaus arka [Noah’s Ark] based in Lithuania’s Biržai region are helping clean up the neglected cemetery.

 The head of marketing and projects for Noah’s Ark, Gražvilė Noreikienė, who is coordinating volunteer work at the Darbėnai cemetery, told the newspaper: “Lithuanian Jewish Community chair Faina Kukliansky, with whom we are in constant contact, told us the cemetery in Darbėnai needed our help. We were surprised at how very well the Darbėnai cemetery is being looked after, thanks to the district municipality and the gymnasium. The walls and gate are intact, there are very few such gates left in Lithuania. It’s just that the old trees growing around it, their roots are lifting and warping the wall, and the branches are obscuring it. So we’re pruning branches, and wiping moss and lichen from the monuments so the inscriptions can be seen. We hope with our work to contribute in some small way to the preservation of the heritage of the Jewish people and to spread the concept of tolerance between peoples.”

Noreikienė told the newspaper she began working with the German Christian-Jewish Cooperation organization three years ago when a center for teaching tolerance was set up at the gymnasium in the city of Biržai, Lithuania where she teaches. Such centers nominally operate at 70 Lithuanian schools, with greater or lesser participation in community projects depending on school staff and student interest. Noreikienė pointed out Biržai has a long and continuing history of different faiths living together, and Biržai is traditionally known as a center of Protestantism within Catholic Lithuania. She said her Noah’s Ark volunteers are currently caring for a joint Karaite cemetery there. She said she met members of the German cooperation organization when they were visiting Lutheran colleagues in Biržai. Noreikienė noted there are actually four organizations involved in the Darbėnai Jewish cemetery work: hers, Danys’s, Klaipėda University and the Yiddish Center of Vilnius University.

In another of those “it’s a small world” moments, it turns out Klaipėda University historian Arūnas Baublys is an honorary counsel of Germany in the former German port. He studies Jewish heritage, does historic cartography and lent a hand to help these organizations come together for this purpose.

Also lending a hand–and giving the lie to the concept that all local boosters want to sweep the Holocaust under the rug–was the Darbėnai district municipality, who chipped in for on-site toilets, work tools and tent facilities for the volunteers.

According to the newspaper, the German delegation stayed in near-by Šventoji, and will be shown around the Lithuanian coast by their hosts, including trips planned to Klaipėda, Juodkrantė and other settlements along the Curonian Lagoon, as well as meetings with local Lutherans in Klaipėda and several Jewish communities.

Nor was it all work and no relaxation for the other volunteers, who received some informal education on Jewish culture, history and traditions by Klaipėda University dean Sada Šliužinskė and by Rūta Puišytė and Indrė Joffytė, who work at the Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University. They even gave the volunteers some lessons in Jewish cooking, and taught them how to make a dish they call farshmak, a sort of spread for bread made of herring, apples, onions, beets and bits of bread fried in oil.

According to the newspaper, “People of Jewish extraction of the Darbėnai township were buried here from the end of the 18th century onwards. The last people were buried from June to September of 1941; here are buried those who died in the Darbėnai Jewish ghetto. In 2005 the Old Jewish Cemetery of Darbėnai was declared a cultural heritage object protected by the state.”

Hopefully the farshmak tasted better than this last paragraph, because there is no mention of a Darbėnai Jewish ghetto in the Holocaust literature I have to hand as I write this. Unless they mean the women and children locked in the synagogue for three months and then taken down Vainieku street to the woods about 1 kilometer outside Darbėnai and shot in early September, 1941. Or the women who survived that initial culling to be shot a week later. Did the local Lithuanian Nazis lead them that far away to shoot them in woods, only to haul their corpses back to the cemetery? Possibly. I doubt it. That’s not how they did things in any of the other mass murder sites throughout Lithuania.

Another part of the article struck a strange note as well. The URL above is to the article hosted on the Vakarų Ekspresas newspaper site under news for Western Lithuania, but the original seems to be from an outfit called Pajurio Naujienos, or Coastal News at  www.pajurionaujienos.com

 The text is verbatim with the Vakarų Ekspresas article, but Vakarų Ekspresas only carries one reader comment under their story:

 “Let those take care of it who are crying the most about it.”

Not exactly sympathetic, but not alarming either.

Compare some of the comments under what seems to be the original version on Pajurio Naujienos:

1. How is the residents of Darbėnai do not protest such wantonness? Local activists should get together and formulate a serious statement. Most like the Plunge Jew Bunka sent them here. Let them first repair the old Jewish houses in the center of town, and only then let those ravers [?] into the Jewish cemetery. If they outdo the Zemaitijans, what then?

Maybe Sodom will come, or even Gomorrah.

2. Jews are making war on Palestine, killing peaceful people, they don’t have time to take care of graveyards, so they hire young Lithuanians to do it…

3. Lithuanians take care of Jewish graves, now Germans have arrived. But the question arises: why don’t Jews themselves come, after all, these are the graves of their forefathers. Why do they show initiative in erecting monuments to famous people, but can’t be bothered to tend to graves… Perhaps they don’t have time. They need to make war on the Palestinian people. To carry out the genocide of that people…

4. Germans are taking care of Jewish graves? While Jews are murdering the children of Palestine? For shame.

Consider again the words of the German director Miroslav Danys:

“‘It falls to our generation to correct the mistakes of our forefathers and to teach young people tolerance, so that expressions of extreme nationalism disappear from Europe … Through restoring historical sites, young people themselves take part in and create history, thus understanding more profoundly, inside, what mistakes should never be repeated. The genocide of the Jewish people is not just the shame of the German people, in this process there also participated Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Belarusian nationalists. And today it falls upon us together to heal the wounds of the past.”

It’s difficult to find more of a contrast than that which exists between the mentality of Danys, and of the majority of the comments under slightly incorrect but nice article published by both news websites. It’s difficult as well to reconcile the glaring omission in the town’s history made by the present inhabitants, and the attempts by people of good will in Lithuania and abroad to address the past openly and without fear.

Blaming Israel in 2014 for the mass murder of the Jews of Darbėnai in the summer of 1941 is, of course, irrational, a non-argument, an appeal to emotion or even the worst in human beings, the same appeal the Nazis made to the German people in the 1930s, the same appeal and allure of the dark side of the human animal that led to a barbarity never seen among real animals. It is also misdirection, apples and oranges, an attempt to avert attention from what went on in Darbėnai, not by passive forces, not by foreigners who came and went, but by the locals.

Just as it is true that we can tell almost everything about a society by the way it treats its weakest members, so too is it true that we can tell a lot about people by the way they treat their dead, and the memory of the dead.

No one knows anymore Dorbyan, because all the Jews who once lived there were murdered, and hundreds of Jews from neighboring Kretinge were also marched there to be shot. Not all were shot: bullets were too precious to waste on the children.The Lithuanians who live there now call the town Darbėnai, and say it is named after the Darba Creek that flows nearby, a tributary to the Šventoji River. According to the wikipedia entry in broken English, obviously written by locals who love their town, there now live there 1,598 souls. Somehow the wikipedia entry skips the murder of around half, perhaps more, of the town’s people in 1941, although the authors found time to mention a monument to freedom that was taken by the Soviets and replaced in 1989. Looking to the sources they cite for population figures, the high-water mark in the first half of the 20th century, the year 1937 had 1,921 people living there. The wikipedia authors neglect to give the next available population figure from their own source, for 1959, when 1,084 allegedly lived there. That’s a loss of 837 people, including approximately 600 local Jews.

 “On June 28, 1941, local whitearmbanders [Lithuanian Nazis] collected all the Jews of Darbėnai (about 600 people) to be sent to Kretinga. When brought to Kretinga, the Darbėnai Jews were seated next to the Jewish cemetery. Then they were photographed and, 2 hours later, sent back to Darbėnai. On the way, the people slept by the wayside. On June 29, 1941, the Jews were kept on the outskirts of the town in the open air for 24 hours. They had not received any food for two days. On the same day, six German officers arrived who separated the Jewish men from the women and took them away. In total, they took 150 Jewish men and four Soviet prisoners of war. The condemned were taken to the town’s outskirts and shot on the left side of the Darbėnai-Lazdininkai road, near the forest. They were shot with automatic weapons by the Germans. In the evening of the same day (June 29), the Jewish women and children were driven into the town’s synagogue.”

That’s one of three entries for Darbėnai in the Lithuanian Holocaust Atlas published by the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum in 2011. The next entries are for the women and children, murdered by Lithuanian Nazis and local police, and another mass murder of Jews from Kretinge, around 510 people, at the Joskaudai Forest in the Darbėnai district in mid-August, 1941. They were murdered by pro-Nazi police from Skuodas, Lithuania, Lithuanian Nazi commanders Mykolas Vitkus and Edmundas Tyras, and local volunteers.

 There were no German Nazis present at the latter two mass murders. The men of Darbėnai were murdered almost immediately, in late June of 1941, while the women and children, over 400 people, were kept locked in the town synagogue until September, when they were murdered.

Obviously, by any measure applied whatsoever, the mass murders in summer and fall of 1941 were the biggest events the small town had ever experienced, including the Wallach reform of ca. 1566,  the church built in 1621, the uprising of 1831 and the freedom monument built in 1930, removed in 1962 and rebuilt in 1989. Never before or since have 600 people been murdered all at once in this sleepy coastal town. Of course it wouldn’t be surprising if the locals wanted to suppress that story, if they felt somehow personally involved in either the murders, or in property acquired as a result.

Which goes to explain some disturbing comments under what is otherwise a nice story.