Baltics 2008 - talk about all over the place!

Helsinki Finland
Saturday 6 September - Monday 8 September

Good flight over to Amsterdam - got a row of 3 seats by myself.  Not by chance, worked hard at it at the airport but . it worked!  So I slept about 5 - 6 hrs, hooray.  Amsterdam - Helsinki uneventful.

I'm meeting my friend Ronnie Kerbow, who decided to come along on the trip with me since he's never seen this part of the world either.  It will be a kinda quick "if it's Tuesday this must be Belgium" kind of trip, 6 countries in 2 wks.  Whew, I'm tired already.  It's with an Australian company called Intrepid, very socially-conscious, green, use local transport, homestays sometimes, etc.  They don't drag you all around either, but just get you from point A to point B (often the hardest part of a trip), then give you a short orientation tour once you get where you're going, maybe arrange one dinner, but mostly leave you to do what you're interested in before it's time to get to the next place. 

We walked around a lot the first day, before we met up with the group that night.  We wandered around the Lutheran Cathedral, which is on the main square with the government palace & main bldg of the Helsinki university - a statue of Tsar Alexander 2 here, surrounded by figures symbolizing law, peace, work, & light - all big green muscular Finnish people.  The law figure is a woman wearing a bearskin, the head on top of hers so it looks like she's being eaten. Kinda ferocious. You see her all over the place.

The cathedral itself is pretty on the outside but very plain inside, as you would expect from an outfit named after Martin Luther.  White walls, plain pews, a couple of angel statues, simple altar with a cross of two straight bits of metal. 

We went down to part of the harbor where there's an open market area, pretty busy on this Sunday afternoon.  Fruits & veggies, mostly berries of all kinds (including lingonberries, yum) and mushrooms like you wouldn't believe!  All from the Finnish forests.  Then also for sale handmade items - knitwear, stuff out of sheep's wool (I got a felt hat), fox & mink fur items (it DOES get cold here), and all kinds of reindeer merchandise.  Only Laps (Sami) can own reindeer legally, but in the market you can get antlers, pelts, and food.  For lunch we had reindeer meatballs & reindeer sausage with potatoes & pickles & berry preserves.  Can't get much more Finnish than that cuisine-wise.

The city is partially on the land & also spread across a number of islands, some of them quite tiny We walked across a bridge to an island called Katajanokka, where we went through the local Russian Orthodox church, Uspenski Cathedral.  Inside it wasn't really that big but the custodian guy I talked to said that on a holiday like Easter there are 1000 people inside, totally illegally according to fire laws, everybody milling around (no seats, just open, like in Russia) holding candles for heaven's sake. Photos not allowed but I snuck a couple.

Then we walked around the island, which is known for its Art Deco buildings.  Lots of interesting architectural details - some of the doors made it look like trolls lived there!

Back onto the mainland then to walk to the oldest church (Vanha Kirkko, Lutheran of course & only from 1820s, but it is wooden), which was actually closed but there was a wedding rehearsal going on so we walked into the back to look around; that was fun, giggling bridesmaids, solemn groom, weepy parents. 

Finland went back & forth between belonging to Sweden & Russia forever, so both are strong influences here.  the street signs & everything kinda official has to be in both Finnish & Swedish, although Swedes are less than 10% of the population, so that's kinda weird, but because of it you can see how really different the 2 languages are. Swedish with the vowels that have circles over them, finnish with the double dots.

lintujen ruokkminen kelletty (left out the dots)
forgjudt att mata faglar  (left out the circles)
don't feed the birds

neither of them is a short-spoken language either - words are hugely-long & i guess combined, like German. here's the name of a bus stop:

kauppakorkeakoulut

that's just the Finnish!  We haven't had any trouble with people not speaking English, which is a great relief since Finnish is not intuitive!

the weather hasn't been much to brag about, only about 15 minutes of sun.ÿ but it only rained at night, so that's something.ÿ i think it's in the 50s.

everything is really expensive here, even more so with the exchange rate.ÿ tram ride = 2 euros, cup of tea 2.20, entree at a restaurant ~ 25 euros. internet 2 euros for 30 mins!

We met with the group that night.  A couple in their 60s from Australia, Al from Connecticut, retired from IBM, the rest in their 30s I think - two youngish girl cousins from Australia, a single Australian guy who's working in London right now, a Canadian who's working in NY state, the tour leader Amanda from London.  Everyone seems nice & I think we'll all get along.  We went to a restaurant that features tractor parts, something left over from Soviet times.  I ate blini with mushrooms, and Ronnie had them with roe, which was marvelously crunchy red fish eggs that broke open when you bit down, with an explosion of taste.  (Obviously he let me try them.)  I thought the blini would be thin pancakes things, but they were more like the way we make cornbread, in a hot iron skillet.  About the same texture too.  But with sour cream.  Everyone but me had Finnish beer, which they declared to be excellent.

Today we went by ferry to another couple of islands, site of a fort now called Suomenlinna, originally called Sveaborg by the Swedes who built it in the 1740s to protect themselves (Finland was Swedish then) from a sea attack by the Russians.  Building the fort is what really made the town of Helsinki, which was just some rundown shacks until the big dream construction job came.  Here's something funny.  The Finns pronounced Sveaborg "Viapori."  No wonder things are so confusing around here.  Something else funny.  When the Russians finally attacked the fort, it was by land, just lobbing cannon shells from the mainland - they were outnumbered by the Swedes, who gave the fortress up anyway.  Huh?  A bit of infamous Swedish history there.  Anyway, it's all a UNESCO World Heritage site now, all cobblestones and old buildings, lots made into restaurants.  A couple thousand people still live here.  They also have a brewery; guess that's keeping your priorities straight.

We then went back to town & visited two interesting things - a church hewn - fancy word, hewn - right out of the rock that the town seems to be built over.  Temppeliauko Church, built 1969.  The walls are just natural granite, with a low glass ceiling.  Supposedly great acoustics.  (Will hear tomorrow, Ronnie & Al are going to a saxophone concert there tonight I'm staying in cuz it's raining again).  While we sat there taking it in, a Japanese tour group came in, trooped in really, chatter chatter, all took each other's photos, then left.  Check that site off the "to do" list.  Different approach.

Next we went to the Sibelius monument.  We're both music fans, so we wanted to see the memorial to the probably-most-famous native son, a composer.  It was a bunch of tubes like on an organ, with different lengths & decorations, and across the way a bust of Sibelius, all in a silvery metal.  Someone had taken a magic marker & made him look cross-eyed, hmmm.

Ferry across the Gulf of Finland? Baltic Sea? & Tallinn Estonia
Tuesday September 9 - Wednesday September 10

This morning we took a tram to the Viking Line terminal on Katajanokka, leaving e hotel about 9:15 for an 11:00 ferry.  This ferry is called the Xprs or something like that, it just high-tails it across between Helsinki & Tallinn every day.  Apparently there's quite a bit of back-and-forth of people and goods.  Didn't realize that last part until we docked in Tallinn, and saw a huge 3-story door open at the bottom of the ship & dozens of cars, trucks, even 18-wheelers drive off.  The ship seemed brand-spanking new, everything shiny & shipshape.  There were 10 decks, 2 at the top pretty open for people to sit about in the sun on nice days (& that would be REALLY nice, but not the kind of weather we were having), a couple for crew, 1 with cabins for rich folks so they didn't have to mingle, 2 for regular passengers to mill about in, and I think 3 for cargo.  The passenger decks have all kinds of restaurants, cafeterias, bars, coffee shops, and seating areas.  You could even stretch out on padded benches, and there was a play room for kids & each floor had 1-2 smoking rooms.  One of the bar areas had live music, and another had dance tunes and a dance floor.  There was also a duty free store with liquor, candy, perfume, etc, and an area with conference rooms for business people.

The crossing took 3 hours and was a little rocky, a couple of our folks got whoopsie, but I didn't really notice it except when crashing into the walls while walking around!  I didn't realize it till a day or so later, but . I don't think it was this line, but a ferry like this sunk a few years back, with almost 900 people dying.  Worst ferry disaster in history or something.

When we got to Tallinn, it was - raining of course, but we did the orientation walk anyway.  Amanda zipped us through the Old Town so we could get an idea of where things were, then we broke up, got a bite to eat, and crashed at our hotel.

This hotel, which is called G9, is really funky.  It's in a Soviet-era-looking rectangular concrete building, no elevator, on the 3rd floor up huge wide industrial-strength concrete stairs.  The rooms have beds that are narrow & lumpy, with the shower just a curtain separating one half of the little bathroom from the part with the toilet & sink - until you figure it out, water goes everywhere.  But at least there's a bathroom in the room, so that's something.  It's about a 10-min walk from the Old Town, which is where the action is.

And there is lots of action - in addition to being full of curvy narrow cobblestone streets, every building is either a museum, restaurant, coffee shop, souvenir place, pastry shop, nightclub, or historic site.  And a puppet theater!  All pretty much surrounded by old town walls & towers.  The city's been here since about the 9th c, and although Tallinn was heavily bombed in WW2, they have carefully restored the Old Town & it's a World Heritage Site. 

I mentioned how Finland went back & forth between the Swedes & Russians - so did Estonia, but add into the mix Danes & Germans.  They were independent 1918 - 1939, when the Nazis signed an agreement with Russia that handed Estonia over to the Soviets.  Devastation resulted, with tens of thousands shipped off to labor camps in Siberia, including children.  Then the Nazis moved in, with A lot of people's support, thinking that would get their freedom, but no.  Germans executed 75,000 people, then Russians bombed the heck out of the country & swept back in.  With the executions, deportations, and those who fled, Estonia lost more than 280,000.   Now the Russians were back & the problems began in earnest. 

Funny thing - singing Estonian folk songs was a big part of the resistance, also the same with Latvia & Lithuania.  Eg, in 1988 250,000 Estonians gathered to sing in Tallinn. Amazing how these folks kept their identities after being occupied through most of their history. The most recent occupier of all 3 countries was Russia, so they pushed for & got independence in 1991 when the Soviet Union fell apart.  All 3 are members of the EU, but not using euros yet, so every couple of days we have to change $$,

These countries still have lots of Russians (the Estonian city of Narva is over 90% Russian), but it's kinda payback time since they didn't automatically make these Russian-speaking folks citizens.  Instead, they have to learn Estonian and pass a test on the language.  They are very cranky about it in Estonia & don't even want Russian language used at all, although you do see it here & there.

Well anyway, we went back to town the next day, when there was still no sun but at least it has pretty much stopped raining.  Here are some things we saw:

• Town Hall on the Raekoja plats (square), topped with a weathervane of Old Thomas, the city mascot.  Supposedly the only Gothic Town Hall left in N Europe.
• St Nicholas church, the German one from the 13th c.  Bombed almost to oblivion, but now nicely restored.  Took a couple of illegal photos there. 
• Alexander Nevsky cathedral, one of several Orthodox churches built by Russians to consolidate their presence.  The priest who was standing on duty was friendly & told me that several hundred people attend there.  I made a donation & lit a candle & drank holy water out of a tin cup, so things should go pretty well now. 
• Holy Spirit church, now used by Lutherans, with old 1684 clock.
• St Olaf's church, famous spire (lots of tall-tall-tall church spires around here)
• 15th c Dome church, Lutheran
• Cannon tower with 9 of Ivan the Terrible's cannon balls still embedded in the walls
• Medieval guild halls, one from 1410
• Russian St Nicholas church

Riga Latvia
Wednesday September 10 - Thursday September 11

Got up quite early to leave the hotel at 6, catching a bus at 7 & have ~15 min to walk to the station.  This bus is pretty damn nice - bathroom! Dispenses coffee!  Has wireless internet access!  Estonia totally kicks butt in the area of technology.  Skype was developed here.  I read that they pay parking meters via their cell phones.

Of course after all the rainy & gray weather that made pictures so crummy in Tallinn, once we're on the bus it clears up & we have 4 hrs of beautiful sunny skies while we watch the bucolic landscape roll by.  Then when we get to Riga it has clouded up again, but at least it's not raining. 

Check into the hotel, which is a cute one.  Intrepid pretty much goes for 2-stars, which is fine with me, but there can be a pretty wide variation in that category.  This one is not the commie-era style, but newish & traditional.  Another climb to the 3rd floor with my luggage, but it's a nicer staircase, so that's got to count for something!

After we settle in we bundle up & head for the market to collect something for a quick bite.  I say collect because the market is in 5 old buildings used to house zeppelins in WW1, cavernous & filled with stalls, each with a kind of specialty - meats in this one, fish in another, then breads, veggies in the next, etc.  so to collect a meal of all food groups you have to move between the buildings.  I was taking some photos of the produce & a stern guard came up & shook his finger at me (state secrets possibly hidden in the tomatoes?) - Ronnie said "our first brush with the KGB."  Then when I wanted to buy some grapes & pointed to them the harsh-looking woman said in russian nyet nyet nyet!  Translation: you can't buy just a handful, you have to buy this whole crate of them.  No grapes for me.

Then we wandered over to the opera house, very nice building, to meet our guide Alex. He was about 55, very nice & said "there are no secrets" so we were able to ask him a few things.  On the soviet occupation, he admitted that although things are better now, that in some ways it was easier then - medical care was free, as was university, etc.  now you have to have $$ to survive because you have to pay for everything.  He said it's hard to find work if you don't have a degree, and it's easier if you are a smart woman with a degree & long legs.  Joke?  He also said that they still have to be careful around Russia, because that's where they get their oil & gas - Latvia has none of its own. So "instead of growling & barking really big, we can only yip-yip.yip."

I was surprised to see how beautiful this city is.  It seems maybe a bit nondescript in guidebooks, but it has beautiful parks with canals running through, the old town is interesting, and the people seem pretty modern (unless you count the babushka types begging on the street.  Women were very fashionably dressed, lots of long legs showing under very short skirts, and a few women even had their hair dyed (at least in streaks) that matched their clothes, boots, purses - I particularly noticed fire-engine red & purple.  Strange.

Although the old town in pretty interesting, I'd like to just comment on a couple of things.

art nouveau buildings were prominent in the old town - strange mix with buildings from the 1600s. and several traditional buildings had people in casual poses on top - not stiff statues of martin luther, but like a kid sitting on the edge with his knees crossed, looking at the bottom of a foot.  Never heard what that was about.

The museum of occupation.  Amazing collection of info about the 1st & 2nd Russian occupations, as well as the Nazis in between.  Our second day it was clear (finally) & I could have been out taking decent photos, but stayed in the museum almost 3 hrs.  as you leave you learn that 550,000 latvians were lost, executed, deported, disappeared during this time.  here are some bits of info:

I had no idea how extensive the Russian gulag system was, or how many people were deported for virtually no reason to work in these camps.  There was a model of a barracks from these camps - just slats of wood in 2-3 levels for sleeping, no heat, few blankets, little food etc, people's hair froze to the planks overnight, an oil drum cut in half in the corner for a toilet, which seemed to be the most degrading part.  People dropped like flies & when someone died the workers tried to keep it secret by hiding the bodies so that the now-extra food rations could be shared.  See gulag map.  Much of the exhibit was personal items from these camps - scraps of cloth on which women had embroidered names of their co-workers so they could remember them - maybe a handkerchief from home, embroidered with a homemade needle with bits of thread pulled out of clothes; bits of bark used as paper to write on, scraps of paper thrown off of the transport trains hoping someone would let their families know they had been taken, handmade quilted masks with eyeholes & mouth cut out to protect their faces from working in cold about 40 below; drawings of home & loved ones they made on bits of paper, etc.

Also striking were stories of how any spark of independence was squashed. Eg, a group of high school boys had a Free Latvia society (secret no doubt) that was discovered.  They were arrested & imprisoned & a number died there.  The "before" and "after" photos were sad - high school photos of handsome young men shown next to their booking photos - heads shaved, beat up, holding numbers. 

When WW2 came the Latvians were "liberated" by the Germans, who were looked on with hope initially, then turned into a new kind of nightmare.  The creepiest part was that they went all around digging up bodies from mass executions that the Russians had done - there were plenty available - then blamed the killings on the jews.  And of course killed most of the Latvian jews.

Another interesting thing was a photo of the new theater built about that time, fully draped in nazi flags.

Ran back to the hotel to get some lunch before leaving, & squeezed into a table in the corner of the small caf‚ in the hotel.  They graciously let us eat there - the place was set up for a wedding luncheon, and the party came in while we were there.  Good greek salad & eggplant with tomatoes & cheese like we fix at home.  Yummm.

We left Riga about 4pm on a bus to Klaipeda, on the Baltic in Lithuania.  This is the longest bus ride we have, about 5 « hrs.  at first it was as if it were a normal bus that took people on & off-loaded them at regular bus stations, but then it started picking people up along the road & letting them off just anywhere.  So people got off in the middle of the forest in the pitch black.  One girl got off & jumped onto a tractor someone had driven to pick her up. 

We got there with enough time left over to change $ again.  This trip has 6 countries and 5 monetary systems, so we're always changing $.  As I said, lthough the Baltics are part of the EU, they haven't been approved for euros yet. 
Finland      euro
Estonia      kroon (on signs it is called eek, cuz Estonia is eesti)
Latvia       lat
Lithuania   lita
Poland       zloty

 Klaipeda & Neringa Lithuania
Friday September 12 - Saturday September 13
Tiny little room, turn around & you trip over something, but nice enough.  Good hot water!  There is a breakfast, which is nice - the last place we had to buy it.  There is no dining room though, so they bring you a little basket with a carton of juice, a few bits of bread, cheese, butter, & jam.  There's an electric kettle in the room, so you can make your own hot drink.

This morning we walked over to the dock area to take a ferry to the Curonian spit, a long thin bit of a sandbar that's now forested & has several small towns.  It has the Baltic Sea on one side & the Curonian Lagoon on the other.  The about half of the spit belongs to Lithuania, the other half to Russia, with the Lithuanian part called Neringa.  This part is about 1 hr long by bus.  It is totally composed of sand dunes, but most are stable enough that there are forests all over.  Other parts are unstable, and there was a town called Nagliai that moved 4-5 times between 1675 & 1834, running away from the shifting dunes; eventually they just gave up & left.

We are met by our guide, whose first name is Algus-something.  Like Alex, he seems willing to talk.  His English is . interesting, so that you can understand about 2/3 of what he says, making for some strange guide-type information.  His take on the soviet occupation was that they're much better off now.  No one could speak freely because you never knew who was an informant - he knew several people who were arrested & imprisoned for years for expressing an opinion.  Although education was free, it was not for everyone - there were quotas of how many would go to college, how many be laborers, etc, and you had to please the folks who had that power over you.  He was a good student but his teacher didn't like him, so he didn't get good grades - but went to the university by paying a big bribe to bureaucrats at the school.  They had to go into the Russian army for 2 years at 18, and he went to Afghanistan, He still wakes up screaming because of things that happened there, he said.  Lithuania has a volunteer, professional army, no compulsory service.

Neringa is beautiful.  The first thing we saw was Witches' Hill, which is a nice walk in the woods past wooden sculptures that depict Lithuanian fairy tales.  Trees are birches & pines, & there are mushrooms here & there.  The first, going up, part of the walk is statues of things like "the storyteller" who was punished by the gods, a giant lady named Neringa & her husband; Egle,  "queen of serpents" in which 3 sisters go swimming, a snake gets in the shirt of Egle, & forces her to marry him, turns out to be handsome prince (of course), they marry & live at the bottom of the sea, then when she takes her kids home to visit "the family," her 12 brothers trick her daughter into telling the secret password that calls her snky husband from the sea, they kill him, in grief she turns herself & her kids into trees.  The going-down part of the walk was witches & devils (with horns & hooves, but looking like people) casting spells, playing cards, dancing etc.

This area of Lithuania was originally German, and the houses have a kind of Bavarian look, with thatched roofs.  Lots of Germans still like to visit here.  The people for a long time were kinda a mix of the two groups, called Lietuvninkai, but gradually the Germans got richer & more bossy.  In 1872 it was specified that there would be no Lithuanian in schools. 

The Baltics in general are known for amber - they were on the "Amber Road" until they got fished-out, so to speak.  You can still buy amber here, it's the big Baltic souvenir, stores are everywhere, but it comes from somewhere else.  I did get a couple of amber things to bring home.

When the Russians owned this area after WW2 they planted ICBM missile silos & other military stuff all around.  You sure couldn't tell it to look at it now - it's quite picturesque.  We were in shouting distance of the Russian area called Kaliningrad (a tiny bit right under Lithuania that Russia kept to maintain some sea access).  There used to be flags planted very so often along the dunes marking the border between Lith & Russia.  At night the Russians would come out & move them a few yards to give Russia more territory, then the next night the Liths came out & moved "the border" just that much more into Russian territory!

The folks who live here were initially fishermen who went out in kurenas, shallow wooden boats that held ~ 5 people and cost as much as a house.  Officials in the Curonean Lagoon decided that they needed to track who was fishing where, to run off the ones who had drifted into another area's territory, to control amt of fishing & identify boats, so they specified that boats had to have weathervanes - these early primitive ones eventually became highly decorated with symbols for personal info, like married/single, children, where his house was, flag of his town, etc, and very colorful - black & white with bits of green, red, & blue.  Now of course you can buy them as a tourist item, & I would have bought one if I could have figured out how to carry it back.

As we were walking around in Nida, the last town on the Lith part, I noticed that, although there was water all around, there was no salty smell.  Then I read that most sea water is ~ 3.5% salt, but the Baltic is only 0.1 - 0.8%.  wonder why?

Vilnius Lithuania
Sunday September 14 - Monday September 15

4 hr bus to Vilnius, a woman was sprawled across the seats Ronnie & I were assigned to, who wouldn't move & indicated we should sit somewhere else.  Not speaking Lith, we couldn't effectively argue, so we did find other seats - fortunately no one else got on later who wanted our seats.

The city was supposedly founded in 1320 when on a hunting trip Grand Duke Gediminas dreamt of an iron wolf that howled with the voices of 100 wolves, to him an obvious sign that he was intended to build a great city there.  It did turn out pretty great, one of the largest in E Europe into the 1600s. 

Vilnius Univ was founded in 1579, the first in E Europe.  (The Russians shut it down 1832 - 1919 because of pesky Lith students etc. making too much trouble.

The Vilnius Cathedral is on a large square, with one of the paving stones being a glass tile marked stebuklas (miracles).  This was where the human chain of 2 million people that stretched through Lithuania & Latvia to Tallinn Estonia began.  The chain was built in 1989 to protest soviet occupation. This was to mark the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Agreement, in which Germany & Russia secretly divided up much of Europe.  You stand on the tile & turn (3 times? well, at least once) clockwise while making a wish.

Incidentally, I should mention the Singing Revolution.  During the second Russian occupation, after WW2, much of the protest against the Soviets took place by the singing of traditional songs in the Baltics.  Singing is REALLY big here, they always win worldwide competitions, and all 3 countries had huge sing-ins, I guess you might say, of about a quarter-million people.  Eventually with the fall of the iron curtain in 1991, dreams of independence came true, with Lithuania in the forefront and the other 2 close behind.

Back to the cathedral.  It was originally a pagan temple to the thunder god Perkunas.  Lithuanians were the last people in Europe to become Christians, in ~1400.  They still seem to be very nature-oriented.  Alongside the cathedral is a statue of Grand Duke Gediminas and the iron wolf.

Vilnius has lots of churches, about one per corner it seems, but now also lots of strip clubs & escort services.  Westernization.  Progress?  One of the most famous is St Anne's, built in the 1500s.  Supposedly Napoleon was so enchanted by it that he wanted to take it back to Paris with him. 

We had dinner the first night at a restaurant that had a bear out front, in one of the oldest buildings in the city (?), that served traditional food.  We were entertained by 3 strolloing musicians (all-kinds-of-percussion guy, accordion, and a strange almost-clarinet). They got us into the spirit by handing out triangle, bells, clappers, etc & having us join in.  then we danced a song that involved taping feet, clunking shoulders & butts, & got faster & faster.  My partner was Brendan, the 25-yr-old redhead from Australia.

Most of my time in Vilnius, though, was taken up by depressing themes.  Having seen the Occupation museum in Riga, I was interested to see what the Russian/German story was in this area.  I & 3 others from our group (Al, Ronnie, & Brendan) took a private tour of Jewish Vilnius - you have to be shown where things were because there's virtually nothing left.  Besides the obvious Nazi destruction, the Russians finished the job by pulling down huge swaths of the city's old buildings, including in the Jewish areas, to put in parks & apt buildings.

So we met our guide Amalia, who is not Jewish but is very interested in the history of her city, especially the Jewish part since one of her grandmothers was Jewish.
 
Vilnius was a major Jewish center, known as Jerusalem of the North.  Jews first came at the invitation of guess who?  Grand Duke Gediminas, the wolf-man.  He promised religious freedom, and it worked out fine until after WW1, when Poland took over (pretty famous for anti-Semitism), then of course WW2, goes without saying.  Vilnius was a center of Yiddish study, and was chosen over Warsaw & NYC to be the location of the Yiddish language center YIVO in 1925.  before WW2 there were 104 synagogues, theaters, and 6 daily newspapers.  It was also the home of famous anti-Hassidism teacher Gaon Elijahu Zalman in the 1700s (famous for reciting the Talmud by heart at 6).  Now pretty much all that's left are a couple of street names - Gaono & Zydu ("Jewish"). 

Most dramatic, we went to the Paneriai Forest, where tens of thousands of Jews, Poles, Liths, etc were taken to be killed.  Before the Germans took over the area, the Russians had dug large pits lined with stones for the storage of fuel (?), but never used them because the Germans took the area in June 1941.  They were herded onto trains, which transported them into the forest, lined up at the pits, shot, & tossed in.  About 70,000 Jews were killed.  When the Germans realized they were losing & the Russians were coming, they destroyed the evidence.  14 young Jewish boys were made to unload the pits (in the process coming across the bodies of friends, neighbors, & family members) & make pyramids with stacks of bodies, wood between the layers, then douse it all with fuel & set the pyramid on fire.  After the pyramids burned down, they broke up the bones with hammers.  While they were working, they dug a tunnel from one of the pits to escape since they knew they would be killed when done, carrying the dirt out in their pockets. They made their escape, but all but 3 were killed by running over land mines.  We saw one of the pits that remain and a number of memorials.  Creepy & sad to think what happened in such a lovely forest area, covered with pine needles, dotted with mushrooms & bushes with bright red berries.

We saw a memorial to a Japanese embassy guy who stayed behind when the Russians came to sign 7000 visas for Jews to help them escape.  Also 2 apt buildings built by a rich guy named Baron Hirsch for impoverished Jews, where 400 were executed and buried in their own yard.

Also visited a new cemetery where a lot of bodies were moved when the Russians plowed up the older Jewish cemeteries.  They used the gravestones for paving & building steps for new buildings.  Eventually some of these were rescued & put in a memorial area where some bodies have been placed.  The new cemetery has the new burial site of Gaon Elijahu.

Vilnius had 2 ghettos, called the Small Ghetto (lasted about 6 wks, after which 11,000 were killed), and the Large Ghetto (36,000 people) which lasted until the general liquidation of ghettos in late 1943.

We visited the only synagogue left, overlooked in the general destruction because it was being used for storage.  The caretaker guy who let us in spoke with us a bit, and said that on a good day about 17 people attend prayers - there were 4 there when we were inside.  During major holidays they max out at about 50, but the numbers are dropping as young people move, mostly to isreal.

We asked her why the Russians deported so many people (more in a minute). She said very briefly "no people, no problems" - they wanted the place but the people were just extraneous & a bit of a pain in the butt with demands for independence etc.

Before leaving we ran down to the Museum of Genocide Victims, which is about the Russian occupation - also called the KGB Museum.  What a grim place!  (about 200,000 Liths imprisoned across the country by Russians, this is just an example of what the prisons were like). An execution chamber where 1000 were killed, that had a sloped floor down to the back where blood drained out yuk.  Padded interrogation cells.  2 rooms whose floor was flooded with freezing water, in the winter turned to ice, with a small metal platform (~1 ft diameter) you could stand on as long as you could balance to stay out of the water.  Cells ~12 ft square for dozens of prisoners.  Exercise yard with walled in area about as large as the cells, where they could exercise for ~ 15 min a day, walking in circles with hands behind their backs, no talking, patrolled by walkways above).  They got a showers once a month, the note said the jailers often turned on only hot or cold, for fun.
 
Also were exhibits about the deportations - people were wakened in the middle of the night, given about an hour to gather some things, each got 1 piece of luggage, but they didn't know where they were going or what to take. The deportees were taken from lists of intellectuals and other sorts of troublemakers, like farmers who refused to join the collective farms.  Whole families were shipped out, parents & kids, grandparents, etc.  Women & kids were sent to resettlement towns in Russia, men to work camps. About 120,000 were deported.  No people, no problems.

Another area of the museums was about the partisans, freedom fighters who hid out in the woods & tried to fight the communists & make contact with the West so that people would know what was happening.  This futile effort was based on a comment/document by Churchill & Roosevelt in Aug 1941, that self-government of nations was what the war was about.  Will have to look this up, it's been mentioned several times.

Ginuciu Lithuania in Aukstaitija National Park
Tuesday September 16 - Wednesday September 17

2 hr train to Ignalina right after the museum trip, and then picked up by a kayaking outfit to be taken to the house where we will have a homestay for 2 nights.  Threw our stuff down, then put on lots of warm clothes since it's about 50 degrees & no sun - thermometer at the train station said 9!  So I put on long underwear, turtleneck shirt, jeans, two hats.

So we went kayaking about 3 hrs in Aukstaitija National Park - our guide was named Edmundos, and he called us all "dears" - "Everyone all right, dears?  Shall we go, dears?"  partway through we climbed a very very steep hill to have a look around at all the surrounding lakes.  He explained the importance of nature worship for Liths - the goddess who was the mother of all other gods, of the earth, thunder, etc.  he said to be healthy you should hug the oak tree that was alone on the top of the hill, he did it & closed his eyes in ecstacy!  so I did, and it did feel pretty good.

We returned to an amazing dinner - mushroom soup, cold fried fish, shredded cucumber salad, tomatoes, pork wrapped around dressing with raisins, potatoes, etc.  the rest of the house is so cold that we stayed in the dining area where the fireplace is.  We were talking about any- & everything, ending up on English & Australian slang.  They are familiar with & understand American slang because of movies, but we don't get theirs at all.  to Australians, the English are Poms (because they came from England with overalls with Prisoner of Her Majesty on the back), faffing around (piddling, which they use to mean pissing), alcohol is plonk, & it's sold in bottle stores, bathing suits are swimming costumes or cozzies,

Slept well, 10 hrs!!!  pretty cold, but 2 blankets.

Next day we went on a 2-hr hike to a small but really pleasant bee museum.  Lots of flowers, vertical & horizontal tree trunks for bee hives, wood carvings like on Witches' Hill, but . no bees!!!!  Back to a nice lunch with lots of bread, meat, cheese, and apple cake. 

Afternoon off, I've been typing this up for hours!  Some went into the sauna (most every house in the Balkans seems to have a sauna), then jumped in the lake, then back in the sauna, etc etc.  A very Baltic thing to do.  The sauna is a small room, about 8x10, all surfaces covered in wood, with a step-like set of three seats on one side.  Across from that is a huge pile of VERY hot stones.  To disperse the heat through the room better you toss a bit of water in a saucepan onto the stones.  The thermometer on the wall read 65 degrees - Celcius!  which is about 150 Fahrenheit.  The lady of the house, Regina, was drying rings of apples in there, and when everyone clears out she will use it for a clothes dryer. 

Warsaw Poland
Thursday September 18 - Friday September 19
Hope to add something here soon

Berlin Germany
Saturday September 20 - Sunday September 21
ditto

 

Comments

[timary weinfeld]

Hey, where's the post on Warsaw? That's the one place I have actually been, although it was 15 years and a lifetime ago. :) I wonder if it still looks like a Soviet-era master planned community...