A life-changing journey

ELLEN CASSEDY

My mother used Yiddish words only sparingly, like a spice. At the window on a rainy day: “A pliukhe” (downpour). In the kitchen: “Hand me that shisl” (bowl). On the telephone: “The woman’s a makhsheyfe” (witch).

After my mother died, I found myself missing these pungent expressions. When I learned about a summer institute in Yiddish in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, I was eager to go. I wanted to walk the streets where my Jewish forebears had walked, to breathe that air.

At that point, I barely knew where Lithuania was. I had to get out an atlas to learn that it’s the most southern of the three Baltic republics, with Latvia and Estonia on top. One thing I did know was that Lithuania was both a place where Jews and their culture had once flourished, and a place where Jews were annihilated on a massive scale. By the end of the Second World War, six percent of Lithuania’s 240,000 Jews remained alive. Today, only 4,000 Jews remain.

In the mornings at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, we studied Yiddish language and literature in all its glory, which was a mekhaye, great pleasure. In the afternoons, the last Yiddish speakers of this beautiful city, now in their eighties, walked us through the twisting lanes of the Jewish quarter, which once swirled with religious, political and intellectual ferment. They told us about the terrible destruction that came with the Nazi occupation, and about the years after the war, when Lithuania was incorporated into the Soviet Union.

By the time the Soviet Union fell in 1991, we learned, half a century under two regimes had turned Lithuania into a cauldron, boiling and bubbling with competing martyrdoms, hatreds and resentments. As a journalist, I undertook to investigate that cauldron. And what I found surprised me.

Yes, I found evidence of antisemitism. I saw swastikas painted on Jewish gravestones. I learned that in Lithuania, as elsewhere in eastern Europe, a call has arisen for greater recognition of Stalin’s crimes – and that call often seems bound up with an attempt to deny or distort Hitler’s crimes. Yet I also met brave souls, Jews and non-Jews, who were striving in an often hostile environment to build a more tolerant future. These people educated me and they inspired me.

Perhaps the most remarkable was Irena Veisaite. Some 70 years ago, at the age of 15, Irena was forced into the ghetto, alone, without her parents. After two years, non-Jewish Lithuanians smuggled her out. She ended up hiding in the home of a woman she came to consider her second mother. This is how she survived. After the war, this second mother was sent to Siberia by the Soviet regime.

Irena’s family was killed by the Nazis, and then her second mother was taken from her. Yet, out of this terrible suffering, she emerged as a leader of efforts toward mutual understanding.

I met with educators who were employed by the government to design curricula about the Holocaust for Lithuanians of all ages. “If Lithuania is to mature as a nation,” one of them told me, “Lithuanians need to ask themselves rigorous moral questions. Our goal is to transform ourselves from a nation of bystanders into an active civil society.”

Ruta Puisyte, a young non-Jewish woman who worked at the Jewish museum, showed me the questions she was posing in a booklet for Lithuanian schoolchildren:

• What do you think of Albert Einstein’s saying, “The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing”?

• Have you ever been in a situation where someone needed your help and you didn’t provide it? If so, why did you behave like others, rather than follow your conscience?

• Is there a connection between your answers and the behavior of people during the war?

I set out for the Old World to learn Yiddish. But my journey into the old Jewish heartland did more than expand my vocabulary. It also expanded my sense of possibilities.

Having met courageous individuals dedicated to building a tolerant future, I feel a cautious sense of hope – not only for Lithuania, but also for other nations struggling to emerge from conflict.

Maybe it is possible for people to reach out and appeal to one another as fellow beings with the capacity for moral choice. Maybe we can create the kind of society where citizens can stand up, instead of standing by.

Ellen Cassedy is author most recently of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust (University of Nebraska Press 2012). Her work has been published in Hadassah, the Forward, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Polin, Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal and other publications. She lives near Washington, D.C. She will be in Vancouver to give a free book talk on Feb. 13, 7 p.m., at Har El Synagogue; and on Feb. 15, with a Friday night dinner, 6:15 p.m., and a talk at 8 p.m., at the Peretz Centre ($12 or dish for dinner and talk; $10/non-member for talk only).

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