MEMORY IN THE SHADOW OF CRUMBLING EMPIRES

Ah, do you really believe
Oblivion has the final say in what is to be forgotten?
For it is often an image from the ashes rising
And stands in flesh, in full reality
Forever framed for every day to come. 

Hirsh Osherovitch, 1968
Transl. to English by Rytis Zemkauskas

1st Memory. Juozas Rutkauskas

First, there was a letter. In 2013, my brother, then a student at New York University, forwarded an email sent to him by Nick Bravin, a professor at the university. It was a story about his research, inspired by the story of his grandmother and the rescuer Juozas Rutkauskas. Three years later, I presented a fictional audio-visual tour with J.R. as one of the protagonists.
Four years later, the professor and I met at a café in Greenwich Village. The story continued.

[…] My current research grew out of a […] research project I started several years ago to discover if a book called Anya (the name of my grandmother) was in fact the life story of my grandmother misappropriated by an ambitious author in the 1970s.  That project, while it involved some difficult people to track down and a few intervening decades to complicate things, turned out to be remarkably manageable compared to what I’ve been working on lately.  I call that part of my project the story of Anya. Since wrapping that part up, I’ve turned to the story of Anya (my grandmother). She grew up in Vilnius when it was part of the Russian Empire, occupied by the Germans (in WWI), and when it was Poland between the wars. She also returned there from Warsaw after Vilnius was occupied by the Soviets, returned to Lithuania, then seized by the Soviets, and lived in the ghetto there for the full two years it existed.  A Lithuanian helped my mother (who was a young girl with my grandmother and her family in the ghetto) escape and adopted her.  That same Lithuanian man – named Juozas Rutkauskas – later traveled to Riga to help my grandmother escape from a concentration camp there and brought her back to Vilnius, before she fled the Gestapo to Minsk.  […] I have many documents from Rutkauskas University and military files that I’ve had translated, and I’ve conducted interviews with some of his distant family who relocated to Australia (Juozas was caught by the Germans and killed (though I’ve found no definitive proof of this – the Germans tried to avoid leaving such evidence) for helping Jews and others) – and a woman he either married or lived with [was killed too].  Rutkauskas is a fascinating figure. He was born in Kaunas in 1900 and was (blessed? Cursed?) to live through some of the most interesting times (as the Chinese curse goes); he appears to have fought for Lithuanian independence, to have attended the University of Lithuania in the law faculty, beginning in 1923 after attending gymnasium in Russia, then seems to have been arrested and spent 18-24 months in jail (for what I have not yet been able to determine); then tried desperately to continue his law studies but was refused by the university despite his eloquent pleas (he was admitted, it appears to the philosophy faculty, but I don’t think he attended). Around this same time of trouble, he appears to have lost his family (his wife and three kids – interestingly his wife was from Klaipėda and when Hitler retook Memel [Klaipėda – D.P.], she repatriated to Germany (she was a Lutheran and of German background I think) and she performed for the German troops and Rutkauskas’s sons fought in the Wehrmacht in France as Rutkauskas was trying to undermine the Germans in Vilnius), and I’m not really sure what he did between 1928 and 1939 (though I do know as a literate, educated man he wrote letters on behalf of those who were not), but when the capital of Lithuania moved back to Vilnius he worked there at the Statistics Bureau and later at a passport office (which provided ready access to false papers). My grandmother always referred to him “the judge,” but besides some evidence he may have served as a police district examiner in Salantai, I’m not sure how the title fit (surely he told her he was a judge). Rutkauskas is recognized in Yad Vashem and in Lithuania’s Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History 1 as a savior of Jews but no organization has anything but a brief (and inaccurate) biographical sketch of the man. He kept a complicated organization going, constantly sneaking Jews out of the ghetto and the city, but he was reckless and often drunk. He seems to be one of those larger-than-life kinds of figures, and I would love to be able to piece enough together to sketch him out more fully.
From Prof. Nick Bravin’s email

This story has become one of my greatest professional and creative inspirations. The life of Juozas Rutkauskas is a great illustration of the country’s history. It convinced me that one man’s life can tell us as much about the country’s past as the history books. Micro-histories have become the most important tool for getting to know an undiscovered city and the Kaunas people who lived here before us. The story of the life of Rutkauskas, worthy of a feature film script, has encouraged me to tell the forgotten stories of the city, and to take an interest in the city’s multi-ethnic past and the stories of the Second World War. Thus, in 2016, Spirit’s Guide to the Old City, the first artistic audio-visual tour in Lithuania, was born, telling the story of multiethnic Kaunas and the history of the Holocaust 2.

2nd Memory. The Imperial Past
In his book The Great Imperial Hangover. How Empires Shaped the World, author Samir Puri reflects on the post-imperial world: ‘And, yet empires continue to haunt our minds in all manner of ways, stalking our subconscious understanding of who we are and of our place in the world. Empires have helped to construct national identities and carve out geopolitical realities and mentalities that prove hard to escape’ 3 .

In my opinion, the destiny of people depends on the family in which they grew up. And the destiny of a family depends on the countries in which they live. In my case, those countries are Germany and Lithuania. My name is German, and my last name is Jewish. It reflects both sides of me. The destiny of my family is tied to the entire history of the Second World War and its aftermath in Lithuania and Germany. Nazism, Hitler, Soviet occupation of Lithuania… My destiny reflects two great dictatorships of the twentieth century.
Interview with Julijana Zarchi, 2018 4

Samir Puri notes: ‘Empires, however, do not end overnight – they unravel gradually, fraying like a rope under stress, before the strands separate. Even then, threads of a bond with the past can remain in their physical and psychological legacies. […] The memories, experiences and scars of the past will have contributed to how people feel about themselves, where they locate their people in the wider world, and where such feelings as group pride and group blame are directed’ 5 .

These days I keep thinking, what is freedom? Can you be free when you are not at liberty? I remember my service in the Soviet army. We were standing in formation (rikiuotė). You had to be fit, neat, your shoes clean. The Russian officers were walking around, shouting at us, and I was thinking: ‘I am still a free man. Well, I can move my toes in my oversized soldier’s boots and you won’t do anything to me. I’m standing here, moving my toes, and you will not stop me. Because I am free. I can still be free’.
A memory shared by Juozas (my father, born 1950), January 2023.

The author of the Great Imperial Hangover adds: ‘As citizens of the world, we can look at each other and wonder about the post-imperial inheritances that others carry as part of their heritage […] It illustrates why people raised on one set of stories might struggle to empathise with others, and why potentially huge misunderstandings arise between governments, when one assumes right of way on a particular issue where others deny it. World order today comprises numerous post-imperial visions colliding with one another. These movements are akin to shifts in the tectonic plates that underlie world affairs but on a much smaller level, every one of us carries an imperial inheritance that is personal to them’ 6 .

What inheritance do we carry? What stories have been told to us at school, at home, on TV and in film?
I grew up in the USSR. I grew up with a deep awareness that I was living under occupation. The stories I heard at school and on TV differed from those I heard at home. I grew up with the message that I was not free. Today, I reflect on what living under occupation has done to us. Were we really able to feel free? Was my constant rebellion at school an expression of my personality or a subconscious desire to resist the oppressive system? In primary school, I was scolded in front of the class for bringing in an Easter egg. The Russian teacher kept comparing the Russian and Lithuanian languages in class, saying that no literary masterpieces could be written in a language as archaic as Lithuanian. Today, I cannot bring myself to speak Russian. The words I once learned are locked deep in my subconscious.
At home, it was a different reality. It was dominated by my mother’s stories about the occupation of Lithuania and her admonition not to watch Russian films because they were a tool of Soviet propaganda. In the background, Polish TV was playing American Westerns on weekend nights. At home, my father’s Luxembourg radio recordings played Western world music jams, and on the shelves was a large library of Western literature. But behind the walls of the house, lies were the most important principle of this society. Even we children knew that to survive was to lie. Every school paper was based on lies about the perfect Soviet reality and the meaningless bourgeois life. This is how we learned to survive in a schizophrenic society where you think one thing and say another out loud. But where is the line between what you think and say to others? What has lying to ourselves and others have done to us?

When the Russians came, the villagers started to get drunk, and families started to quarrel. They started forbidding us to go to church, to celebrate festivals; they cut our wages, demanded tributes in the form of grain and livestock, started deporting people, took land away from those who were more off, and gave it to those who were favourable to the Russian government… Life became even harder for people. They started to steal from factories and canteens – just to survive. The Russians closed the schools and banned everything Lithuanian. They would come to your house, take down the holy pictures and replace them with Russian ones – with Stalin and Lenin.
Interview with Salomėja Piliponytė-Užupienė, 2020

3rd Memory. The Ghosts of Empires

How to deal with the memory of loss, especially when it is fresh, when the fall of the empire, the mourning of the empire is still ongoing, and the sadness is still mixed with pride in the imperial history?
Having grown up in an empire, I feel most uncomfortable in the capitals of former empires. From architecture to public discourse, from idle pride to hostility, from unrequited bragging to blame, the ghosts of empires are everywhere. Have the former empires really reflected on their history enough?
‘Empires are still shaping the twenty-first century in profound ways through their abiding influences on present generations’, Samir Puri reminds us 7 . Many countries on different continents find past imperialisms still shape their present – from Britain to China, from the US to the Middle East.
Russia is the last colonial empire in Europe and its possible collapse still frightens many Westerners. For centuries, Russia has been destroying the statehood of its neighbours and their history, culture and identity. But signs of its imperial influence have taken root in Western universities, where Eastern European studies were reduced to Russian cultural subjects – Russian history, literature, music… For Eastern Europeans, the existence of the Russian Empire is a constant threat and reality. In the West, Russia is imagined as a possible evil, but without which the world is unimaginable. Why?
Because of imperial desires and the unlearned lessons of the Second World War, war in Europe today is no longer an abstract conceptual reality. Today, Ukraine is fighting for its survival, for its museums, its libraries, its schools, for the right to have its own narrative of history. The aggression of one state against another and the horrific war crimes have shown that what we thought was the past has become the horrific present. We are fighting a crumbling empire.

In the morning, we woke up and heard a thunderstorm. My mother stood before the window and I saw the sky was blue. The thunder was, of course, strange: “Bah-boom, bah-boom.” Mother said: “This is probably war”.
A memory shared by Jaroslavas Okulič-Kazarinas, 2018.

4th Memory. ‘Frozen’ Memory
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past 8.

Today, it is difficult to explain to the average Westerner why it is only recently that the countries of Central and Eastern Europe have begun to ‘discover’ their history and, after a long silence, to finally start exploring the subject of the Holocaust seriously. The reality of the Soviet occupation and the use of history as a propaganda tool was alien to Western citizens. However, in this part of Europe, where for almost 50 years, historical truth had been forbidden, the 1990s not only became a time of ‘reclaiming’ history and memory but also witnessed the undertaking of several revisions of the postwar memory culture. The period after the 1990s was when, for the first time after decades of occupation, it was possible to remember our marginalised past.

In 1988, there were plans for the fifteenth-century church of St Gertrude, which had been converted by the Soviets into a warehouse, to be built over with a multi-storey building. The plan was to quietly demolish the church. But the publicity (Gorbachev’s Glasnost) and the rebellion of the civic consciousness of the Kaunas people prevented the execution of these plans. After a long struggle, victory was achieved: construction was stopped and the unfinished building was demolished.
A memory shared by Gintaras Vitulskis, 2014

5th Memory. Threatening past
February 2014. Occupation of Crimea by Russia. Something in the air changed. There was a sense of threat in the air. Summer. I woke up at night. I saw him standing at the window. ‘The Russians are coming’, he said. Then he added: ‘I couldn’t sleep and watched TV for a long time. Around 3 am the wind picked up, and the branches of the trees began to sway. Then I realised it wasn’t the wind, but a helicopter hovering near the window. I could not see any distinguishing marks, and I could not understand what country it belonged to. All I could see were the glowing electronics and two people inside. Then the helicopter pulled back and circled around the house. Then another helicopter appeared and did the same.’ ‘Which side did the helicopter come from?’ – I asked. He waved his hand towards the city centre. ‘No, it can’t be the Russians’, I thought, ‘Russia is on the opposite side’. The next morning we found out that our house was at the centre of a NATO military training. In the yard, we found a war machine with a cannon. For several weeks, we kept coming across war machines on the road, and there were warplanes in the air. Strangely enough, these trappings of war made us feel safer.

After the occupation of Crimea, I realised that historical heritage was not a neutral decor in our cities. Invisible and unnoticed for many years, it could become activated by changes in historical and political circumstances – it could start to act as an active beacon of a certain ideology. Before the Crimean occupation, the bridge in Kaunas Old Town was one of the last bridges not to be stripped of its ‘decorative’ Soviet symbols with stars and a coat of arms. Lately, this Soviet symbolism has seemed innocuous, because history will not repeat itself, we thought. We were sure we were safe. But in 2014 everything changed. After the occupation of Crimea, these hitherto ‘innocent’ decorations seemed to have been ‘switched on’, ‘activated’ and became signs of a hostile state, heralding a threat.
However, this threat was only felt by us, who had experienced what it meant to be subjected to military aggression by a neighbouring state. In 2018, we had lunch with a cultural delegation from Denmark. Suddenly, one of the guests said: ‘You just go on and on about the Russian threat in the European Parliament. It’s just so annoying…’ We realised that there was a deep divide between us and our guests. It is not possible to convey the historical experience to others in words.

6th Memory. Competing Memory
I should tell you something more about my relatively recent interest in Lithuania and its role in WWII. Before I do let me say that your observations echo precisely some of mine in interviewing many people (Lithuanians, Jews, others) with strong feelings about the country and its role in the war.  You are right too, of course, that my Baltic Ghosts piece (the magazine\s title) omitted many important and fascinating aspects of the intricate and complicated puzzle of Lithuanian identity post- independence (and the impact of the Brown vs. Red choices and victim vs. oppressor labels).  […] The phenomenon I came across most frequently (and that came through most clearly) was this real competition over victimhood (and heroism) that many people feel. This is related to the point you make about lumping all together, either as shooters of Jews (the more extreme ‘Nazi hunters’ I spoke to put the number of Lithuanian ‘shooters’ in the tens of thousands and the most stout Lithuanian defenders put the number in the scores — I think the number is undoubtedly nearer to the several thousand you mention) or saviors of Jews or victims of deportations and cultural repression (Lithuanians by the Poles, by the Soviets, Jews by the Germans (and complicit Lithuanians), by the Soviets, etc.). Whose suffering was worse, more severe, more acute, more lasting, to me seems a ridiculous and fruitless road to go down.  Each person’s suffering was worst for him or herself and for his or her family. Further, as the saying goes, two wrongs don’t make a right, so those who abused, tortured, killed, and violated international laws are not absolved by having been victimized (or had family members, friends, and countrymen victimized) thereafter. At the end, each person is culpable or responsible for his or her own actions and while attempting to characterize events and cultures and peoples is something that historians, politicians, writers, sociologists, journalists, etc. do, once we start to abstract what we gain in the generalities of the big picture we lose in the accuracy of the individual and individual event.  In short, Lithuanians were neither all shooters nor all saviors nor all friends of the Germans nor all victims of the Soviets.  (To be sure, Lithuania and many Lithuanians faced repression of their language and culture, and many individuals faced deportation, torture, and execution.  The losses of Jews, especially those who lived in pre-WWII Lithuania, are well- documented.)
From Prof. Nick Bravin’s email

The narratives of the Second World War and the Holocaust have become central elements of Europe’s shared memory. However, as many scholars have shown, the memory of communism has no place in this European memory. It is this memory that forms the basis of the identity of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. However, it still remains unknown and misunderstood in Western Europe. The desire for the suffering of unrecognised victims to be acknowledged sometimes leads to ‘competition of victims’. There is a belief among many memory communities that multiple memories cannot exist simultaneously. In many cases, there is a fear that ‘too much’ of one memory prevents the articulation of other memories. As historian Michael Rothberg says, memories take place in a sort of ‘winner takes all’ struggle. Memory becomes a kind of battleground, as a guarantee of identity and survival. But can’t several memories exist side by side, and must one of them prevail? Do we not have to remind ourselves that it is our duty to include those memories that have remained on the margins?

7th Memory. Past and Present
With the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, I am in a dilemma.
How can we talk about history today when history is repeating itself right now and we are still making the same mistakes? How have we allowed ‘never again’ to happen again and again and again?
How can we talk to the younger generation today about the historical lessons of the twentieth century if we ourselves have not learned from the mistakes of the past?
What is the role of memory in a contemporary world that is once again plagued by wars and a sense of global threat?

In the first week of the war in Ukraine, students from the University of Amsterdam asked me to tell them about the projects I was curating for Kaunas European Capital of Culture 2022. The title of the presentation was ‘What can Kaunas bring to Europe?’ Most of our programme, Memory Office, focused on the history of the Holocaust and the aftermath of the Second World War. But I couldn’t talk about art that time. On that occasion, I decided that the best thing I, as a Kaunasian, could give young Europeans is historical knowledge about a part of Europe they knew nothing about. About us, where the Second World War did not end in 1945, like in the rest of Europe, but in 1990, when the countries occupied by the Soviets regained their independence. Then I told them about our post-war armed resistance movement, about the events of 13 January, 1991, which claimed 14 lives. At that time, it seemed that the empire was convulsing and trying to survive. Then we talked with Dutch students about whether Europe has learned its historical lessons and whether Europeans were ready to stand up for ‘European values’.

What will you do when war knocks on your door? Will you open the door, or will you turn off the lights and pretend you are not home?

8th Memory. Trauma
We lived in a village in Samogitia (Žemaitija), near a forest. Some terrible things happened there. And the children absorbed it all, they heard everything, they were always under stress. It was burned into our subconscious. All my life I have associated the forest with something mysterious, but unpleasant, scary, frightening.
Once the Lithuanian partisans 9 took my father barefoot and led him all night through the forest. It was his brother’s revenge because he didn’t want my father’s family to live on their parents’ land…
I remember the shots fired by the Soviet ‘stribai’ 10 at night in the hut…
My mother told me that a Lithuanian partisan leader was in love with her sister. But she loved the local teacher. The partisan raped her in front of her parents out of revenge. That is how my cousin Julija was born.
A memory shared by Liucija (my mother, 1949 – 2022), January

How to remember when the past is traumatic?

In March 2022, I was packing my life into boxes and thinking about which things I would need most in my next life in England. When the Russians started attacking the Ukrainian nuclear power plant, I realised that we had to go somewhere further. I had to do it for my children. The sense of war had come to our home.
This unexpected ‘evacuation’ made me re-evaluate my life – what have I accumulated and what is most important to me? If I never return to my home in Lithuania, where, we thought at the time, the muddy boots of Russian soldiers would walk, what was the most important thing to take with me, and what must not be left behind? Which photos, which bits of my life should I take and which ones should I leave behind?
A few weeks later, we returned to our house. Thousands of Ukrainians today have nowhere to return to.

Our village was very beautiful. Now it is no longer the case. Only two huts of people who moved here are left – it is unlikely that they know the history of Mackūnai village. The only legacy of our family there are the graves where our parents and relatives are buried.
I don’t meet people my age anymore, but there are children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren… It is a pleasure to meet them and tell them our story. About the hard life we lived. I am called to those places by the longing for my homeland, the beautiful nature and the memories of my youth. I see my life in Mackūnai as if through a mist – I was accompanied there by painful experiences and the loss of loved ones. In general, life was very difficult. We had no nice clothes, no shoes, no telephones, no television, except for the radio… And that’s not all.
After the front, we came back from the forest. We found an empty land – the whole village had been burnt down, two houses were left standing. We were a big family – seven people in an empty field…
Memory shared by Salomėja Piliponytė-Užupienė, 2020

9th Memory. Healing Memory
When we were organising the 2019 CityTelling Festival and announced a concert in memory of the Kaunas Ghetto Orchestra in our programme, I received an email. It said: 
‘Good afternoon, I am Joseph Haid, the son of Percy Haid, the composer who composed Phantasy in Yellow in the ghetto. I live in the USA. And I am coming to Kaunas’. Only later, Joseph and his wife Julie admitted that they did not know what to expect when they came to Kaunas. Both of Joseph’s parents survived the Holocaust. Joseph never planned to come here. It was too painful. 
After the first days of our acquaintance, Joseph and Julie were already planning their return to Kaunas. In September 2022, they were in Kaunas again, at the Litvak Culture Forum. This time with their son.

Can memory serve as a tool for dialogue, for reconciliation, for healing?

I’ve been working with memory for many years, and I have to admit that our memory is not an ‘objective’ reflection of history. Our memories are not accurate representations of the past, but only certain reconstructions of it. Memory is subjective because we put into it our worldview and our experiences. It is influenced by our emotions, beliefs, expectations and, finally, time.
Memory is a way of talking about the past today. Whether we share our memories, tell stories, take photographs or make films, we are creating a TODAY’S story of the past. So memory and its tools – stories and images – help us better understand not so much the past but the time we live in and ourselves in that time. Looking back is a way of reflecting on the present and our identity – why are we the way we are? Remembering stories of the past is also an opportunity to create visions of the future – where are we going, what kind of future do we hope for? Memory is a way of healing our souls.
This journal was produced in the context of the war in Ukraine. The sense of war surrounded this magazine. The themes, issues and questions raised in this publication are directly and indirectly related to the war. A war caused by the convulsions of a collapsing empire. I am grateful to the contributors of this journal, excellent professionals from different fields, who responded to my invitation to contribute with their texts and images to the debate on memory in the modern world.
Issues of responsibility, guilt, value choices in moments of complex historical circumstances, and in the context of war – trauma and traumatic memory – seem to me to be the most important issues in today’s world. I am very grateful to them for their cooperation and to those who shared their personal experiences and memories. Each of the texts, in one way or another, address the topic of historical processes that have taken place and are still taking place in today’s crumbling empires.
Prof. James E. Young raises the crucial questions of memory and monuments, and at the same time asks whether focusing on the past substitutes real actions against contemporary genocide? The artist and writer Manca Bajec takes us down her memory lane, reminding us of another war of the twentieth century: the war in the former Yugoslavia. Artists Michael Shubitz and Jenny Kagan, both second-generation Holocaust survivors, share personal stories of their families and those who experienced the Holocaust. At the same time, the journal recalls the crimes of communism, which are explored by artists Mindaugas Lukošaitis, Vytenė Saunoriūtė Muschick, Gintarė Valevičiūtė-Brazauskienė and Indrė Šerpytytė.
Perhaps the most important themes in this journal are traumatic memory and psychology. Prof. Danutė Gailienė, Prof. Jana D. Javakhishvili and Prof. Robert Van Voren discuss the impact of traumatic experiences on society and its memory. The artist Lukošaitis uses his masterful drawings to depict the horror of war and genocide in Rwanda, Finland, Ukraine, and Lithuania. 
Memories of the Second World War and post-war experiences quoted in this magazine were published in the 2016 microhistory archive atmintiesvietos.lt. The texts are complemented by several poems, to whose authors I am very grateful.
Special thanks go to William Kentridge, one of the world’s most eminent Litvaks, with whom I had the honour to walk the streets of Kaunas and who agreed to share his artwork with this journal.
But most of all, I am grateful to the Ukrainian artist Alevtina Kakhidze, who, despite the difficult conditions of war, has kindly sent us her drawings – artistic documents of the war. The Kyiv electricity schedule she shared with me will always remind me of the time we edited this journal and the terrible crimes taking place nearby.

1 Author refers to Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History
2 https://www.atmintiesvietos.lt/en/routes/spirits-guide-to-the-old-city/
3 Puri, Samir. The Great Imperial Hangover. How Empires Shaped the World. Atlantic Books, London, 2021, p. 1.
4 Memories and interviews used in the text are published on https://www.atmintiesvietos.lt/en/
5 Puri, Samir. The Great Imperial Hangover. How Empires Shaped the World. Atlantic Books, London, 2021, pp.16-17.
6 Ibid., p.289.
7 Ibid., p. 1.
8 Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Penguine Books, UK, p. 162
9 Members of armed guerilla resistance
10 stribai, istrebiteliai (in Russian istrebitel – destroyer), officially the exterminators, people’s defenders, a Lithuanian paramilitary formation that fought against anti-Soviet partisans.