Gedimino Prospektas

GEDIMINO PROSPEKTAS

This title, the name of a street, does not come close to picturing the series of disconnected and emotionally powerful encounters that I just wandered into during my early walks on this street.  The word Prospekt or Prospektas which is common in Eastern Europe usually refers a major avenue for pedestrian outings and special shops.  Gedimino is that avenue in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital.  It runs from the cathedral at one end to the Parliament at the other. Half-way down is a green square, Lukiskiu Aikste, or Lukiskiu Square. For fifty years this was Lenin Square where the required heroic statue of him, arm outstretched - and symbolically enough pointing across the square to the KGB Headquarters - stood atop an equally heroic porphyry pedestal. That was until a massive, joyous crowd celebrating the fall of the Soviet Union and especially the end of Lithuania’s Soviet government flooded into the square. They brought with them an industrial building crane, wrapped Lenin in steel cables, wrenched him off his porphyry pedestal, and sent him flying through the air before the world's cameras. Interestingly enough, although I did not know it at the time, the monumental church that formed the historic background for Lenin’s voyage was the Dominican monastery where I would live for those years.

During the Soviet reign the cathedral at one end of Gedimino became a museum of atheism, and the Parliament at the other end - a Moscow rubber stamp - became the scene during the Union’s final days where Gorbachev’s tanks came and killed the defending students in their futile attempt to stop the nation’s first freely elected parliament fro rising up against Soviet power. This Parliament had been a rubber stamp during Moscow’s effectively direct rule until the election of Vytautas Landsbergis - whom Ken and I had the privilege of interviewing and filming - who led Lithuania to cast that first vote taking a Soviet Republic out of the Soviet Union. It wasn’t long after all that that I moved from California into that badly battered monastery - itself reduced to a warehouse during the Soviet years. I actually spent many eye-opening hours walking up and down Gedimino during my first months there. To go overnight from my privileged turf outside San Francisco to this equally battered, but still monumentally beautiful, Polish baroque city - apparently the largest in Europe - was such an unforeseen gift for this curious old man. Of course I had not yet been exposed to what Soviet rule meant, no accident that since the Soviets worked endlessly and skillfully for fifty years to make sure no outsider would know. Westerners would see it. Those deeper agenda remained unformed for a good while. But in the meantime I was still very much a Californian out on a hunt for the supplies I needed to move in.    

Other than the settling-in agenda I really wasn't looking for anything.  I was obviously becoming invested in my presence in the country but if asked why I would have had no answer. I knew that I was being exposed to the human bases of a terrible story.  In 2000 the public buildings were still grey and grim.   What had been the visiting Muscovites' classy hotel and chief hangout, the Vilnius Hotel, was boarded up. The beveled glass panes in the carved doors were dirty and written on. And the once elegant lobby still visible from Gedimino a dumping  ground for orphaned furniture.  I was left with the impression that, for Kruschoff, Brezniew, and Gorbachef the chief symbols of capitalist corruption to be eliminated at all cost were soap and paint.  

 I was there in Lithuania - part exile, part refugee.  Exiled, without pain, from the mainstream of Dominican life in California for faults that were never named. And a willing refugee from work with no real purpose or demands. I had come there thinking of myself as someone who disdained old stones and their supposedly sacral roles. I found out that I was wrong.  Ironically it was the stone facade of the KGB headquarters, born around 1900 as a czarist police headquarters and which I passed routinely everyday for at least a year without note, that called my lack of responsiveness to a halt.  Away from the world of ideas and words my eyes had really begun to call me once again, as in my years in Provence, to these old stones. The KGB building was, and is, an imposing place of  blended Russian and beaux arts design.  The three story building with the usual Palladian windows, Corinthian columns and monumental entryway rises above a solid foundation of rose-colored granite stones.  These stones rise above the sidewalk to a height well above eye level.  And it was the attention now being given to these rose-colored stones that commanded my attention.

During my absence for a quick trip to California workers had set two blue and yellow tents on the sidewalk near the entrance, right up against the foundation stones. The larger held a rusting Russian compressor, a few rolled-up air hoses, and several bags of sand.  The other tent was completely empty except for wind-scattered piles of white sand.  On each of the four foundation stones within section covered by the tent a rectangular sheet of white rubber had been pressed and glued to the stone's surface.  And a name and two dates had been cut out of each of the rubber sheets.

Vincas Juskevicius  1925-1946   

Antanas Zvirblis   1924 - 1945

Vincas Juodis  1920 - 1947

Algimantas Kimas  1928 - 1947    

These young men were killed inside this building, and the stone masons were beginning a memorial to them.  They were the first of the many names to be cut into the stone.  Walking back and forth from our house to the university where I studied and then taught, and to the family support agency where I was eventually asked to work, I became very familiar with the many signs of the Soviet's brutish, fifty-year repression. 

Yet here and in the old city, many of the stones although so disdainfully abused at least are still there. But the abuse was more than just neglect or disdain.  Was there some deep contempt or resentment of Baltic culture? When Gorbachev's tanks finally left, two years after the collapse of the Soviet system, our baroque stone church, battered and abused, empty and vandalized like the others, was still standing.  But they were more than just standing.  In some way, they were bearing witness in the very lightness of their design and imagination recalling a humane and freer time.  Consecrated stones remembered when the fear and distress of daily life under Hitler and Stalin made remembering just too painful.  In effect, the stones stood human watch and guard when flesh and blood could not. 

Not all stones were so lucky.  Starting around 1900 Vilnius became the center for the renewal of the Yiddish language as the common, unifying force for Jewish culture in Eastern Europe. They called it the Jerusalem of the North.  Simultaneously there was the eventually successful promotion of Zionism's push for a homeland in  Palestine, but during these years Vilnius's role as a cultural, religious, and linguistic center for Jewish life was carrying the day.  There were a great synagogue, many other ones, and memories of a hundred libraries.  Nearly all this was burned and left in ruins by the Nazis.  And when the Soviets came in they took the next step - bulldozed all the ruins and carted them away so that not even a memory capable of rising in silent competition with the new socialist paradise could be seen. 

Living with this, knowing next to no one, not speaking the language, I looked at and listened to the silent city.  Only six or seven years after the Soviet tanks pulled out the deep, angry disdain the Russian occupiers impressed for fifty years on this western city's culture was still visible on every street.  The longer I was there, as I watched the former life rise again in small elegant renewals of stonework, rebuilt wooden doorways, broken streets carefully re-cobbled, the more I realized what had been there in the rest of the city and was now not there.  The knowledge of what happened in this land is harsh and unforgiving.  Even in the dark hours of empty silence it proclaimed still what no one should forget.  To anyone with ears to hear it cried out with a memory of stone. 

And when I read these words it is clear that the person who first came to Vilnius and the one who wrote them five years later are not the same.  With time the brutal history of what happened here began to sink in.  Young men so much younger than I was killed here.  Arrested, tortured, imprisoned and interrogated day after soul-numbing day, gotten rid of with a bullet in the back of the head. People were killed here and tortured here and sent from here to die as slaves,  exiles. Or when too worn to work or worry or care any more to sit down in the cold with no food and wait. I lived across the street from this. It was right across the street, visible from our house all the time. It is a place I had to pass by whenever I went anywhere. 

But realizations come.  In my country, no one - no one, really - knew or cared about these people, their histories, their lives or deaths or the circumstances of any of them. But many days walking streets where a few abandoned baroque monasteries whose windows  looked out with the blindness of empty, jet black eye sockets, walking along streets along streets where old farm women in heavy winter boots -they looked like my mother - sat in the cold selling a few jars of their honey or brown bags of the chanterelles they picked in the woods.  Days walking naively unprepared for the cold, living and studying in unheated buildings until I ended up with pneumonia and trying in a country where I did not speak the language get medical were there really was none.  It took all that and more to move me out of California and into the land where the names on the foundation stones, those young, men with a name and two dates, were people. 

Once in the context of their lives for some reason, I found myself caring about them, what had happened, about what it was like.  Even that took two years.  But by then I walked on newly contexted streets.  And it was from within this new sense - a sense I did not bring with me -it was with this different sense of self that I can go back to describe how we went about making this picture. But first I had to be there. What I have written here makes it sound as though this was a painful process.  Much was unnerving, and having to go home twice for medical treatment was somewhat startling and unexpected.  But in truth, it was an incredibly wonderful, humane, and liberating experience.  And at the start, there was no plan.  Just two outsiders serendipitously on the edge of a great scene from the state religion. 

 Dominicans have a long history in California, drifting into Baja in the middle 1700s from Mexico where they first arrived in the 1500s.  So settle other than ing on anniversaries in places you've around forever seemed sort of arbitrary. After the Mexican War of 1848, all legal responsibilities were transferred from Mexican authorities to American, including church authorities. So clergy from the East made the trip around the Cape or over the Isthmus of Panama out to California. Among them was the first American bishop of Monterey-San Francisco, a Dominican.  So the anniversary, probably 150 years, was celebrated with the usual civil-religious command performance in St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco.

My friend and not-yet film partner Ken Gumbert and I are not great fans of a state religion, and we also had very busy travel schedules.  So we sat together on the sidelines for much of it, catching up on our own lives and work. And we really did want to catch up.  He described a recent trip to Cuba, to locate and interview Catholic dissidents.  With my own history of dissent, I was really fascinated by his story of Catholic dissidents working somehow far enough in private to avoid arrest.  And we agreed that, come the Christmas vacation in a few months we would try o get back with the intention of filming some interviews with willing resisters.  Well before Christmas, he told me that his Cuban contacts would never be able to talk before cameras.  That would have meant definite arrest and imprisonment. So, with regret, we let the matter rest there,

I was lucky enough to have traveled into the old Eastern Germany and Poland right after the collapse of the Soviet system and I was considering a request from the head of the order to help with the restoring the church in the Baltics after a 50 year repressive occupation by the Soviets, deportations by the tens of thousands, and the systematic dismantling and destruction of all social institutions that had held the loyalty of the people.  He told me, to my surprise that he was planning to go to Prague during his up-coming sabbatical year from Providence College to look into a documentary on the repression of the church following the Soviet putsch of 1948.  After the Nazi defeat in 1945, the Czech Government in Exi1e returned from London to Prague.  But President Edvard Benes' and the respected Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk' government was already under Soviet pressure. Communist Party chief under Stalin's directions took over.  Masaryk was killed and Benes retired leaving Gottwald in full power. His rule was severe and repressive. So Ken wanted to go to Prague and interview dissidents and former prisoners to learn about those forty years of Communist rule.  The legal situation in the two countries, of course, was very different.  Czechoslovakia was an independent republic with its own language, currency and army.  Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were each Soviet Socialist Republics, partners with the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which was made up of republics. And each of them was a member of the U. N. But in Lithuania, the currency was the ruble. the official language effectively was Russian, and young men were all drafted into the Soviet Army.  All of them were effectively ruled directly from the Kremlin.

Our history in the Baltics went back to the early 13th Century and paralleled the establishment of Hanseatic trading centers so it had a history that tied in with my own interests going back to my years at Yale.  I was to go to Tallinn in Estonia to work with the diplomatic community, the nascent ecumenical activity, and in the university area. It sounded like my many years in Berkeley seemed like a  wonderful adventure. So in 1999, I flew to Vilnius to meet with the local superior about the work.  It turned out that he was an American, had taught my niece at Harvard, and she thought he was great.  He had made the mistake of going to Lithuania to check family roots and the small, young, attractive, and needy community-in-the making had worked their magic on him.  And he agreed to stay for a while and help them rebuild.

Before long Ken and I were talking with each other about our plans, checked possible schedules, and decided that we would go together to Eastern Europe for the summer, travel to the capital cities, and then go to our own work at summer's end, he to Prague, I to Vilnius. And, if anything, it turned out to be more of a wonder, a greater adventure, and really a greater renewal of life and hopefulness than I could have ever imagined.  

I have described how, by accident, I came to wander into the headquarters, the prison and the killing room of the Lithuanian KGB  because someone left the front door unlocked.  From there it was a journalist's fascination with a terrible story joined with our American's access to the means to tell it. The price you pay, of course, is that learning a story involves living with it. But the word 'price' is too American and patronizing. No outsider to the world of WW II and the Soviet occupation has any right to talk knowingly or even proximately of human costs.  I passed it on the street.  I saw the old women in heavy winter boots shuffle into our place every day in silent, looking neither up nor to right or left. I was not one of them.  I can look wherever I want whenever I want.  But I do know the difference and it is a burden.