Whatever the cause, there is unlikely to be a trash basket anywhere in public that doesn't have one and probably many banana peels. And all the vendors use abacuses (abaci?) to total up your bill.
On the way to the museum Evelyn had noticed the trolley signs for trolleys that the 'Lonely Planet' guide said went to Paneriai, or at least to a bus that did. So we decided to go to Paneriai from here. (It certainly fit in thematically.)
Paneriai is actually about an hour's bus ride six miles southwest of Vilnius. Yes, we are afraid it is one more gruesome spot, our last for a while. This is a piney forest where the Nazis murdered 100,000 people, about 70% of them Jews, although one book points out that Lithuanians did at least as much of the killing as the Nazis did. This was where Vilna died. The site is right next to a rail yard which conjures up other images of the Holocaust, though inaccurately here. The job was done right here rather than sending Jews to some death factory elsewhere.
Another false but evocative image is the trolley we took which was absolutely packed. The trolley was packed more tightly than the ones on our last Eastern European trip. Evelyn was left unable even to reach a bar to grab onto. She was held in place just by the bodies around her. Mark was a little amused by the sight of a teenager trying to eat a banana in this crush and getting banana smears on the back of another passenger. (In fact, it was so crowded that they had problems getting the door to close!)
After crowding onto this trolley, we bounced along and the trolley got a little less crowded. Since our transfer (Vaduvos) was near the end of the line, the trolley was pretty empty by the time we got there. (The trolley map in 'Vilnius in Your Pocket' was a real help in figuring out where we wanted to go.) We got off and waited in the cold and wind for bus number 8 for a long time. (The fact that it was gray, cold, and windy probably made it seem longer than it was.) We got on and rode another mile or two to the last stop, at the Paneriai train yards.
We got off and crossed the tracks using the pedestrian overpass. A lot of people just walked across the tracks, but this seemed dangerous and besides, you have to wait for the trains to pass if you do that. On the far side, we turned right and walked down a road into the forest (about half a mile, or a kilometer). At the end of the road was a small parking lot (empty except for one car) and a stone memorial saying that 100,000 people were murdered here, 70,000 of them Jews. The car belonged to a clean-up crew, who were raking the dead leaves and branches away from the bases of the memorials and then burning the collected refuse. There was something eerie about seeing this smoke rising where the thousands of bodies had been burned before. Now all that remains are the pits, filled in and covered with grass, where the ashes are buried. There are fresh flowers on the stones marking the spots, and we saw a couple more people walking around with tulips to put on the memorials. Apparently red tulips are what people put on graves here. I assume these were all put there by Christians, since the Jewish custom is not to place a flower, killing a plant, but to place a stone to help bury the dead. (On the Internet many people were not sure what was happening in the epilogue to SCHINDLER'S LIST. The people were placing stones as a mark of respect.) The memorials also had a few stones on them, and we put stones on as well.
One practical note: We had a hard time at first finding stones. If you want to place memorial stones, you should pick up a few stones on the way along the road.
There is also a tiny museum, similar to those at the Ninth Fort and in Vilnius. There was more English translation here, though often the text of documents was left untranslated. There was one other person (besides the caretaker) in the museum. As we left, Mark commented that no one would understand why we were spending our vacation going to death camps. This isn't the most fun way to spend a vacation, but we had only one more and that wasn't for another six days. Why do we go? A sense of obligation, we suppose--a feeling that as long as people see that these crimes are remembered they may also realize that they need to be guarded against. If people see that no one remembers these atrocities, they may decide that no one will care if such things happen again.
Evelyn writes, 'Walking to Paneriai we walked in the footsteps of thousands; walking back we were alone.'
From there we returned to Vilnius. We had eaten a big lunch, so we just got a small package of (very good) Swedish cookies and we worked on our logs in the room all evening long.
May 10, 1994: Same breakfast and routine as yesterday. Right now Thing tells Mark we are 16.46% through the trip. That is discounting seven hours a night for sleeping. With sleep time, we are 17.54% through. But he doesn't write in his log or take pictures in his sleep (yet). He should be on shot 12 of his 5th roll of film. Safe there--he is on shot 13 of his 4th roll. However, he should be on page 96 of the first book of his log and he is actually on page 105. Thing allows some extra for an early start and extra writing for the end of the trip. (It also assumes he won't start taking pictures until he gets to my destination and will stop taking pictures when he boards the plane.)
Well, Lithuania is obviously not doing really well economically. There appear everywhere signs that it has not fully recovered from years of Soviet economics. That is to be expected of the Baltic states. Estonia probably recovered fastest due to trade with Scandinavia. Here the scars of the perfectly managed economy will take longer to heal. Our hosts--whose name we've never gotten, by the way--are hard-working but the house, particularly the outside, shows signs of real poverty. By American standards we are paying high for our comfort level, but I know our hosts need the money. And their extravagances are all in the room they have rented out: the color television and VCR, the stereo, and the books. They have a china cabinet with place settings for six people, yet a table that seems to indicate that the china service was not purchased for use in this apartment unless they can make it a cramped six people.
When we left this morning it was to go to the Orthodox Church of the Holy Spirit, the Philharmonic to see if anything was on, and the city gates. The Philharmonic office was closed until 13:00. The Holy Spirit Church is the chief Russian Orthodox church of Lithuania, dating back to the 1600s. It has a high ceiling, maybe fifty feet (fifteen meters) high, with a dome that goes up higher. We did not go in because there was a mass in progress. (And a very well-attended mass, though most of the worshippers were elderly women. This may be because this was a work day, of course.) Everyone was standing (there are no pews in Orthodox churches). There was a table with candles and loaves of bread. There were crystal chandeliers and paintings edged in gold. There were a series of arches on the left and right going to the ceiling and delineating chapels on each side. The color scheme was pastel blue and beige. (The guidebook calls it pink, but it was closer to beige.) There were mouldings over the arches and a life-size angel's head. Actually, since we have not really seen an angel, it is only what we surmise to be life-size. The one touch that struck Mark as odd were two words in Cyrillic at the front. The letters were drawn in bulbs, giving it a very Broadway look. It is interesting to have Russian Orthodox and Catholic cathedrals getting along in one city.
As you might have detected, this log has a definite Jewish orientation and is heavy on Jewish sites and light on churches. We get the impression we could have filled six days in Vilnius just going to churches--there *are* a lot of them. But someone else can write up that tour.
At the end of the street was Aushros Vartai, the Gates of Dawn, which are part of the original wall of the city and on the outside decorated with what looks to be a wrought iron picture of the sun. Above it is a chapel with a (supposedly) miraculous icon of the Virgin Mary. But we could see it was very crowded so skipped climbing the stairs just to get a glimpse of it.
We walked back on Zhydu gatve where the great cathedral-sized synagogue once stood. It is now a kindergarten and a playground with a basketball hoop.
Then we sat in Cathedral Square and wrote in our logs. A television crew was doing Lithuanian-in-the-street interviews. Mark turned the tables and took their picture. What wasn't there were the hordes of tourists and tour buses that one would find at a similar square in a Western European city. We don't know if it's just early in the season or if we really have come before this area has gotten discovered by tourists. We suspect the latter--are other cities empty of tourists in May? Certainly there is less English spoken and understood here than anywhere else we've been on our own, and comparable to Romania and Bulgaria. Not that this is a problem. It is good that Litinterp spoke English, but other than that we're making do with the mini-glossary in the 'Lonely Planet' guide.
Since we don't read Lithuanian and there's very little English here, where did we go next? Right! A bookstore! First we went to the Penki Kontinentai (Five Continents) at Vilniaus gatve 39, which is described as a 'foreign-languages bookshop' and was expected to be large, according to books published before it opened. Well, it does have one shelf of novels in English and some textbooks and technical books in English, but it's several blocks off Gedimino prospektas and not worth the walk unless you actually *need* something in English.
The Vilnius Bookstore on Gedimino and Vilniaus gatve is a more complete bookstore, but basically all the books are in Lithuanian or Russian. There was a lot of science fiction (a lot of Robert Silverberg, especially) and we got DRACULA in Lithuanian and KING KONG, KILLER CRABS, and SPIDERS in an omnibus Russian edition. Some Russian printer grinds these out with little concern for niceties like copyright. The layout of this bookstore was similar to the others we went into (all except the Penki Kontinentai). There are several 'stands' which form one long row against the back wall. A table in front of the stand has a copy of each of the books it carries. You can look at those, but when you want to buy, you tell (or point to or show) the clerk behind the counter what you want and she retrieves it from the shelves along the wall. You pay separately at each stand for the books you buy there. Again, everyone uses abacuses to total the bill. There is no overlap that we could detect in the books carried by the various stands, but from one bookstore to the next there wasn't much variation. Evelyn suspects the average B. Dalton or Waldenbooks in a mall in the United States has a wider selection. But books are cheaper in Lithuania--usually under US$1, and sometimes as little as 1 Lt.
Evelyn notes that she asked at one stand, 'Sherlock Holmes?' The woman said no, but she clearly understood what was being asked for.
We also got some film music on cassette.
After the music store, Evelyn had this idea for what to do with some spare time. Our train is 23:20 Thursday night. The question was what to do until time to go to the train. We can check our luggage at the station but still things close about 19:00. What is there to do until 23:20? We dropped over to the opera house and got tickets for RIGOLETTO that night. The tickets are 7 Lt each, or about US$1.75. Not a bad price for opera.
Lunch was at a place called the Baltu Ainiai. This place was founded by the local temperance union so there is no alcohol--no loss. It was recommended by the 'Lonely Planet' guide as a good place to get cepelinai (as well as other good stuff). Well, they didn't have cepelinai--no one seems to have cepelinai. It's as if they've decided that cepelinai were Soviet or something and no one wanted anything to do with cepelinai. However, the food they did have was terrific. |
