by Geoff Vasil

Sometimes you open a door and walk into a room expecting nothing, and the strangest things happen. I went to the Rositsan Elite Chess and Checkers Club chess tournament dedicated to the memory of chess enthusiast and interwar Lithuanian president Kazys Grinius at the Lithuanian Jewish Community on Sunday morning, June 19, and thought I saw the president himself, although he died many years ago in exile in America.

At the chess tournament held in his name, there were tables with timers and boards set up both inside the Jascha Heifetz hall and in the foyer and people of all age groups from pre-teen to people in their 80s waiting for the games to begin. I expected some sort of formal nod of the head to the former president, a cursory commemoration after which the players would get down to business. The organizers had a much different idea of what it means to honor someone. Multiple speakers took the podium, gifts were lavished, chess medallions were passed out and there was a sincere recollection of the man himself.

Borisas Gelpernas, former chess champion, spoke about how Kazys Grinius rescued his mother and father from the Kaunas ghetto. At first his father refused the offer of help, not wanting to put Grinius in danger, but the former Lithuanian president kept insisting, and after the actions–mass shootings of Jews–began, he and his wife did hide in Grinius’s own apartment for several months, along with Kristina, Kazys’s second wife.

In all respects Kazys Grinius doesn’t fit the profile, neither of a rescuer nor of a politician. He overlaps and extends beyond the categories. Most rescuers kept an extremely low profile, for obvious reasons, whereas most Lithuanian politicians and public figures were afraid to act or even speak out. Grinius did all of the above. Besides rescuing numerous Jews from death, he and another man eventually wrote and signed a memorandum calling on the Nazis to stop the mass murder of Lithuania’s Jews. For this he was arrested by the Nazis.

Following Gelpernas, it appeared as if Kazys Grinius himself approached the podium. In fact it was the director of the Kazys Grinius memorial museum near Marijampolė, Vytautas Grinius, a relative of the president and Righteous Gentile. He thanked the Jewish Community for inviting him and spoke about the life of the man, and the attempt by museum staff to have some of his memoirs published. He said he has one book of writings by the late president written in Lithuanian, but in the old style seldom encountered anymore, the Tsarist orthography. Even 20 years ago one sometimes came across elderly Lithuanians who only knew how to write the language in the old standardized Cyrillic orthography. Vytautas Grinius also asked the audience for help in translating and publishing a book he discovered in Yiddish which appears to be a general history of the city of Marijampolė. He recalled what Kazys Grinius used to say about chess: for young people it helps them to organize their thoughts and think logically, for adults it aids in strategic thinking, and for the elderly it helps them to live longer. Kazys Grinius was an avid chess player who taught both his sons to play.

Vytautas Višinskis, director of the Goodwill Foundation, spoke about the need to remember the rescuers, and thanked the organizers in the name of his organization both for the event to honor Kazys Grinius and the on-going chess matches at the Lithuanian Jewish Community.

A shortened version of a Lithuanian Television documentary about Grinius was screened, detailing his life, his opposition to the Nazis and Soviets, his family’s murder and his own escape to the West, to America, where he passed away in 1950. His ashes were returned to Lithuania shortly after independence in 1990. In 2015 the Lithuanian parliament declared 2016 the Year of Kazys Grinius to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth.

For more about the museum dedicated to his memory, see:
http://www.griniausmuziejus.lt/