Kaunas

We went to Kaunas, the second city-after Vilnius, this weekend. Most of all, we wanted to visit the 9th Fort, the last in a series of forts the Russians built to protect against the Germans. Being controlled by Tsarist Russia up until WWI, and on the main road between Russia and Germany, the Russians built a series of forts ringing the city. This ninth (and last) fort was built in the early 1900s, and was the most advanced, though, you might be thinking--as I was, weren't fortress defenses a bit outdated? As it turns out, yes.

The Germans actually attacked three of the other forts, using artillery pieces with much greater range than the Russian defenders had. The three older forts fell, and the Russian forces quickly abandoned the ninth fort, which never fired a shot in anger. The Germans held Kaunas for 11 days, or something like that. After WWI, Lithuania became independent, and I don't know what the fort was used for.

In 1939, in a secret addendum to the Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact (which partitioned Poland), the Soviets and the Germans also partitioned Lithuania, and the Soviets got the section that included Kaunas. They proceeded to use the barracks section of the fort as a prison/processing center for political prisoners (Lithuanian nationalists) often on their way to exile. In 1941, after the Germans took this territory following their attack on the Soviet Union, they began to use the fort's barracks as a small concentration camp. About 50,000 thousand--including 30,000 Jews--were murdered there.

After the Soviets liberated Kaunas, they began using the fort as a prison again.

Our camera battery died on the way there, so if you want to see some pictures, go here.

This place beats on the mind and spirit in the same steady way that other such places (Auschwitz-Birkenau, which is of course, much larger, Anne Frank house, which is very private and intimate, the tiny museum in Palanga, the KGB prison last year) do. The pervasiveness of these places and the conduct therein, and in the case of the 9th fort, the quick and easy use of the same place by different people for such depressingly inhuman things, weighs on the heart and soul.