On 24 May 2011, on invitation of the Lithuanian government and the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum heads of the largest Holocaust history museums from Poland, Washington and Jerusalem gathered in Vilnius. They exchanged their experience at the international workshop “The ashes of Paneriai: tribute to the Holocaust victims. Ideas for the reconstruction of the memorial”held at the Tolerance Centre. Experts on heritage protection, museologists, historians and politicians participated in the seminar  

The chairman of the Yad Vashem Museum, Avner Shalev, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum deputy director, Jacek Nowakowski, directors of the State Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum in Oswiencim and Stutthof, Piotr M. A. Cywiński and  Piotr Tarnowsky as well as the advisor to the minister of culture of the Republic of Lithuania, Rolandas Kvietkauskas, spoke about the idea of the reconstruction of the Paneriai Memorial.

Experts from the Lithuanian Institute of History, Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre, Department of the Cultural Heritage, Vilnius University, Vilnius City Municipality, Kaunas Fort IX Museum, Lithuanian Union of Architects, International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes together with representatives of diplomatic representations and culture centres discussed the present state of the Paneriai Memorial and exchanged opinions about new concepts for its reconstruction. Present also were the Chief Rabbi of Lithuania Chaim Burshtein, representatives of the Lithuanian Jewish Community and the Telšiai Bishop Jonas Boruta SJ.

According to the 1944 data, over 100 000 people were massacred in Paneriai. It is believed that the number of the Jews killed could amount to 70 000. Other victims were soldiers of the Lithuanian local squad, Roma people, participants in the Polish resistance movement, people who were considered communists, and Soviet POWs. The Paneriai Memorial, the site of the mass massacres committed by the Nazis has long needed a new complex that would pay tribute due to all the killed here and corresponding to the needs of modern society.

Welcome address by Markas Zingeris, Director of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum:

Prime Minister Kubilius,
Minister Gelūnas,
Chairman Shalev, dear colleagues Nowakowski, Tarnowsky and Cywiński,
Members of the Seimas, representatives of the ministries of Culture and Foreign Affairs,
Your excellencies ambassadors,
Your eminences Chief Rabbi of Lithuania Chaim Burshtein and Bishop Boruta,
Members of the Lithuanian Jewish Community,
Colleagues from the Department of the Cultural Heritage, architects, historians, municipality and museum workers,

I would like to dedicate the gathering at the Tolerance Centre of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum to children, families and civilians who could have made great contribution to Lithuania but whose lives were extinguished in the pits in Paneriai. We Lithuanian citizens owe it to Jews, as well as Poles, Russians and Lithuanians. We owe it to the future of Lithuania and Europe, Israel and the world.

 The pine forest in Paneriai is the largest site of the crimes committed by the Nazis in Lithuania. Paneriai is the place where the Special Squad under the SS brutally cut short the historical road of the Jerusalem of Lithuania. It was a series of actions with every one of them being an indescribable massacre, which for those butchers who carried out the Holocaust was a routine job. The crimes committed in Paneriai figured at the Nuremberg war crimes trial.

The word “Paneriai, Ponary, Ponar” has become known in various languages in history books, films, memoirs, and literary works. Unfortunately, for decades the site of the largest Nazi crimes has been formed spontaneously. The site’s being under the jurisdiction of a juridical person is also questionable. Different groups of people come to pay tribute to their dead at various times of the year, state ceremonies are held, and the victims are united not by people but by the common forest full of silent cries.

The tragedy of Paneriai is huge, as huge is the unused potential of the site. We can consider the site only as a cemetery without tombstones, as there are no separate graves for the dead; a cemetery where the memorials are silent most of the year and come to life only on commemorative days. I am sure that if the victims had survived many of them would consent to the wish to give wings to Paneriai; the wings of tolerance and culture, so that they could take a single tear of every child killed in Paneriai into the future and for the whole world to see, and every unsaid message or every victim’s attempt to resist, which perhaps was hopeless then, but which now gives us  belief in human strength. The many-voiced story must be heard in the murmur of the pines in Paneriai.

The Holocaust Memorial Museums Charter discussed in Israel last year by a group of countries says: “Holocaust memorial museums have to protect the dignity of the victims from attempts to exploit it for political purposes in every way, and to ensure that the interpretation of history awakens critical, independent thinking about the past that goes beyond an ordinary lesson we have to learn from the past.”

Memorial sites like this one in Paneriai have to take on the challenges of contemporary society. This is not the first attempt in Lithuania to find a solution but the first that enlisted the help of international experienced experts. The question is how to reconstruct the site in Paneriai?  Let us try to imagine and lay the foundation for future projects, so far with our thoughts or with ideas. There are many documents about Paneriai in this museum and in Lithuanian archives. I hope that they can be found in Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

 I express my gratitude to the Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania, the prime minister’s office, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, our diplomats abroad, the embassies of Poland, the USA, and the Czech Republic without whose help this gathering in Vilnius would have been impossible. I thank my colleagues for the work they have done. 

 I wish you all success in sharing your experience, thoughts and inspiring discussions.

Thank you very much for organizing this very important seminar here and making it so important with the presence of the prime minister and thank you for all those rewards.

I have been to Ponary. Ever since 1990ies it always struck me that this extremely important place is somehow neglected. This meeting proves that it’s not and this is very, very important thing to do. And I’m very pleased that the highest representatives [?] of the Lithuanian government are real engaged in making something new at this very important site. I remember as sort of an anecdote, in November of last year we came to the place and then with my boss , Sara Bloomfield, director of our museum and we were struck completely by this very same tour, that we got today from Rachel. And it was very difficult for us not to be really touched by that. And what added to the fact was the fact, that among our group was one person, an employee of the U.S. embassy here, who visibly started crying and then we found out that she is a  local employee, who grew up in Vilnius and she has never been to Ponary. And I think that this example shows us what the direction should be of the new memorial there.

Let me start with a quote from Hermann Kruk, one of his poems that were found after his death in Klooga. Herman Kruk was one of the chroniclers of the Vilna ghetto and I think that his words here give us the direction:

„I know I‘m condemned and waiting my turn. Although deep inside me burrows a hope for a miracle. Drunk on the pen trembling in my hand I record everything for future generations. The day will come when someone will find the leaves of horror I write and record. People will tear their hair in anguish, eyes will plunge into the sky unwilling to believe the horror of our times and then these lines will be a consolation“

I think that those words set us up in the sense that those who survive, those who didn’t survive and left any traces after themselves are trying to ask that we have to remember that. And remembering them are several ways of doing. One of those would be to remember a place like Ponary. A place, one of many place of executions, that were in this part of  the world, this is probably one of the largest in it, but also this is one of  the places that is most documented with the words of Hermann Kruk, with the diary of a neighbour, who witnessed this, with the German documentations etc ..

That gives us opportunity to know that place more than any other. And this way, this place already became sort of a symbol. And it would be very important to build up on that symbol. And again to echo the words of Avner, the education is the most important part, because this is, in the words of Herman Kruk and other survivors they wanted  us to not only  tell the story but to draw a lesson from those. And this is what I think a place like that should be.

The institution, again the same way as Avner Shalev, I was asked to present my institution and I think that we are quite a different place and we are a place that really takes its power from the sites like no matter, like Auschwitz and like Belzec and other places. We would not be in existence without those places. Those places are a witness to what happened, are the witness to the stories that we try to tell. The survivors live in Israel and the United states. The survivors are the ones who build our institutions and they want, they still watch us every day, believe me, we know it quite painfully, but it is a very important watch that we get from them.

And this place there are just a few survivors here and I watch that groupof people since 1990ies, when I come  here and what they build [?] This building is a testimony to this, “The Green House” is a testimony to this.and now if something happens in Ponary that would be something very, very  important

Let me give you one example of quite a similar but yet different process, our institution, our museum was involved back in 1990ies, which coordinated in new memorial opening in 2004. It was on the site of Belzec death camp. Belzec death camp for most was always confused with Bergen-Belsen. It was really not on the map of commemoration and yet it was a place, that had half a millions victims there.

So, it happened that our chairman of the boardwas originally from the town next door to Belzec.

It was his really important task, life task to start and to do something there. And he started a dialog with the polish government, not easy, not fast, but the dialog led in a sense to building the new memorial.

The situation in the beginning was very similar. It was many small commemorations, completely meaningless.But the place itself was powerful enough to strike everybody who came there. And step, after step, after step, in 1997 there was a competition for the new memorial.The new memorial was designed by a polish architect. Those who participated in the competition were only from Poland. They did not make international competition for that. The monument was built in 2004 and it has also a small museum on the side. A museum that is, its roll is only to explain the place, both what was happening on this site as well as its place within the whole scheme of what was happening during the Holocaust

We feel that this is enough. And now the museum is open for 6, 7 years and already from a meager several hundred visitors per year the place has around 30.000.Of course the museum was taken over by our colleges from the state museum of Majdanek. And they doubled up our debt and raised many educational programs. Belzec suddenly started being on the map. The very first thing they did there was to bring the school groups from local schools. They engaged those students, and those students became guides and teachers for other groups. Israeli groups started coming to Belzec, which was not happening before.

So that is some sort of an example how something can be done in a place that was almost completely neglected and forgotten, because forgotten  I think is the main word here in this.

In our work in our museum in Washington, also education is the key word for everything that we do in similar ways as in Yad Vashem. And for education there are many, many educational tools and having something like the site in Ponary, this the most powerful tool, combined with the  interviews, like the ones that we saw a few seconds ago, combined with the stories, that are known from there, combined with the all possible tools that can be employed in this exhibition setting. I think that the site itself should have something in it, that will explain what was happening on this site and more importantly show who the victims were. Show the faces, show the fact that those were people from among ourselves. They were people who like ourselves could be sitting in this very room one day and the next day become the victims. And I think that, that could be done in the setting of a small museum. I do agree that there is needed some sort of large Holocaust museum that will explain and I’m not sure that Ponary is the site for that. I think that this is a completely different discussion. However I think that at the site in Ponary it is very important to explain what was happening there and what was the time frames.

Also we have to remember that we live in the 21^st century and there are many, many new ways to spread the education, spread the work. Powerful website, powerful presence in the virtual space is also a very important thing. And that doesn’t take away from the place, as Piotr can attest, it brings more people. If you have well developed virtual presence it will bring more and more people to your site and they will come despite the fact, that this is not easy to get to.

And last but not at least this is something that my institution is very much on edge. This is the story of the holocaust and especially in places like this it’s an incredible tool to teach special people. People who have special roles in the life of the community, like judges, police men, military. We started and I try that was requested first by police force in Washington D.C. to start some sort of training for them. And upon their training we already built to quite a large scale, for instance, all the we have a very convoluted system of court judges from the state of Arizona, for instance, requested at some point. So we tailor for them all sorts of special programs, in which they come and they take a lesson from the Holocaust

I know that for instance the Auschwitz museum does similar things for the people from the prisoner service. We do this for instance for all the military. There is usually this time of the year the front of the museum is full of people in beautiful white uniforms, those are the plebs from the Naval academy. It’s a very uplifting view for us, who work with this subject, but also it is important that we know that that lesson goes to them.

And last but not least, the lesson of the Holocaust as it rose to the contemporary atrocities. This is also something that is in being demand. A lot of those who are engaged in the atrocities in Ruanda and all the other places come to us to get the knowledge and inspiration of what should they do as there are Atrocities? One of the lessons that we teach is that you do not compare atrocities, because everybody has their own tragedies. But what is important to know is, that from one lesson someone else can draw another lesson.

I think that the place here, I hope it will be established soon.

Thank you.

Photographer S. Pammer