VILKAVISKIS
          A small town in Southern Lithuania
Where the Jewish Community is no more
 
This could have been the site of our house Antanas Bravol Cigarette Factory 3 Bravol Cigarette Factory 2 Market Square to the site of the Synagogue Part of the Market place The synagogue was at the end of this street Market Square 1
This could have been the site of our house Antanas Bravol Cigarette Factory 3 Bravol Cigarette Factory 2 Market Square to the site of the Synagogue Part of the Market place The synagogue was at the end of this street Market Square 1
 

With eyes wide open, on the lookout for everything and anything that surrounds us we make our way to the town. Very little, practically nothing, seems to date
from before the war. Everything must have changed. Will we see my grandfather’s house?
In the meantime we walk around the town for a while, looking for the hotel. It is huge and empty; a young girl comes to welcome us in Lithuanian. She speaks
neither Russian nor English. We have a problem explaining to her that the two large rooms she offers us are not those we had booked: we had asked for a room for three
people, to save money. A part of the hotel is being repaired; and we seem to be the only visitors. We wonder why it is so difficult to get a room (already booked) in an
empty hotel. The young woman seems simply unwilling to give us a room for three. In the end she offers us a suite with two little rooms, one with one bed, the other with
two. The radiators have not been lit and the cold in the room makes us shiver. We leave our things there and return to the hall to meet Antanas, responsible for the
Vilkaviskis museum, whom we had arranged to meet. He offers us several typically Lithuanian presents: pumpernickel rye bread, mushroom-shaped sweets, and other
specialties. Soon, he starts telling us about the other descendants of Vilkaviskis Jews who sometimes come, like us, in quest of…of…
In quest of so much, and so little…

He tells us about a certain Mr. Salinger (no connection to the author J.D. Salinger), an Israeli, whom my Dad knows, because he has set up a website about
Vilkovishk, the Jewish name for the town of Vilkaviskis. Salinger has gone there several times to carry out research about his family, and a few years ago he initiated the
clearing of the Jewish cemetery, the last vestige of Jewish life, buried under the thriving weeds, left in abandon like the past of the town. Antanas then showed us a yellow
document: an extremely detailed plan of the town, with its shops and houses drawn by hand with great care, he said, by a woman, Dvora Dolev, who is supposed to have
drawn it from memory in Israel after 1945, to attempt to recreate the landscape of her past, that she had left behind in 1937. Antanas is obviously the privileged interlocutor
of the Jewish ghosts.
                                        Have I become a ghost?
       We seem to be ghosts,
                                        Zombies by proxy who've come to check
                                        the current state of the town 70 years after the horrors.
       Who does Antanas see through our faces?
       Why does he receive us with gifts?
       We seem to be the living incarnation
       Of the ghosts of the past.   

Born and bred here, living and working here, he has become enthralled by the history of his town, where little less than seventy years ago, there had been an important
community of over 3,500 Jews which has disappeared completely, leaving very few traces. He tells us that he has created an exhibition about the life of the Vilkaviskis
Jews, in order to make the local inhabitants aware of the almost totally forgotten history of their town.
We leave in the rain with Antanas in the direction of Janonio street No.7, previously called Eimcio street, where Papy, my grandfather, used to live. Antanas explains that
the town had been bombed so intensively by the Germans that hardly a house remains standing. Janonio street has nothing in common with the way it looked at the time,
apart from its location.
                                        So does this mean we won’t see Papy’s house?
Now at Janonio street No.7 stands a large blue cement house behind a green fence. It has nothing in common with the photo of Papy’s house that my dad carries : a huge
two-story building made of bricks, with a balcony on which the whole family had posed for the photo.
                                                 No, we won't see Papy’s house...
                                                 We can only project on this blue building
                                                 the image of that other disappeared house.
                                                 Here the present is not added to the past;
                                                 the present has replaced the obliterated past
                                                that cannot be glimpsed.
We continue our walk along a small river, the Shemeinia. My dad remembers that his father used to talk about this river, along which he walked every day to school,
probably with his classmates or his brothers. We grope through the mud of the grayish banks of Papy’s river, zigzagging between the puddles, and I see in my
imagination, in the reddish brown of old photos, a little fellow in short trousers and stockings with a cap on his head, running in the midst of the other little ones and
playing ducks and drakes on the water.
                                                            The river has not changed! It remains
                                                            the uninvolved and unchanged witness
                                                            of the upheavals that took place around it.
                                                            And above all the witness of Papy’s
                                                            ducks and drakes!
We follow Antanas who makes us cross a bridge above the river, in which we see the reflection of the town church. He takes us to the old High School, turned into a
library; then shows us a large building that had been used by Napoleon; then a monument commemorating Vincas Kurdika, the author of the Lithuanian hymn, who also
came from Vilkaviskis. Nadia and I are now walking behind, listening now and then to my dad’s translation of Antana’s remarks on the important buildings, but we no
longer concentrate on their discussion. We start discussing all sorts of futile things, nothing connected to the present moment, and suddenly, amused, realize how
incongruent our conversation has become! Our futile chat clashes with the seriousness of the visit and with the emotion that we feel while we saunter through Papy’s town.
As though the town had become sufficiently familiar now for us to return to our proper selves. Or as if our proper selves had to be re-asserted, so as not to become
absorbed by...by...what?

                            ...by the unpleasant feeling that we are no longer our own selves,
                            Lily and Nadia, aged 29 and 23, born in Paris,
                            blablabla, but something beyond: ghosts, zombies by proxy,
                            haunting (unwillingly) the lost land of our ancestors.
                            Objects related to History, produced by wars
                            and migrations, sucked up like others, by some
                            natural magnetism, by this place of the past.
In the end, Antanas shows us a previous Jewish hospice that has become a hospital. (I later found out that Papy’s grandfather had contributed to its foundation.) And then
an old Hebrew high school, where our great-uncle, Fissia, had studied, which is now the Town Hall. A plaque on the building commemorates its original use in English and
in Hebrew.
Our stroll ends with a pizza in a huge restaurant, completely new, looking like a hall for municipal feasting. The evening ends with a walk through a supermarket a few
steps from the hotel, on the main square, where we buy the last things we want to take with us: bottles of vodka, various sweets, herring, kasha... Then we return to our
cold room. 
Tuesday, 12th April
Waking up is difficult. I hear in my sleep someone bustling around, and gently leave my slumber. Where am I? I sense that my body is in a bed, but I have no idea where
my bed is. As I almost open my eyes, the outlines of what surrounds me become clearer, and for a moment I am carried by a nebulous wave out of space and time.
Flash: The nebulous wave suddenly evaporates, and deposits me on my bed in the hotel room in Vilkaviskis in Lithuania, beside my sister's bed, and from there I hear
some activity by my father in the next room. The hotel room in Vilkaviskis! Less than a few hundred meters from the place where Papy lived as a child!
This morning I've woken up in Vilkaviskis.
What a strange sensation. It feels so unreal, but we are indeed here, in Vilkaviskis. I recall yesterday evening's visit, Janonio street, the river...
Nadia is still sleeping tightly, and dad tries to get us out of bed, because we have a meeting with someone from the tourist office, asked (by Antanas) to take us to the
town, its museums, the Jewish cemetery.
We catch up with dad already sitting down at breakfast in the hotel coffee-bar. All three of us are deep in thought. To wake up in Vilkaviskis leaves us speechless. Nadia
seems to be down in the dumps. I don't know about dad. And as for me, I feel in the company of Papy, and I feel at peace. I see in my imagination a child in the
marketplace below the hotel windows, or walking up the river with his little friends, holding small stones. This morning, the void left somewhere inside me since Papy left
us, seems to be replenished somewhat, and my memories of him are fueled with this new acquaintance of the place where he spent his childhood.
However different from the place he knew.
Looking around vaguely, biting on our rolls, we see a young woman with blond hair coming towards us. It's Neringa, our guide this morning. The visit starts at the tourist
office. Our arrival was expected, and the two employees heap gifts on us. We leave with fluorescent yellow Vilkaviskis keyrings, Vilkaviskis magnets, Vilkaviskis photo
accordions, T-shirts of Vilkaviskis, a Vilkaviskis corkscrew, all in a large plastic Vilkaviskis bag. Dad is interested in a book about Vilkaviskis, and one of the employees
offers it to him.
The Jewish Vilkaviskis has evaporated with the Jews of Vilkaviskis,
but we, the Jewish ghosts can uncork our bottles of beer
with a Vilkaviskis corkscrew,
and hang our key on a Vilkaviskis fluorescent yellow keyring!
What a cynic I am!
Even if we find these trifles a bit amusing, we do know really what they symbolize, and we are truly touched by this attention, and gratefully receive these marks of
friendship.
In an adjoining room we can admire the pride of the tourist office: an exhibition on Sonia Gaskell, the beautiful Russian dancer, born here.
After this visit, the four of us get into our car to visit the Jewish cemetery, a few kilometers from the center of the town. Neringa explains that a few years ago,
before Ralph Salinger had arrived to clear out the cemetery and clean the gravestones with the help of some friends and a few employees of the municipal parks, this
cemetery was almost impenetrable, drowned in weeds and bushes.
Today the gravestones rest on a bed of dead leaves, bordered by soft green moss. The stones are either upright, lying down, wobbly, legible, illegible, whole,
cracked, broken… A few shattered stones with Hebrew inscriptions cover the ground under the dead leaves. Above an ancient gravestone, set in the ground, two rare
yellow flowers have bloomed. The cemetery is beautiful and desolate, almost post-apocalyptic. Motionless, silent, in ruins, engraved with Hebrew letters, covered by dead
leaves. It is pregnant with death, and oblivion. In spite of the clearing up of the cemetery, one feels as though on the edge of the world, in a forgotten, deserted place. And
yet, just behind the cemetery, separated from it by a small fence, there are private gardens, vegetable gardens, tricycles, greenhouses, and houses.

The cemetery is dying.
And around it life is thriving.
Who is there left to carry
The memory of these dead?

Before Ralph Salinger’s project of clearing up the cemetery, the local population knew nothing about the existence on their doorstep of this place of decay, just as
it was hardly aware of the previous existence of the Jewish community in the shtetl of Vilkaviskis, which, 70 years ago, numbered 60% of this town’s population. They
began to be more aware of it when the Soviets left.
A few months after our return to France, we received by e-mail photos of the commemoration of the genocide of Lithuanian Jews - taking place every year on the
23rd September, the day of the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto - in front of the mass grave of the gunned down Vilkaviskis Jews. One of the photos shows the hands of
schoolchildren, holding little stones, each inscribed with the name of an assassinated Jewish child: Eda, Dina, Israel, Sonia, Avram, Frida, Gita, Chaya, Meri…Maybe
Papy had known them or come across them?

A few minutes by car from there, on the bank of a lake, facing a white and beige castle, lying there somehow, out of the blue, Neringa takes us to look at the
Magdalenai Stankunierei House, a museum dedicated to a painter, born here in 1927. Only a few paintings are exhibited, most of the collection consisting in her personal
belongings, traditional costumes and photos.
After a quick tour of the museum, we climb up the spiral staircase of the old red-brick tower overtowering the magdalenai Stankunierei House. On each landing
there are dateless photos of Vilkaviskis from before the war or at the time of the war. On one of them a little boy is sitting on his suitcase in a square, among a thousand
other suitcases. There are soldiers marching along. Who? Where? When? Why? The photo doesn’t make sense, but is permeated by a universal sadness, related to
oppression and exile. When we reach the top of the stairs, a panorama of the whole area is revealed before us: the lake in a haze, the castle below, a factory, a parking
lot, residential blocks of houses of the Soviet type.
We enter the castle, climb up a small wooden staircase and discover impressive but dilapidated halls. The ageless rooms are being repaired, scraped and
exposing white and brown traces, but the candelabras are still hanging. The smooth moldings on the walls and on the ceiling, painted over in shining white paint, and
outlined in creamy orange, contrasts with the splattered walls. A sky-blue curtain wafts in the wind, penetrating through a windowless window, unveiling the brilliant white
rotunda of a concert hall, its perfect moldings, its beautiful wrought-iron balconies ornamented with gold. Ivory women dance on the blue round ceiling, around a gilded
chandelier that one can make out under the white cloth covering it. I don’t know if I am in a haunted castle or in a palace made of sugar, and once more I don’t know where
I am, as though I’ve landed in the improbable world of Alice. One corridor away, we find ourselves in a spanking-new orange room, where gorgeous and multi-colored batiks
and patchworks are exhibited.
After returning to the center of the town we leave our guide and go back to Janinio street. It is peaceful under the white sky and we observe the house, from a
distance, and from close to, from the side; we photograph it, internalize it, this house that no longer has anything to do with Papy, we absorb it like a puff of wind loaded
with snatches of memories. A woman looks at us with surprise, and stops to talk to us. She is the owner of the house. Her family has owned the land since the sixties;
the land was empty when they arrived. She invites us in and shows us the garden. Maybe one thing has remained: a mound of stone overgrown with grass, with a small
aluminum door, a cellar. The garden is large, divided into several parts: a vegetable garden, a basketball court, a place to eat under a pavilion. We leave the garden as if we
were leaving a person - with a heavy heart.
Before leaving for Vistytis, the town Papy’s grandfather came from, we eat some Lithuanian specialties in a restaurant recommended by Antanas, a last tasty
moment at Vilkaviskis.
At Vistytis it is quiet. We discover a line of totem poles lining the road: a woman half fish, an old man with wings, an imp carrying a heavy stone… Then we come
across a small green and red boat in a garden separated from the road by stones painted green. Then a lake, alone and silent. On the banks, an empty bench supported
by two grimacing gnomes, is bored and waits; a wooden swing looks at the lake, a picnic table is hibernating, a few rowing boats are asleep on their flanks.

We jump through a magic skylight
Into papy’s childhood
Liliane Berz's Vilkaviskis Impressions
Nadia Berz's Photographic Vilkaviskis Impressions