Today, there is scarcely 2,000 Jewish people living in the country.
The scale of collaboration with the Nazis in Lithuanian society at every level was sufficient to make the genocide extraordinarily rapid and thorough. Large-scale voluntary cooperation was widespread and resulted in the near-total obliteration of the country’s Jewish community, one of the highest destruction rates in Europe.
When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 – and the German army was welcomed by Lithuanians as liberators – anti-Jewish violence and pogroms erupted almost immediately throughout Lithuania, often even before German forces were fully in control.
Entire communities – men, women, children and the elderly – were wiped out town by town. Mass shootings, rather than deportations to death camps, were the primary method of murder, and often occurred close to victims’ homes with local participation.
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Helping Jews during this time was punishable by death. Despite this, over 900 Lithuanians have been recognised by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.
Situated beside a newly restored Jewish cemetery in Šeduva, 180km north of Lithuania’s capital Vilnius, the Lost Shtetl Museum opened in September last year. The privately funded multi-million-euro project is the result of more than a decade of collaboration between experts from across Europe, the US and Israel.
It began with an idea to build a small museum to honour Šeduva’s Jewish population, which had been massacred in a nearby forest by Lithuanian collaborators under German orders.
“But in time, the idea grew bigger and bigger,” Mickute said, who is also an assistant professor of history at Vytautas Magnus University where her research focuses on the experience of Jewish women in interwar Poland.
Across 2,700 sq m of floorspace, the museum’s ten bilingual galleries are devoted to different subjects that tell the story of shtetl life in eastern Europe. More specifically, they tell the story of the Jews that called Šeduva home: their social and religious practices, their significant cultural and political contribution to the country and their destruction during the Holocaust. According to an 1897 census, two-thirds of the town’s 3,000 inhabitants had been Jewish. Despite its rural setting, the museum attracts around 2,000 visitors a week from across Lithuania, drawing schoolchildren, educators, government officials and international visitors.
“The reactions we are getting from people is giving us tremendous hope [for the future of Holocaust education in Lithuania],” Mickute said. “Countless people have been moved to tears, they thank us for making the space. They say ‘wow, we didn’t know’ and ‘I see now what Lithuania has lost’.” She said Lithuanians today largely still “have a very poor understanding” of Judaism and Jewish people, and how so much of the country “turned on [its Jews] and participated” in the Holocaust.
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But Jewish people, Mickute said, “were here for over 600 years. They were rightful citizens of Lithuania and made important contributions to the making of the Lithuanian state, and more [people in this country] are coming to realise that.”
The first half of the museum is “dedicated to the richness of shtetl and Lithuanian Jewish life and tells the many personal stories of the people who once lived here, from the town’s watchmaker to the town’s intellectual who was also the pharmacist,” Mickute said.
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It was important for the museum’s curators to “show the real stories of people instead of [presenting them] as numbers and statistics or some unknown mass of people,” she said. They wanted visitors to know “the individuals who lived and worked and loved on this very ground, and to form a connection with them before reaching the second half of the museum and finding out that they are gone all of a sudden, their stories stopped short.”
The last gallery is dedicated to the descendants of the Šeduva Jews, who the museum’s curators “painstakingly” tracked down around the world, and their family artefacts.
Thirty-five years after gaining independence, Mickute said, Lithuania is a different country and ready to confront the realities of what happened “to Lithuanians at the hands of their fellow Lithuanians” who collaborated with the Nazis.
“People can go to synagogues openly now. It’s an independent state where people can say things openly without being sent to gulags,” Mickute said.
“And it is in this new country that the Lost Shtetl Museum is helping to start a new era. It provides a space where we talk openly about what happened, where people can rediscover Lithuanian history [while asking] very difficult questions of themselves.”
Mickute, together museum colleague Professor Antony Polonsky, will present a screening of one of the museum’s films, Extinguishing Lives, at JW3 on February 11, followed by a talk
