The Lithuanian Jewish Community is publishing a series of articles by the historian Algimantas Kasparavičius, a senior researcher at the Lithuanian History Institute.

Part 2

In the 20th century Lithuania without intermission lived through two bloody world wars and the psychological Cold War tensely lasting more than 40 years. The realities and outcomes of World War I corresponded with the political aspirations of the Lithuanians and set the groundwork for restoration of Lithuanian statehood. The confused ideology and daily horrors of World War II resulted in the loss of the Lithuanians’ nation-state, the de facto destruction of the first Republic of Lithuania. Hundreds of thousands of Red Army troops occupied Lithuania on June 15, 1940, And less than two months later, using the policy of total state terror and the services of local collaborators, the Stalinist Soviet Union annexed Lithuania along with her two northern neighbors.

Without going into all the factual trivia or fine details, or worse the political circumstances of alternate plans, looking at events in Lithuania generally and in the context of the entire political-ideological and geopolitical of Europe, we can say the Soviet occupation of the Republic of Lithuania and the forced, actual destruction of Lithuanian statehood in the summer of 1940 had two essential features.

The Lithuanian Jewish Community is publishing a series of articles by the historian Algimantas Kasparavičius, a senior researcher at the Lithuanian History Institute.

Part 1

In Lithuanian historiography and in the public socio-cultural discourse, Lithuania’s greatest tragedy is often considered the Soviet occupation of 1940, which quickly turned into annexation and the loss of statehood. While not denying the historical significance of this catastrophe for modern Lithuanian statehood, considering the wider and deeper historical view, this is not entirely fair or moral historically. The greatest 20th century tragedy really came upon Lithuania not in June of 1940, when freedom and statehood was lost, but a year later when the Holocaust began in Nazi-occupied Lithuania. The greatest 20th-century tragedy for Lithuania is the destruction of the Jewish community which had lived for half of a millennium and had created a civic Lithuanian identity. Even the loss of national statehood is not an irreversible process, as shown by the experience of many peoples. When a nation loses statehood during critical historical circumstances, after the geopolitical situation changes for the better it is possible to restore it. That’s what Lithuania did as well on March 11, 1990. But the former Lithuanian Jewish Litvak community, rich in all senses, will never be restored, unfortunately. And that can only mean one thing, that our Lithuania, which for many Lithuanians still represents, as Dr. Jonas Basanavičius said, “the home of the people,” will remain diminished, darker, emptier, weaker and more fragile. In terms of civilization. Emotionally. Culturally. Demographically. Geopolitically.

Jewish forced laborers dug a tunnel from this holding pit near Vilnius, Lithuania, into the surrounding forest. Photo: Ezra Wolfinger for NOVA

In a look back at the top science stories of 2016, the New York Times science desk included non-invasive archaeology last summer at Ponar outside Vilnius. In “Evidence of a Great Escape” (not to be confused with The Great Escape at Stalag Luft III in Poland), New York Times science writer Nicholas St. Fleur talks about the discoveries made there.

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In 1943, the Nazis forced 80 Lithuanian Jews to dig up the rotting bodies of their murdered neighbors, pile them on top of wood and burn them.

They were then ordered to mix the ashes with sand and bury the remains so no one would know of the atrocities committed at Ponar, an extermination site where the Nazis executed more than 100,000 people.