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Darius Udrys

Opinion: Darius Udrys

If there’s one thing civilized people should all be able to agree upon, one would think that it would be not to make heroes out of Nazi collaborators. Yet here in Lithuania we are about to witness just such a moral travesty.

Somebody apparently decided it would be a good idea to move the remains of Juozas Ambrazevicius-Brazaitis, acting prime minister of Lithuania during the first months of the Nazi occupation, from the United States to Lithuania. Buried previously in Putnam, Connecticut, he has been exhumed and will be reinterred in Kaunas this Sunday with as much fanfare as can be mustered among the clueless and the callous.

Ambrazevicius-Brazaitis is no hero.

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Juozas Ambrazevičius or Juozas Brazaitis

The controversial case of Juozas Ambrazevius Brazaitis' (1903-1974) remains being returned to Lithuania for re-burial this week

Juozas Ambrazevičius or Juozas Brazaitis was a Lithuanian literary historian, better known for his political career and nationalistic views. He was acting Prime Minister of the Provisional Government of Lithuania, the so-called Nazi puppet government, from 23 June 1941 to 5 August 1941.

He later joined an anti-Nazi movement, until he escaped from Lithuania by the end of WWII.

A document by the US Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, from January 1975, states that Brazaitis was removed from the list of Alleged Nazi War Criminals and that further investigations had been stopped. But Efraim Zuroff, leader of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Israel, says: "At the time the Americans didn't have the data that clearly point to his connection to the Nazis and to anti-Jewish violence." Here is a copy of the 1975 document...

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“The LT government didn’t call to say they love me.”
This was the headline of an article we brought earlier this week, about Rimgaudas "Rim" Vidziunas in Arizona, USA. Rim and many other American-Lithuanians have been doing much to keep the memory of Lithuania alive. When I asked if he ever heard from the Lithuanian authorities, he told me that no one from the homeland had ever told him or other refugee children that they are loved by the ancestral homeland, that they are welcome back now that the communism yoke is lifted off.

It seems, unfortunately, that today’s Lithuanian leadership has not done much to restore contact with this most valuable of all resources, namely its own people around the globe – the diasporas.

And even worse is that when these 'refugee children' are trying to make contact with Lithuanian leaders themselves, they will very often not even receive replies.

Sadness pit dug even deeper.

Here a couple of emails we received some time ago, from two American-Lithuanians born in their home country before the war:

____________________________________________________________________

Sending e-mail to LT is
like sending it to the black
hole of the universe

Vytautas Sliupas

Dear Aage:

Lithuania's business people and government officials are yet to learn the necessity of good communications. Without a two way communication there is no possibility for further contacts. One of the most frustrating experiences I had was in e-mail (before that it was in regular "snail mail") communications. I would write and write but receive no reply (with only a few exceptions).

When I was working, our management had a rule - "answer all letters received in not more than three days. If there is no answer to be given, than at least acknowledge the receipt".

One of my American colleagues, who was sincerely trying to help Lithuania, said "Sending e-mail to Lithuania is like sending it to the black hole of the universe. Everything goes one way and nothing comes back".

No wander he is now disenchanted and helping others.

Vytautas Sliupas, P.E.
www.aukfoundation.org
Burlingame, California

____________________________________________________________________

"Dummheit und Stolz
wachsen auf einem Holz"
(Pride and ignorance are akin)

Stan Backaitis

Dear Aage,

Several months ago I had arranged a visit between the minister of energy and a CEO of an important nuclear reactor manufacturer. The meeting was supposed to be for the benefit of the minister on information of what is forthcoming in the future, particularly in small reactors and the possibility of establishing a European affiliate of the company in Lithuania.

The minister graciously extended an invitation to the CEO, but the minister's secretariat refused to extend even the slightest courtesy to this visit, such as picking up the visitor from the airport and transporting him to the meeting, setting up a meeting agenda, or even providing to the visitor's office the address of the ministry. They claimed that this was just another sales visit, and the visitor should take care of everything on his own. As a result the CEO canceled the meeting and eventually went to London. The European affiliate was established in the UK. Thus through such arrogance another opportunity was lost.

There is a lot truth in the German proverb "Dummheit und Stolz wachsen auf einem Holz".

Best regards,
Stan Backaitis
Washington, USA

No LT leaders called
to say they love me

Rimgaudas P. Vidziunas aka "Rim", at Scorpion Bay Marina,
Lake Pleasant, Arizona.

Rimgaudas "Rim" Vidziunas
Owner of Photography by Rimgaudas, Mesa, Arizona
Creator of "Images and Imagination"

This is Rimgaudas' brief autobiography and photo album, from his birth in a German camp for displaced Lithuanians in 1947, fleeing westward with his family until he ended up in Arizona, USA. His story is similar to those of many other Lithuanian-American children who were born while their parents fled Stalin's Red Army. Rim has been back in his parents' homeland and do much to keep the memory alive. Still it is with a certain soreness he answers NO when I ask if he ever heard from the Lithuanian authorities. Not a single letter, no phone call from the home country's leaders. No one from home has told Rim and many other refugee children that they are loved by the ancestral homeland, that they are welcome back now that the communism yoke is lifted off. It seems, unfortunately, that today’s Lithuanian leadership has not done much to restore contact with this most valuable of all resources, namely its own people around the globe.

Here is his story...

My father Juozas Vidziunas escaped Pramedziava, Lithuania during the Soviet invasion of 1941. He went to Germany and there he studied Medicine at the University of Heidelberg. Juozas met Salomeja while he was a student. My mother, Salomeja worked as a hostess at a US Army USO club after the war in Germany. They were given a visa to go to the United States in 1949.

Parents did not talk about their escape from Lithuania to Germany.

I was born in 1947, and when I was two were allowed to come to the U.S. We came here with the ship USS General Sturgis, a US Army troop carrier. After dropping off troops in Germany it would carry refugees back to the United States. We left Bremen Germany, arriving Port of New Orleans 13 March 1949.

The Army Red Cross gave us each $5.00 US dollars and boarded us on a train bound to Los Angeles, California. We were met by my father's brother Juonas Vidziunas and cousin Daiva. We lived with them till 1952 and departed for Chicago, Illinois. Several years later we moved to a small farming community Lexington, Illinois about 120 miles southwest of Chicago. I graduated high school from Lexington, was Senior Class President and graduated University of Miami, Florida, BA History, January 1970.

I returned to the Midwestern United States upon graduation. My love of photography began. On a trip to Arizona in 1974, I fell in love with the desert and moved to Arizona in 1978. I continue my art of photography to this day.

Read more, and see more of Rim’s photos…

Come celebrate with me
Mother’s Day in Lithuania

Impression from my today’s visit to the Jurbarkas Cemetery.

Text/photos: Aage Myhre
aage.myhre@Vilnews.com

I was up very early today, to drive the 200 kilometers (125 mi.) to Jurbarkas town, where mothers and grandmothers of my wife's family are buried.

A sunny day, a fantastic backdrop for the celebration and commemoration to the honour of these proud Lithuanian women.

You are cordially invited to join the tour and see the pictures I took in this incredibly beautiful cemetery ...

See my today’s cemetery photos, if you wish…

How Chicago became
Lithuania’s second capital
PLUS EARLY 20th CENTURY LITHUANIAN-AMERICAN
SOCIETY TOKENS OF CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

Banner from the website http://www.wttw.com/main.taf?p=1,7,1,1,26

By Frank Passic, Albion, Michigan.

When Lithuania came under Russian control in 1795, the Russians did all they could to “Russify” the Lithuanians, but they were continually met with stiff opposition. During the last half of the 19th Century, oppression increased as parochial schools were closed and Lithuanian printed matter was forbidden. Repressive measures were forced upon the people by the Czar, adding to the misery of the Lithuanian nation which already suffered from famine and mass unemployment.

As a result, thousands of Lithuanians fled their homeland in the late 19th and early 20th centuries prior to World War I. Emigration to America eventually totaled 635,000 individuals, approximately 20 percent of the population of Lithuania! Lithuanians arrived at Ellis Island impoverished, penniless, and unable to speak the English language but full of hope – the hope of freedom, a new life and unlimited opportunity.

Helping the Lithuanian immigrant was the Brooklyn Chapter of the Lithuanian Alliance of America, which gave aid to those at Ellis Island. The Brooklyn Lithuanian-American Citizens Club held a special conference in May of 1911 to plan a strategy for helping those who were scheduled for deportation back to Lithuania. The No. 4 issue of Tevyne (1896) stated, “At present, masses of Lithuanian emigrants are arriving in New York. Every ship from Hamburg brings tens and hundreds of Lithuanians. Many are sent back and the Alliance’s Brooklyn Chapter is working its hardest for the good of those poor peoples…”

In general, the immigrants stayed in New York only briefly, then moved westward to Pennsylvania, where they found employment building railroads and working the coal mines. Numerous Lithuanian organizations, newspapers, and societies were organized in Pennsylvania. These served as the prelude to those that were to be established later in Chicago as Lithuanian immigrants moved westward. Many Chicago societies were actually branches of those that were first established in Pennsylvania.

The first group of Lithuanians came to Chicago in 1870, when eighteen men arrived with a railroad crew. Because of its central location with industry and development, Chicago became the goal of the thousands of impoverished Lithuanian immigrants seeking a new life. Groups of Lithuanians came in 1880 and 1885, with the first colony being established on the North side of the city. After that, the influx of Lithuanians to Chicago grew at an enormous rate. It is estimated that between 1880 and 1914 more than 47,000 Lithuanians settled in the city, congregating in the Bridgeport and Town of Lake districts. By 1923, the Lithuanian population had grown to over 90,000, confirming the fact that Chicago contained the largest Lithuanian population of any city in the world, even more than Kaunas, Lithuania.

According to one story, the Bridgeport section, where many Lithuanians settled, was supposedly named after a Lithuanian immigrant from Tilsit (East Prussia/ Lithuanian Minor) named Ansas Portas. Portas owned land on the south side of the Chicago River at a bridge crossing, and people referred to the area as the “bridge to Portas,” which was later changed to Bridgeport. The Bridgeport section served as the nucleus of the Lithuanian community from the early years of immigration to Chicago through the era of World War I.

Due to the difficulty they had in obtaining jobs, Lithuanian immigrants began to settle around the stockyards where work was available in the slaughterhouses and steel mills. By World War I, approximately 25 percent of the ethnic work force in the industries was Lithuanian, and it is estimated that a total of 100,000 Lithuanians worked in the stockyards in Chicago during their existence. The grim and horrible conditions Lithuanian workers faced there were the theme of the classic novel, The Jungle (1906) by Upton Sinclair.

The Lithuanian contribution to the city of Chicago is significant in several ways. First, it provided the city with an added labor base upon which the city’s industries grew and prospered. Second it accelerated the building of ethnic neighborhoods, adding to the distinctive variety found in the city’s cultural life. Third, it spurred the formation of new businesses and more affluence.

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By Jennifer Virškus

A nation can be defined by several different characteristics; geographical location, language, a common history, cultural body, or race. The Lithuanian nation is defined by all of these. Lithuania has a language which is unique in the world and a culture that runs deep. It shares more than two centuries of its history with Poland, and few other nations have survived occupation by so many different groups. There are several types of nationalism; primordial, civic, organic, and liberal. Because of the lack of opportunity in Lithuania, young Lithuanians have recently tried to convince themselves that they want to “forget” their Lithuanian culture and move on to a new life in the West, but it is not possible. Lithuanians will always be Lithuanians whether they are in Lietuva or not. This is evident in the Lithuanian-American community, though they are clearly Americans, their Lithuanian identity stays with them. This is because Lithuanian nationalism is both geographic and organic, an entity to which all Lithuanians belong, as parts of a whole and independently of their will, choice or consciousness. 

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Jennifer Virškus Jennifer Virškus is a Lithuanian-American freelance writer, photographer, graphic designer, skier, sailor, traveler, and current MFA Writing student at California College of the Arts. While living in Vilnius, she founded the Kalnu Ereliai Ski Team. You can read more of her writing about skiing, sailing, and Lithuania at her blog, One Way Ticket.

Rūta Šepetys and Ellen Cassedy
Probably our relatives brushed shoulders in the marketplace

Rūta Šepetys and Ellen Cassedy interviewed by Jennifer Virškus

Two new books making a splash in the literary world—Between Shades of Grey by Rūta Šepetys and We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust by Ellen Cassedy—take place in WWII Lithuania. Though the two women's stories begin in much the same place—Sepetys's grandfather is from a village near Biržai, while Cassedy's great-grandfather hails from Rokiškis only 60km away—the books, and their stories, couldn't be more different. We Are Here is a first person memoir about Cassedy's journey to discover her Litvak heritage while studying Yiddish at Vilnius University. Between Shades of Grey is a young adult fiction novel about a 15-year-old girl who is deported to Siberia along with her mother and younger brother.

Individually, the books have met with incredible success. Between Shades of Grey, which came out in paperback this month in the US, has been translated into twenty-five languages and sold in thirty countries. Only in bookstores for a little over a month, We Are Here is racking up rave reviews at home and abroad. When speaking of the book, which will be released in Lithuania in May, former president Valdas Adamkus said, “This eloquent book can help us to reach out, open our hearts, and rediscover one another in a spirit of mutual understanding.”

Indeed, the need for understanding is a theme in both books, and together, they provide a more complete portrait of a time in history when Lithuania's identity was at its most complex—not only for their readers, but for the authors, too. “I went to Lithuania, hoping to decide who was right and who was wrong; to put people in a column, who was a victim, who was a killer. And then those lines began to blur,” says Cassedy.

Šepetys went one step further, “The intersection that I've experienced [between the ethnic Lithuanian fear of the Soviets and the Litvak fear of the Nazis] is one of regret … People that I've spoken to say that some of their greatest regrets weren't the things that they forgot to pack with them; they were human interactions with people. Something that was said or done, a suspicion or paranoia; but they also explained that those are the casualties of war.”

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US-Lithuanian Jews
play many key roles

There are very strong communities of Jews of Lithuanian descent (Litvaks) around the world, especially in Israel, the United States, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Brazil and Australia.

In all these countries they hold top positions in politics, economy, science, culture and society in general.

Their names are frequently found among the Nobel laureates and in many other honorable contexts.

They often lead in matters and innovations that affect and influence us all, wherever in the world we live.

So also in the U.S., where they have been prominent leaders in economics, science and culture since the 1800s. It is, for example, said that Hollywood would not have existed had it not been for the Litvaks.

Litvaks are Jews with roots in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: (present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and the northeastern Suwałki region of Poland).

Lithuania was historically home to a large and influential Jewish community that was almost entirely eliminated during the Holocaust. Before World War II there were over 110 synagogues and 10 yeshivas in Vilnius alone. Before World War II, the Lithuanian Jewish population was some 160,000, about 7% of the total population. Vilnius (then Wilno in the Second Polish Republic) had a Jewish community of nearly 100,000, about 45% of the city's total.

The reason for the Litvaks’ huge success is likely to be found in the fact that Vilnius through many centuries was considered the Jewish intellectual and cultural capital, with a huge number of teachers and scholars who taught and ruled this tiny community with wisdom and deep knowledge about a large number of disciplines.

Tolerance and interpersonal respect was also a hallmark of this community and for the whole of Lithuania through hundreds of years.

It was this that made Napoleon to name Vilnius as "Jerusalem of the North" when he came here on his way to Moscow in 1812. It is said that Napoleon himself became very surprised on what met him in Vilnius, a city so far away from the European mainstreams and still with a lively Mediterranean mood and life.

Vilnius was the first and only "Jewish city" Napoleon would ever see. He was no doubt aware of the Crusades, Inquisitions, pogroms and laws designed to discourage Judaic life. But here he had found a city, right before his eyes, that was an amazing exception to the rule.

And true enough, the history of the Litvaks is unusual and surprising. It was a history of mostly peaceful coexistence with other peoples and cultures that lasted for more than six centuries. It was a history that spawned an incredible number of eminent Jews, not the least of whom was Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (1720-1797), also known as “The Gaon of Vilnius”.

The "Golden Age of Jewry" in Lithuania started with Grand Duke Gediminas (1275-1341), the empire builder who took a liking to foreigners and Jews whose skills and education were badly needed in medieval Lithuania. In the early 1300's he attracted them to his realm with numerous perks, including guarantees of religious freedom and tax exemptions.

The Jews of Europe responded in droves, and Vilnius became the heralded centre of Jewish culture and learning. There would be synagogues, schools, theatres, publishing houses and the Yiddish Institute of Higher Learning. At a time when others in Europe were effectively illiterate, all the Jews in Vilnius could read and write.

This was so unusual that it provoked the invention of a brand-new word, "Vilner," meaning "an educated man with knowledge." For almost 700 years, the Litvaks became an inseparable part of Lithuanian society, having enriched the country’s economy, culture, science, and education.

To read more, go to our SECTION 12