Genocide in Lithuania

While we were in Palanga, we visited the tiny museum of exiles (or something approximating that name), which is one room in a tiny house along this carnival-like walking street. It was strangely jarring, like finding the Holocaust Museum in the middle of "the Puyallup" (that’s sort of like our state fair in WA,for those of you not reading this in Pierce County).

A very nice fellow named Algirdas Bene (all-gear-doss be nay) opens the museum for 2 hours Saturdays and Sundays, and obviously runs it out of his devotion to his own family and Lithuania. The best we can determine (Sandy used her Russian--even though rusty, it is far better than my German), his grandmother and father were both exiled to Siberia, along with hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians between 1946 and 1959. He pointed out--with what really is numbing predictability--that these Lithuanians were nationalist patriots, but Stalin, of course, saw them as (the word he used was) bandits, and that, of course, several hundred thousand died there.

Sandy kindly thought that I was clever to figure out what he was saying (the word he kept using was something like "banditi"), but it was more that one can't read about the number of times and places that Stalin did such things, and not guess pretty clearly what was happening. It's hard to imagine many non-Russian national groups in Eastern Europe that wouldn't have such bitter memories. And of course, Russian nationals suffered the same fate for a variety of reasons.

All that to say, Algirdas was exceedingly generous, and even seemed to beam with pride at the idea of my taking his and Sandy's picture (I'll post soon, I promise). He also provided the first refutation to my assumption about the balance between faith and nationalism. He said that, to him, his faith is more important than his country.



At once, a touching, poignant, and sweet time.