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Living
on the pedestrian street in Šiauliai has its surprises, almost all of them good
ones. This past Sunday, we discovered that the
finish line (also the starting point, but that is less exciting) for a ten-kilometer
race was directly in front of our apartment house. It was fun to watch. The photo above shows some random runners—and
also the handsome building in the background, the Šiaulių Didždvario Gimnazija, one of the
city’s best high schools. Formerly, it was a pillar of the local Jewish community that is no more.
Your posts repeatedly speak to what I gather is a attitude as if they never existed. Very troubling. How can "never again" have any significance and import if they don't recognize that it happened in the first place.
ReplyDeleteHi, Michael. That's a good question. A colleague convinced me that this is an extremely delicate issue because the Soviets were so good, not at denying that Jews ever existed, but at consistently exaggerating the extent to which Lithuanians participated in the atrocities that added up to the Jewish holocaust. According to this man, the Germans were glad to have whatever help they could get from the locals, but it was pretty minimal, and the Soviets had their reasons for wanting Lithuanians to share the guilt. We've seen something of the same thing in Ukraine, where the Soviets use casual charges of fascism to discredit the current regime.
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