The Elephant in the Darkroom
דער העלפֿאַנט אין דער טונקל־קאַמער
TIMELINE
A very short history
The Lithuanian Jews were a predominantly Yiddish-speaking people of mostly Ashkenazi descent who numbered more than 150,000 men, women and children when they were viciously decimated by the Nazis and their willing local companions between 1941 and 1945. With the exception of a tiny handful of early anomalies, their presence in increasingly large numbers can be traced back to the 14th century, and the first in a series of privileges that would render it increasingly easy and more attractive to settle. What the Lithuanian Jews subsequently built was nothing less than a sophisticated and increasingly diverse civilisation, and their influence continues to leave rich and abundant marks throughout the world, not just in Lithuania. This third section of the site focuses nearly all of its energy on events that took place in Lithuania during the Second World War. There are plenty of sources—some better and considerably more balanced than others—to find out more. Today’s authentic Lithuanian Jewish population still living with Lithuania's borders would probably fit on a double decker bus.
1939
MARCH 22—Nazi Germany occupies the Lithuanian city of Klaipėda and the region that surrounds it, the regime’s last uncontested land grab before the outbreak of the Second World War. Adolf Hitler pays a personal visit the following day, and the city is officially (re)named Memel.
AUGUST 23—Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union sign the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression treaty that contains a secret protocol dividing Europe in two for the benefit of their individual expansionist goals. Lithuania falls within the Soviet sphere of influence.
SEPTEMBER 1—Nazi Germany invades western Poland.
SEPTEMBER 3—Great Britain and France declare war on Nazi Germany. The Second World War officially begins.
SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER—The Soviet Union invades eastern Poland, including the city of Wilno, a few days later. The regime temporarily governs—and plunders—the city until October 28, when Wilno is renamed Vilnius and it becomes the newly restored capital of the Lithuanian republic. In return, the Lithuanian government agrees to host 20,000 Red Army soldiers on its territory.
1940
JUNE 15—The Soviet Union launches a full-scale invasion of Lithuania, followed by invasions of Latvia and Estonia the following day. More here.
JULY 14-15—Two days of fraudulent elections end in the Moscow-backed Liaudies Seimas (People’s Government) taking political control of the country.
JULY 17—Following Nazi Germany’s invasion of France in May, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (see Glossary ↓) is founded with the sole purpose of looting valuable art and cultural property from all the countries in Europe and North Africa occupied by Nazi Germany. A very high percentage of this property is Jewish-owned public and private property.
JULY 20—The Soviet Law on the Protection of Cultural Monuments (↓) is ratified, paving the way for the mass nationalisation of almost all cultural and religious property in the country. Nearly every Jewish cultural and religious organisation is either closed or reorganised along ‘Soviet principles’, and their contents are mostly confiscated and taken away to locations still largely unrecorded. Several Lithuanian museums play a major role in the expropriation of countless thousands of works of art and other significant cultural objects. The law is still in place. See the Republic of Lithuania Law on Museums (↓) and the Soviet Law on the Protection of Cultural Monuments (↓) in the Glossary for more information on the subject.
AUGUST 3—Although effectively already a member in all but name, Lithuania is officially incorporated into the Soviet Union.
1941
JUNE 14—The first mass Soviet deportations to Siberia take place. Among the victims are the Zarasai-based Lithuanian Jewish photographer Moisiejus Botvinikas (1901-1984) and his family. See the Zarasai section in The Invisible Magicians for more information on the subject.
JUNE 22—Nazi Germany starts its invasion of the Soviet Union, including Lithuania. See here for more.
JUNE 24—The recently founded Lithuanian Provisional Government (see Glossary ↓) tries and fails to restore Lithuanian independence and take back control of the country.
JUNE 30—Five days after the German military occupies the Lithuanian city of Telšiai, Pranas Genys, the 39-year-old founder and director of the city’s Alka Museum, writes two letters to the mayor, the first requesting permission for the museum to take temporary possession of all the glass and other negatives belonging to the city’s Jewish-owned photography studios, and the second asking if the museum can also take temporary possession of all photographic equipment belonging to the same businesses. The mayor replies on July 2, granting the director permission to take temporary possession of both on behalf of the museum. They still have the negatives. The equipment—or at least some of it—seems to have been confiscated from among Genys' private possessions' when he was arrested by the NKVD in 1951 (↓).
LATE JUNE-EARLY JULY —The Catholic theologian, Hebraica expert and serial looter Johannes Pohl (1904-1960) arrives in Vilnius on behalf of his employer, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg/Adolf Hitler.
JULY 9—Either on or very close to this date, staff from the Aušros Museum in Šiauliai and the city municipality conspire to break into the apartment and photography studio belonging to the 29-year-old Lithuanian Jewish photographer Mauša Fligelis, who it’s believed has fled to Soviet Russia ahead of the Nazi invasion. Among the expropriated objects listed on the official documents still held by the museum are at least one valuable camera, studio lighting, and miscellaneous pieces of darkroom equipment. It’s believed but not yet proven that the photographer’s glass plate negatives and a number of personal/family prints were also among the haul.
JULY 17—The German civil administration takes over from the military.
AUGUST 5—Increasingly aware that it has zero power and/or influence, the Lithuanian Provisional Government dissolves itself and ceases to exist.
AUGUST 15—The Kovno Ghetto and the Šiauliai Ghetto are established.
AUGUST-SEPTEMBER—The Čekiškė photographer Leizer Beker and his wife, Šifra, are murdered sometime during the late summer. The non-Jewish family who move into their empty house find several of the couple’s personal photographs. These photographs still exist, but it’s so far proved impossible to locate them. Today, Leizer’s nephew and extended family live in Alaska, and have expressed a strong desire to possess them. See also Leizer's entry and The Box in The Invisible Magicians.
SEPTEMBER 6—The Vilna Ghetto is established.
SEPTEMBER 6-10—The Germans issue a decree on September 4, carried out September 6-10, demanding that the Jews imprisoned in the Kovno Ghetto hand over all their valuables, an event that’s become known as the Kaunas Gold Aktion. Judging from what was taken from Seredžius (see September 29 ↓), this haul included expensive Leica cameras. No paperwork associated with the Aktion has so far been found.
SEPTEMBER 8—The last surviving Jewish residents of Butrimonys are believed to have been murdered on or around this day. One family’s personal photo album miraculously survives. It’s now in the possession of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. having been 'donated' by a Lithuanian, despite two members of the family surviving the Holocaust, and their direct descendants living in Poland and the United States.
SEPTEMBER 29—A few days after the last Jewish man, woman and child from the small town of Seredžius has been murdered, a two-page inventory of all the valuable possessions that once belonged to the victims and that are now the 'property of the German Reich' is produced. Among the gold and silver watches, wedding rings and kiddush cups is a single camera, whose recorded serial number shows it to be a Leica III that was manufactured in Wetzlar in 1935 and shipped to Berlin on February 19 before it was shipped to Lithuania on an as yet unknown date. Further investigation shows that after it was stolen from its murdered Jewish owner from Seredžius in 1941, it was repaired in Wetzlar on October 27, 1949, and again on November 11, 1956. The precise details are not public knowledge.
1942
JANUARY 21-26—The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg pays a visit to the Vytautas the Great Culture Museum in Kaunas (today the M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art). Among the Jewish cultural objects they seize are a collection of photographs from the Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society in Lithuania that got there under unknown circumstances. Photographs from the Lithuanian headquarters of OZE are also suspected of having been taken at the same time.
FEBRUARY 11—The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg pays a visit to the Vilna Ghetto, an event that inadvertently brought about the creation of the so-called Paper Brigade. See Glossary (↓) for more.
FEBRUARY 18-JUNE 8—The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg produces a document that includes an inventory of the cultural objects held by YIVO in Vilnius. Among the items listed are the institution’s main photo collection and another collection of photographs belonging to YIVO’s in-house Theatre Museum. .
1943
SEPTEMBER 23—The Vilna Ghetto is liquidated.
OCTOBER 23—Approximately 2,700 relatively healthy Jews (among them Annushka Varšavskienė, see the Kaunas section of The Invisible Magicians and the Lost & Found box below for more) are transported from the Kovno Ghetto to the Klooga concentration camp in northern Estonia, where they're forced to do a number of different jobs to aid the Nazi war effort. Klooga is liquidated at the end of September 1944. Among those murdered are Annushka and her two daughters, Frida and Bella.
Lost & Found
In September 2013, I accidentally stumbled upon a collection of family photographs that had been smuggled out of the Kovno Ghetto at great personal risk in October 1943 by an at the time unknown person, who, with huge thanks to the superb sleuthing skills of Saulė Valiūnaitė and Teresė Fedaravičienė and her family who originally saved the photographs, turned out to be Annushka Varšavskienė, a 46-year-old, Berlin-trained musician and childcare specialist living in interwar Kaunas with her second husband, Leiba, and their two daughters, Frida and Bella, whose extraordinary and unprecedented act of preservation shortly before she was deported to the Klooga concentration camp in Estonia where she was murdered by the Nazis 10 months later is the principal—if not the only—reason for this entire project to exist. After a bit more detective work by Saulė, it was also possible to find close family members living in the United States and Canada, with whom the photographs now reside. See The Invisible Magicians (under Annushka Varšavskienė in the Kaunas section) for more. Full story soon. Please consider making a donation to help support the project.
Richard Schofield
Founding Editor, Camera Obscura.
1944
JULY 13—The Nazi occupation of Vilnius ends when the city is ‘liberated’ by the Red Army.
AUGUST 26—With the help of several other survivors and the necessary Soviet bureaucracy to legitimise it, Abraham Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski open the so-called Jewish Museum for Culture & Art (see also Glossary ↓), first in their apartment and later in the former Vilna Ghetto library. Plans for a similar institution in Kaunas aren’t so successful, and the Soviets eventually succeed in closing the Vilnius institution five years later. Among the objects in the museum’s possession are 2,162 photographs from a variety of sources. Although it's known that some photographs made it back to what was and what remains a state-owned museum, now known as the Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History, nobody's ever made a serious attempt at tracking all the still missing photographs down.
1945
JANUARY 28—The last German soldiers flee western Lithuania after the Red Army’s victory at the Battle of Memel. Two Lithuanian Jewish photographers, Judelis Kacenbergas and Chanonas Levinas (see The Invisible Magicians) photograph the day’s events, the latter photographing an anonymous Red Army soldier in the process of looting an unusual trophy. One regime replaces another.
ARIL 30—Adolf Hitler commits suicide in Berlin.
MAY 8—Nazi Germany surrenders, officially marking the end of the Second World War in Europe.
Aftermath
Pranas Genys (see June 30, 1941 ↑) is arrested by the NKVD on April 27, 1951. Found among his possessions is a large collection of professional studio photography equipment which almost certainly originated from murdered Jews. He dies in prison the following year, taking his many wartime secrets to the grave.