‘Day and Night’ is an epoch-making play for modern Lithuania

7 December 2011

O P I N I O N / R E V I E W

by Birutė Ušinskaitė

Cover of playbill

It was just another rainy, temperate evening in early December of the year 2011, but the play I was privileged to see at the Kaunas Chamber Theater, Day and Night,proved to me, a proud woman of Vilnius, that not all that is bold and brilliant here comes from our capital.

For the first time in our modern Lithuanian history, in my experience at any rate, a Lithuanian play on the Holocaust did not try to deflect attention ― or responsibility ― to the Germans or to some “complicated times” or to some pseudo-objective forces milling about on all sides. Or, to stick to some “kosher” theme like the dilemmas of Jacob Gens and the Judenrat in the Vilna Ghetto in the cause of talking about everythingexcept what is frankly the main point for our country: the voluntary participation of thousands of our countrymen in the mass murder of the Jewish citizens of our own country, in some cases starting before the Nazis even arrived.

For the first time in my life, I have been able to enjoy a quality literary creation where the barbaric and pathologically racist and fascist nature of some members of the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) is shown exactly for what it was. In Lithuanian. By and for a Lithuanian audience. That makes me  proud.

It is a small theater, and there were perhaps only a hundred people present, but it was in its own way a grand national catharsis that makes me as a born and bred Lithuanian citizen very patriotic in the European sense of the word, where patriotism is loyalty to finding out and facing the truth and not some kind of nationalist whitewash or prejudice toward minorities or other Others.

From the playbill: Period photos and a 1941 poster tell the audience that this will be no whitewash

Day and Night is a signal that at long last we are becoming a mature nation where a theater production can finally portray the simple truth that a not inconsequential portion of these LAF “heroes” were murderers of civilians  and spreaders of hate toward fellow natives of their country. That it was done artistically, not with some pietistic declaration, but with a strong and unforgettable scene of two LAFers wrapping the white band around their new colleague’s arm, made it incalculably stronger.

The duration of the two-part play is two and a half hours. I personally found that on the long side, and it could benefit by consolidation of some of the latter scenes. One other point is the choice of the music by composer Faustas Latėnas. In my opinion, “general” Yiddish popular songs are not the best choice. I think that Yiddish folk songs of Kaunas, and specific songs of the city’s Holocaust-era ghetto would have made those portions more authentic. Strange to be making such a fuss about these two things, but maybe that is because just about everything else seemed to be almost perfect from the subtle make-up of the actors, the costumes and hauntingly minimalist set, to the singularly effective lighting effects. The Hitchcock-timed dimming sequence at the beginning of the scenes conveyed a slowly unfolding horror. Yes, and the magnificent acting.

Even though the characters of the play have no necessarily real prototypes, the plot is based on historical facts, testimonies of witnesses and archival documents from the Holocaust era. The actors even read some of the documents aloud and quote them in their dialogues, like, for example, a sickening antisemitic article from a newspaper.

Naturally, some viewers in our country might not understand the significance of the play and why it is necessary to speak about the Holocaust in Lithuania today, so the question naturally arises: Why was this play written in the first place?

As playwright Daiva Čepauskaitė puts it:

“I was searching for a serious and principled topic. And the Kaunas Chamber Theater suggested that I should write about the Holocaust in Lithuania. I took this as a challenge, both as a playwright and as a human being. It was a really difficult task for me as a professional ― it was difficult to find the right language, form and the way to tell the story. But the topic enriched me as a person; I had an opportunity to come up with certain principles and a personal approach. Therefore, I have an answer to the question why I have written this play: I wrote it because I am Lithuanian, because it is our common history and because I do care about things that happened, are happening or will happen in Lithuania. And because it hurts.”

It is a tragic love story, the impossible love of teenagers ― a Lithuanian boy Andrius and a Jewish girl Milda, who are entrapped in a bizarre scenario. The main characters are played by young and inspirationally talented Lithuanian actors: Simona Bladženauskaitė and Vytautas Gasiliūnas. They invent a strange game. They are playing the Holocaust in Lithuania and acting out the love story of Milda’s grandmother Golda, who is now old and not clear of mind. Golda had in fact gone mad when her long-time-ago lover Kostas accidentally got shot right before the end of the Second World War, when Golda turned nineteen.

Andrius and Milda are unable to live their own lives. They are predetermined incarnations of ghosts of their city’s past.

Sometimes Andrius resists Milda’s wish to live in the past. And that is when she starts numbly counting aloud to herself. And he invariably succumbs.

It seems to me that many people in Lithuania, whether they want to know it or not, cannot calmly live out their years and roam the streets of the old ghetto in Vilnius, Kaunas or Šiauliai without getting possessed by the dybbuk of our past. In order to let the old wounds heal and to prevent such horrors from happening once again, it is important to tell the young generation of Lithuanians what we have done to our neighbors. Therefore, it is significant to speak the simple truth about the Holocaust in Lithuania, as well as about the lamentable antisemitism today. On the way back from Kaunas, I opened the 3-4 December 2011 weekend edition of our best daily, Lietuvos rytas, only to find a three page antisemitic yarn, advertised with the blurb “Mystery of the Millions” on the front page over a picture of a Jew in the Kaunas synagogue. For shame.

Daiva Čepauskaitė continues to explain what drove her to write the play.

“When I was writing the play, I was reading some documents in the archives, and one protocol of the court caught my eye. The defendant was asked why he was murdering Jews and he replied: “Because I am Lithuanian.” Then I thought about the many meanings of this word. After all, those who rescued Jews were also Lithuanians. The same word can mean the most honest fight for the freedom of the people, simple humanity, or the lowest instincts. I am also Lithuanian and I wrote this play […] because life and death have no nationality, and because inhumanity is our common enemy.”

The two timelines of the play are looped. Today’s reality intertwines and intersects with the past, and the points of intersection are precisely the most important ones. The ones that hurt like wounds that have never healed. The wounds and the pain are real. Kostas burns his arm badly in order to be able to see Golda, the Jewish girl, with whom he falls passionately in love. He comes on Friday night and Golda has to violate the Sabbath law in order to help him, because Jews are not allowed do any work on the Sabbath.

Golda’s father Berelis Taicas (Berl Teitz), a pharmacist, explains to Kostas what it means to be a Jew: Jewish happiness is a very short time between long periods of unhappiness and misery, which change like day and night. Berelis Taicas says that God has punished him, because he has no son, only two unmarried sisters and three unmarried daughters, and, even worse, he thinks that one of the daughters is too smart for a girl, so how could he be happy.

Then the war breaks out and everything changes, at least for the Jewish citizens of Lithuania. The Red Army withdraws from Kaunas and massacres of Jews start immediately. On 25 June 1941 the German advancing troops (Vorauskommando) enter Kaunas. The situation is horrendous. The infamous massacre of Jewish civilians takes place at the Lietūkis garage in Kaunas on 27 June. It seems that the earth under one’s feet is catching fire. The gang of Klimaitis rages and murders people. Some Kaunas Jews are burned alive. One can smell the fear in the air and some of the city’s Jews try to escape or go into hiding.

On 12 July 1941, a regulation is issued for Jews to wear a yellow star, 8-10 cm width in diameter on the front and on the back. They are not allowed to leave home after 8 PM. Another regulation sets out that Jews have to leave their homes and move into a ghetto in Vilijampolė  (Slabódke in Yiddish culture) by 15 August. In Kaunas, Jews are taken to the 7^th Fort. Almost all of them are gunned down by volunteer Lithuanian “partisans”. The murderers are nowadays sometimes hailed as “anti-Soviet patriots”.

Moreover, the Provisional Government of Lithuania does not say a word to condemn the ongoing genocide. After five weeks the mass graves of the victims near the 7^th Fort start to cause problems. The local inhabitants start to complain about the bad smell. In the second half of July it is forbidden to swim in the Nemunas and the Neris rivers because it is believed that the water is contaminated with the “poison of the corpses”.

Kostas joins the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) together with his friends, who instigate racial hatred and genocidal antisemitism. Kostas becomes a Jew-killer, but he saves Golda. Golda’s father is taken away by the young fellows who are wearing white armbands and he never comes back. Golda finds shelter in a hiding-place, a pit under the floor of his house. By day Kostas and his friends murder other Jews, because their task is to liquidate all the “Communists and Jews” though it is Jews who are the primary objects of their passion for murder. By night he makes love to Golda.

Scene from Night and Day. Courtesy Vaida Gedzevičiūtė / Kauno kamerinis teatras

Once Golda inquires of him whether he had shot many of their neighbors and Kostas replies that he had murdered all of them. So that nobody would interfere with their love. Golda attempts suicide, but later she finds out that she is pregnant. One night, after giving birth, she is allowed to have a little walk in the garden. She looks at the starry sky and screams: “Oh, God, the sky is full of Jews! They all are there!”

There are good times and there are bad times in every nation’s life, just like there is day and night, and sometimes we make things of which we cannot be proud, but the story of the Holocaust in Lithuania is the darkest page in the country’s history.

However, the creators of this play, perhaps for the first time in Lithuania’s history, managed to examine and analyze this topic with full honesty. They are not trying to solve any historical dilemmas; their only goal is to frankly and bravely tell what really happened and what kind of mindset made this calamity possible.

The scenes from today actually do more than serve the literary purpose of incarnations of old souls emerging among us, among people just like us, a forever attractive literary device. They are a blunt warning about the advent of antisemitism right here and now which is also presented on stage as it is on the streets (and in our “best” newspapers).

This epoch-making play can and should be translated into English and other languages and produced abroad.

It will do Lithuania proud.

Diena ir naktis.

KAUNO KAMERINIS TEATRAS.

Directed by Stanislovas Rubinovas. Art: Sergėjus Bocullo. Music: Faustas Latėnas.

Starring  Simona Bladženauskaitė and Vytautas Gasiliūnas; Alma Masiulionytė,  Aleksandras Rubinovas, Violeta Steponkutė; with Kristina Kazakevičiūtė, Daiva Škelevaitė, Asta Steponavičiūtė, Edita Niciūtė.

Website.

Birutė Ušinskaitė is a Vilnius translator and memoirist.

← Three Page Antisemitic Mini-Tract runs in Lithuania’s Mainstream Daily