Vigilance

NATO flag raised alongside Lithuanian flag at President's Palace

One of the nice things about the NATO summit in Vilnius this summer is that we are getting all our roads and sidewalks fixed.  The work crews have been busy, patching holes, leveling walkways and putting in all sorts of new planted areas.  Even here in Žverynas these crews have been busy, as this is where many of the ambassadors live.  We are constantly getting fliers from realtors to lease our house out as an ambassador residence.  No thanks, we love our little courtyard, even if it feels like a fish bowl at times.

Larger residential blocks have risen up around us.  A three-story office building now sits where an old wood house and garden once stood next to us.  Polish brothers split the house, finally agreeing to sell it to a developer a few years back.  Loki likes coming to the office workers each morning as they pull up in their cars by the wrought iron fence, reaching through the rails to pet him.  The cat also likes going along the brick ledge to greet them, using the rails as a defense against Loki.  After three years, the two have learned to respect each other's share of the courtyard, albeit the occasional playful chase.

We try to keep the courtyard fresh.  We were out last weekend weeding the flower beds.  Daina was worried about all the insects on the rose bushes so she carefully cleaned each of the bushes and sprayed them with some sort of natural insecticide a horticulturist had recommended.  One of our rhododendrons still struggles.  Not sure what the problem is.  I'm convinced Klavs or one of his guests dumped something on it, either accidentally or on purpose, as the rhoddy next to it is doing just fine.  This would explain why he is so worried about it.

It was funny the other day seeing someone post a picture of a flame lily on the facebook site Archeology & Civilizations, noting it is the national flower of Zimbabwe.  We have one too, or at least one very similar to it, climbing the wrought iron fence.  Such a delicate bush.  Worry about it each winter but it keeps coming back.  This year with more delicate blossoms than usual.

The climbing rose bush has completely overtaken the garage wall nearly reaching the balcony above.  Looks like I will have to screw in some more metal trellises this fall.  It's gone wild so we get tiny little white blooms that last about a week and then quickly turn a molten brown.  You can say that for our yard in general.  We should do more to cultivate it into a more romantic setting but it looks fine.  

Vilnius has become an increasingly cosmopolitan city.  Our own neighborhood attests to that.  Most people who come here enjoy the cozy scale of the city with its numerous parks and over 100 kilometers of bike paths that connect the green areas similar to the emerald necklace of Boston.  The two cities are about the same size and scale.  

The other day we went to the opening of a new exhibit of Samuel Bak at the Vilnius Gaon Museum of Jewish History.  They have a permanent collection of his work.  He bequeathed an additional 50 paintings including a couple more from his youth, when he was forced to flee Vilnius during the Holocaust.  He's still going strong at 90.  Samuel lives just outside Boston and greeted the gathering via zoom during the reception, noting how nice it is to span the ocean with digital communication.  He's still sharp as a tack and as one of the speakers noted, looked like he would live to be 120.  I hope not, he said with a wry smile.

Vilnius had been a very cosmopolitan city before the war but with the purging of the Jewish population and the absorption into the Soviet Union, Vilnius lost a lot of its color.  For decades it was homogenized into an outlying proletarian city with much of its architectural history razed to the ground including the Great Synagogue, which was still standing after the war.  The Soviet planners decided to build an elementary school in its place.  Over the past 10 years, archeologists and architectural researchers from all of the world have done an extensive survey of the site, uncovering a number of artifacts that are now on display at the Gaon museum.

Bak's work is a bit like an archeological jigsaw puzzle, combining pieces from Vilnius with those from other parts of the world he has lived before settling into Massachusetts.  Our friend Vika organized the exhibit around these two themes as Vilnius turned 700 this year.

There were several ambassadors on hand for the opening, including the German ambassador who noted the irony of German troops now stationed in Lithuania to protect the country from potential Russian aggression.  This would have been unthought of not so long ago, given the atrocities that were committed here.  The Israeli, Polish and American ambassadors were also in attendance and gave speeches, noting the constant evolution of the city and that the most important thing is to maintain an open city.

The interesting thing about the Jewish experience in Vilnius is that the "ghetto" was never closed and that Jews lived all over the city thanks to proxies that signed the deeds and lease agreements.  I have an original copy of Israel Cohen's Vilna, published just before the war, in which he noted the open nature of the city throughout its long history, especially under Lithuanian and Polish rule.  It wasn't so accommodating under Russian rule in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  The Jews in Vilnius worked out all sorts of agreements with local authorities, resulting in what Cohen described as a vibrant life unlike that you saw in other parts of Europe.  Hence, Vilnius became a surrogate Jerusalem for European Jews, noted for its scholarly rabbis like the Gaon Elijah, who presided over the Jewish community in the 18th century.  The museum is named after him.  

Sadly, the war ended the spirit of fraternity.  It pit one ethnic group against another and in many ways Vilnius is still recovering from the aftermath of the war and Soviet occupation that lasted the better part of 50 years.  It's not just Jewish culture the Soviets wiped away but any sense of Lithuanian and Polish identity as well.  The Kremlin regarded Lithuania as part of Russia, closing down the Catholic churches, turning many into grain silos and other forms of storage, implanting Russian Orthodoxism if any religion at all.  But, we are continuously reminded of the lost Jewish identity.

It's ironic as Russian Orthodoxism had thrived here for many centuries.  There was even a growing call to unite the Orthodox and Catholic churches in the Ruthenian Uniate Church, but that was squelched when Russia annexed Lithuania during the partitions of the former Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth in the early 19th century.

There is a certain amount of resentment when it comes to the prominence of the Holocaust in contemporary Lithuanian history.  Lithuanians equate the deportations that occurred shortly before and after the war with the Holocaust, which has been rebuked by Anti-Defamation League.  Germany had initially ceded Lithuania to the Soviet Union in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, and Stalin immediately went about remaking the city until Hitler decided he wanted Lithuania as his own in 1941, particularly the port city of Klaipėda that had once been part of Prussia.  They still referred to it as Memel.  Lithuanians were removed on a massive scale, both by Soviets and by Germans, but nothing compared to the Holocaust, as the Jewish community is quick to point out.  Maybe so, but it was a very painful experience just the same.  

Daina's mother was deported with her family to Siberia.  Aldona was a preteen at the time.  She grew up entirely in Siberia and eventually came to be the head of the family when her mother died and father was in poor health.  She spoke of Siberia with both pain and fondness, remembering conflicting experiences.  When she returned to Vilnius after Stalin's death she still felt herself ostracized.  Khrushchev allowed people to repatriate to their home states in the late 1950's, but those returned deportees carried a black mark with them and Aldona could never go to college, so she went to work in the restaurant business.  Nevertheless, Aldona was avid reader and amassed an amazing collection of books that still sit in her library, which we haven't brought ourselves to touch after her death.  She loved those books.  They were an extension of herself.

What I like about Samuel Bak is that he talks about shared pain in his memoir Painted in Words and that we must all overcome our prejudices and hatreds and find ways to reconcile ourselves with each other.  He's such a positive person and well in tune with what is going on today, comparing the flight of Ukrainian refugees to that of Jews during WWII, and that we should do all we can to protect them as many Europeans did Jews during that awful period in history.  Otherwise, he wouldn't be here to tell his story.

I don't think it is a coincidence that the opening of Bak's latest works, many completed in the last ten years and still exhibiting the same fine hand from his youth, is timed with the NATO summit.  On the surface, the two couldn't be further apart but as the American ambassador noted, when a young Samuel encountered an American GI in Germany after the war, he asked for paints, not bubble gum as most kids did, and the GI went and found paint for him to continue his work.

It's just a shame we still have this heavy cloud of aggression hanging over us.  Bak noted the Wagner Group that has now found refuge in neighboring Belarus.  A group that openly embraces Nazi ideology.  Yet, they are just an extension of the Kremlin, which attempts to impose its autocratic will on smaller nations.  NATO is back to serving its original purpose, to keep Russia, which has styled itself as a modern-day Soviet Union, in check.

The shiny new streets and sidewalks bely the sense of unease that permeates Vilnius.  We all know that Putin can turn his head toward Lithuania at the other Baltic states at any moment.  He has openly challenged the independence of these countries in recent years, claiming their secession from the Soviet Union to be unconstitutional.  It doesn't matter that Russia itself seceded from the Soviet Union.  The Duma passed a measure where it claimed Russia to be the rightful successor to the USSR, and as such heir to all its former territories.  

For that reason Lithuanians, like all other countries that were former states of the Soviet Union, remain forever vigilant.  We see what is happening in Ukraine and Belarus and know that if Putin is able to get away with it, he or his successor will continue this campaign throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia.  This is why we still need NATO.