(Summarized from a Lietuvos Rytas Article by Eldoradas Butrimas , November 13, 2011)

“If a child is taught from the cradle to fight indiscriminately for its homeland, that child will grow up to kill anyone who is a foreigner or anyone who disagrees with him.”

This is part of the confession of the late Stefan Dąmbski, a former Polish partisan executioner and a member of the “Armia Krajowa”.  He remained so guilt-ridden by what he had done during the war that he committed suicide in Miami seventeen years go.

Apparently, much of Poland has been polarized by the  revelations in Dąmbski’s  memoir, called “Executioner”.

Dąmbski said of himself: “I was worse than the cruelest beast. I was a typical AK soldier mired in the filth, but they called me a hero and decorated me with a medal after the war – a cross for courage. “

Dąmbski wanted his story to be a cautionary tale for others, but he doubted the book would ever be published.

The former guerrilla said he thought he became such a beast thanks to the patriotic fervor he was filled with in his childhood by his family, his church, and his country.

Born in 1926, he was raised by relatives after his mother died and his father emigrated to Columbia, and he joined the AK as a courier in 1942. When he was told to avoid a former classmate who was collaborating with the Nazis and was slated for execution, he offered to do the job himself.

The next day, Dąmbski invited the classmate into his house, got him drunk, and took him out into the woods where he shot him. He went on to execute over 300 Germans, Ukrainians and Poles, including men, women, and children.

He brutality was extreme. In 1944, despite being instructed by the AK leadership to be friendly to Soviet soldiers, he killed a drunk Russian soldier who was sleeping in a ditch by driving a nail into his head and then riding away on a bicycle.

Similarly, he was instructed not to shoot German prisoners of war, but when peasants turned over a German whom they had stripped naked, he thought it would be too much trouble to look for clothes and shot him instead.

The story being told above is not exactly as uplifting as the stories I used to write Underground, but I think it’s important to lay bare as much as possible in the service of truth, insofar as you can. Sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s in the right, but you need to keep on weighing the evidence.

An acquaintance in Lithuania tells the story of his grandfather, seized during a postwar rural festival and executed in front of his family. This is a real tragedy, a terrific trauma.  But the man, it turns out, had been warned not to cooperate with the Soviets in the countryside. Yet he did, and suffered the consequences.

Was this a justified execution, or an example of a farmer caught between a rock and a hard place?

“By the end of the war, half the population of Belarus had either been killed or moved.” (Snyder, 251).

One of Timothy Snyder’s most important points is that the destruction of civilian populations was not limited to the holocaust (horrifying though those numbers were). Civilian death in the “Bloodlands” of Belarus, Poland, the Baltics and Ukraine totaled about 14 million, these quite apart from military deaths (but including 5.4 million holocaust deaths).

And the worst place of all to be was Belarus, where it was a matter of chance whether one was dragooned by Nazis or Soviets, a matter of chance whether one’s wife and children were killed by Nazis or Soviet partisans.

But suffering was extreme throughout this region, although different for Jews and non-Jews. When the Soviets returned to Poland as they beat back the Germans, they came as questionable allies to the Poles who had already suffered under them. Surviving Jews could only the see the Red Army as liberators.

The Soviets always underlined that the suffering had been Russian suffering, but the fact of the matter was that the Russian heartland was mostly untouched.  Byelorussians, Poles, Baltics, etc. bore the brunt. And it was in the interests of the Soviets to underplay the holocaust.

The Soviets also claimed that the war had started in 1941, not 1939. Thus the territories they occupied in 1939, the Baltics, Eastern Poland and Western Ukraine, were considered always to have been Soviet rather than, as Snyder says, “Booty” of an earlier aggression.

German and Soviet occupation together was worse than German occupation alone.

Snyder reminds us that the majority of dead did not die in concentration camps. The majority were shot, starved to death, or killed on arrival at death camps. He reminds us that the Soviet prisoners of war were starved to death until they became useful as labour, but millions had died before this. As well, Germany planned to starve to death another thirty million people in the Bloodlands, but their plans were stymied by Soviet resistance.

I found this whole semi-forgotten plan of starvation freshly horrifying.

As well, I found it horrifying that the Nazi holocaust death machine only really got rolling once it was clear the Soviets could not be beaten quickly, if at all. For the Nazis, victory was claimed in the killing of the Jews as a stand-in for victory over the Soviets.

There is much more in Snyder than I am summarizing here. I’d just like to add two points which are important.

First, the whole notion of the word “genocide” that I have considered in earlier posts is, according to Snyder, a red herring. It is distracting and unnecessary to fuss over definitions of it (although Naimark devotes a book-length essay to the topic).

His second important point is that one must consider the humanity of all those involved. : “First a legitimate comparison of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Soviet Union must not only explain the crimes but also embrace the humanity of all concerned by them, including the victims, perpetrators, bystanders and leaders. … a legitimate comparison must begin with life rather than death.”

One other thought I’d like to add is that Snyder’s “Bloodlands” include most of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which was partitioned away in 1795. The Bloodlands stand upon a ghost state, one which disappeared but whose old borders delimit the most intense savagery of the war.

This is also the place where the partisan fighting that I depict in my forthcoming novel was most intense.  Not only did the war start early in that region, if one includes the Ukrainian famines, it went longer there too, right into the early fifties.

No wonder emigration out of the region has been so great since the collapse of the Soviet Union. When one adds the losses of the first world war in the East to those of the twenty-year period 1933-1953, this must be considered one of the most unhappy places on the Earth.

Anyone with an Eastern European background, specifically Polish, Baltic, Byelorussian, or Ukrainian, can let out a sigh of relief now that Timothy Snyder’s new history of WW 2, Bloodlands, has been published. This is not to say that it lets those peoples off the hook for crimes committed on their lands. It does show how much greater the savagery of that war and the holocaust was experienced in those territories.

Furthermore, it shows some of the places where one had no chance to take moral action, places such as Byelorussia (Belarus) where a man might just as easily be dragooned into the anti-Nazi partisans as into the anti-partisan Nazi police or even into Nazi slave labour. As for the wives and children of these men, they were often shot to reduce the number of mouths that needed feeding.

Yet hardly anyone I know here in Canada is really clear where Byelorussia is. I’ve had to do explain it again and again.

Snyder starts off earlier than most historians of the war, beginning with Stalin’s famine in Ukraine. While this famine has been known about for some time, one still hears apologists calling it a regrettable bureaucratic error. Not so Snyder. He points out that Ukrainian famine was caused by a conscious decision fully understood by Stalin. He also lays out the brutality of that act in moving passages such as this one:

… families kill their weakest members, usually children, and use the meat for eating …

…  Survival was a moral as well as a physical struggle. A woman doctor wrote to a friend in June 1933 that she had not yet become a cannibal, but was ‘not sure I shall not be one by the time my letter reaches you.’ The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to kill their fellow men died. Parents who resisted cannibalism died. …(page 50)

In a further twist, Stalin and his henchmen came to believe that those who were starving were showing some form of resistance to the regime, and were therefore doubly guilty.

Snyder’s central thesis is that Hitler and Stalin enabled one another’s atrocities. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence, permitted Stalin to begin his arrests of the local intelligence in the East and it permitted the Nazis to begin killing Poles to make way for German settlers.

When the accord fell apart due to Hitler’ attack,  brutality fed brutality. Here is what the New York Review of Books had to say:

In some cases, the atrocities carried out by one power eased the way for the other. When the Nazis marched into western Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltic states in 1941, they entered a region from which the Soviet secret police had deported hundreds of thousands of people in the previous few months, and shot thousands of prisoners in the previous few days. The conquering Germans were thus welcomed by some as “liberators” who might save the population from a genuinely murderous regime. They were also able to mobilize popular anger at these recent atrocities, and in some places to direct some of that anger at local Jews who had, in the public imagination—and sometimes in reality—collaborated with the Soviet Union. It is no accident that the acceleration of the Holocaust occurred at precisely this moment.

Then things got worse. More on this in coming posts, but before that, a little more form the New York Review of Books’ take on these revelations:

For different reasons, the American popular memory of World War II is also due for some revision. In the past, we have sometimes described this as the “good war,” at least when contrasted to the morally ambiguous wars that followed. At some level this is understandable: we did fight for human rights in Germany and Japan, we did leave democratic German and Japanese regimes in our wake, and we should be proud of having done so. But it is also true that while we were fighting for democracy and human rights in the lands of Western Europe, we ignored and then forgot what happened further east.

As a result, we liberated one half of Europe at the cost of enslaving the other half for fifty years. We really did win the war against one genocidal dictator with the help of another. There was a happy end for us, but not for everybody.

I first heard of the controversy about Lithuania’s Museum of Genocide Victims shortly after the place opened. Many people took issue with the name because it was used by a museum of the sufferings of the people under Soviet regimes but did not address the holocaust.

Magazines such as Vilnius in Your Pocket mentioned this omission, and heated discussions took issue on the subject of this name, my own at the Cafe Diplomatico in Toronto, thousands of miles away.

For the first few years I paid little attention to the controversy and was simply glad the museum existed. Most people I knew had no knowledge of any kind about deportations from Lithuania, massive executions of prisoners by retreating Soviets in 1941, and years of anti-Soviet resistance afterward. I didn’t care much what the place was called because I saw strangers come out of there with a rounder knowledge of what happened in Lithuania before, during, and after the war.

But the heat continued to rise as claims were made that Lithuania, like other Eastern European countries, was turning rightward and trying to mask its own severe crimes in the holocaust by drawing moral equivalency between Hitler and Stalin. Related to this issue is the Prague Declaration of 2008, which calls for the examination of the crimes of Communism.

Commentator Dovid Katz has taken great issue with this declaration in the Guardian and on his site, Holocaust in the Baltics. He claims that Lithuanians (and others) are trying to deflect attention from their guilt. Lithuanian commentator Tomas Venclova has agreed with some of the charges. On the other side, notable people such as Vaclav Havel and Lithuania’s Emanuelis Zingeris are signatories of the Prague Declaration.

I had always hoped the narratives did not need to compete, but it seems they do. Let’s return to the word “genocide”.

I had always assumed the term “genocide” dated back to some kind of prehistory, so I was interested to see that it was only defined in 1948 by the United Nations. The lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, first promoted the concept and its definition initially included “social collectivities” as potential victims of genocide.

This formulation was objected to be the Soviet Union, and therefore “social collectivities” were removed. In other words, the Soviets did not want their murder of kulaks, “bourgeois”, and others to be considered genocide.

Therefore the Lithuanian use of “genocide” is not a new formulation. It is an old one.

I merely summarize here. Many people, including Dovid Katz, define the term variously in Wikipedia.

Norman Naimark’s book, Stalin’s Genocides, is really a long essay on the subject, suggesting that the word can indeed be used for the victims of Stalin.

Naimark is no right-wing apologist. While he does claim that from the point of the victim, the suffering of people is equal no matter who caused it, he also says the holocaust is the most extreme case of genocide in human history.

Naimark goes on to write: “… perhaps it is time to stop asking the question whether the group that is being murdered “in whole or in part” is national, ethnic, and religious group, or whether it is a social, political, or economic group. What is, after all, the difference when it comes to human life?”

Dovid Katz might argue that the fudging of terms, the movement of language, is an attempt to mask the crimes of the holocaust.

I hope that isn’t so, but I think the evil politicians might enact shouldn’t prevent the reappraisal of history and the opening up of the many narratives of WW2. One thing is certain, and that is we haven’t come to the bottom of this yet. For decades in the west we had a triumphalist view of WW2 in term of military achievement, and a melancholy view of the terrible crimes and loss of life in the holocaust, crimes perpetrated not only by Nazis but by willing helpers in large numbers all throughout Europe, most viciously in Eastern Europe where the bullets were actually fired.

The above is true, but it isn’t the whole story. We never paid much attention to the East, but the opening of archives in that part of the world has led to a flood of new information and some new interpretations.

While I am still reading Timothy Snyder’s excellent Bloodlands, a story of WW2 in Eastern Europe, I suspect his interpretation of the word “genocide” might be closer to Naimark’s. I’ll see when I reach the end of his work.

My own novel about the Lithuanian postwar partisans comes out in March in Canada. That coming event and the busy fall literary season have slowed down my blog posts. Through some moment of excessive enthusiasm, I have also joined the board of the Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs (CCWWP) and am wrapped up with organizing g a conference in Toronto in May of 2012.  All of these activities put pressure on the posts, but this issue, the evolving story of Eastern Europe, are the ones that compel me the most, both in literary and historical frameworks.

Historian Norman Davies, the late Tony Judt, and Timothy Snyder have been enlarging our understanding of WW 2 and Eastern Europe for the last decade or so, but now the forthcoming history by Sndyer, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, has ignited a sharp debate in The Guardian.

Snyder’s article summarizing his thesis states that the war began with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which divided Poland between Germany and the USSR in 1939.

In this interpretation, Stalin and the Soviets helped Hitler and the Nazis to initiate the most destructive war of the twentieth century and the holocaust as well.

Two sharp responses to this thesis come from Efraim Zuroff and Dovid Katz.

Zuroff’s thesis is that the Soviets entered into the pact as a tactic to protect themselves, whereas the Nazis used it to permit expansion.

Katz’s response is more extensive and nuanced, but his central thesis is that this interpretation plays into the hands of ultranationalist Eastern Europeans who are trying to avoid responsibility for their countries’ role in the holocaust and paint themselves as victims in the “double genocide” of WW 2 and afterward.

This argument is germane to my forthcoming novel, which deals with anti-Soviet partisans after the end of the war. Were they heroes or criminals or misguided nationalists? I take a generally positive view of them, with notable exceptions. But if the Soviets were liberators, then what were the partisans?

As to the arguments outlined above, I believe Zuroff’s argument bears more weight than Katz’s because it deals in history, what the regimes were intending when they signed the pact.

Dovid Katz’s article is respectful of Snyder, but claims he fell into a trap that plays into the hands of the ultranationalists.  This is an argument about the utility of history, or use and misuse of history.  Put simply, Snyder’s thesis can be put to bad use, and therefore it is wrong to state it. This argument is dangerous one because it implies that  one should not say the unsayable because it might be misinterpreted. Katz is dead on about many of his points, which are echoed by the Lithuanian thinker and poet, Tomas Venclova (see an excellent Lithuanian language interview with him on the Donatas Glodenis site) but as for me, I say let Snyder make his arguments regardless of how they might be misused.

The comments at the bottom of the three articles in the Guardian noted above make for fascinating reading as well. One can see the interpretations of this history starting to separate into two (hostile?) camps.

I repeat what I’ve said before: why should these interpretation clash? The crimes of each regime need to be explored thoroughly without falling into moral equivalency.

As to the “double genocide” theory, interestingly historian Norman M Naimark has published a new book titled “Stalins’s Genocides“, and that should cause further discussion.

In Canada, I continue to hear complaints about the historical novel, a genre I work in now. These comments make me think of Hannah Arendt who quote William Faulkner to say: The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

Alexander Statiev is a Canadian assistant prof at the University of Waterloo, and he’s just produced the first broad study in English of anti-Soviet partisans in the postwar period.

He’s used Soviet archives, newly available, to study the methods of counterinsurgency in the long stretch of territory from Latvia in the North to Moldova in the South that was annexed by the Soviets  by mid 1940, lost for a while to Germans, and regained in 1944.

He has also used partisan memoirs and local materials in a labour of research that is quite astonishing and briliant. Most of those interested in the insurgents (a term I’m slightly uncomfortable with because it makes them sound like “rebels”), the “Forest Brothers” tended to be those from the particular countries involved. Part of the value of this book is its study of the region as a whole.

Statiev makes some well-known points. The Soviets faced resistance wherever they annexed lands and in some places they could not control the countryside for years after the annexation. When the Soviets first arrived, locals discovered their standards of living fell and the new regime was extremely authoritarian, to put it mildly. Tens of thousands were deported in terrible conditions.

Statiev adds that lives lost in resistance equal roughly as many as all the lives lost by Americans in the European theatre of World War 2, and I assume he is counting only deaths by immediate violence, not the losses by slow death in the gulag.

The Soviets launched populist reforms in these newly annexed lands in an attempt to exploit class divisions, but these techniques did not work well in the countryside, where the vast majority of resisters came from.

Furthermore, Soviet repression was not aimed necessarily at resisters, but to whole blocks of the population. For example, those labeled as “kulaks” had no choice but to fight or be deported.  Indeed, the Soviet regime used mass deportations as a tool of security policy.  Peasants, one cannot stress enugh, constituted the majority of the guerillas.

The resistance lost steam over a number of years as the struggle became futile.

Somewhat less known and less comforting to those who support the memory of the resisters are some of the darker facts of their history: partisans fought primarily against their own people, those who were willing to accept the new regime. The partisans looked upon them as collaborators.

The whole issue of collaboration is fraught – it only applies to working with regimes that lose. What I mean is collaborators in our understanding tend to have been working with Nazis. What do we call those who worked with the Soviets, in particular the early adopters of their system?

The discussion leads to a nightmare of sorts, one that is still playing out in our discussion of Eastern Europe. Again, I wish there were parallel narratives instead of competing ones as I have mentioned repeatedly in these posts.

Still, one must admit that many of the many of the partisan acts were extremely brutal and unscrupulous. For an example of such brutality, see Donatas Glodenis’s post on this very issue (in Lithuanian)

http://dg.lapas.info/?p=685

So what’s it all mean?

Simple stories rarely hold together over time. I still believe the resistance was heroic, but there were crimes nested within crimes in the resistance and the counterinsurgency. The very fact of the resistance demonstrated that the annexation was carried out by force. Had there been no resistance then, arguably, there would be no independence now.

As I finish checking the line edit and proofing of my novel, Underground, which comes out with Thomas Allen in the spring of 2011, the subject of East European partisans continues to come up in various media.

We are seeing a profound transformation of understanding about that part of the world as historians continue to come up with new material and writers come up with new interpretations of what we already know.

I have written before of narratives in collision wherein the term “genocide” is used in novel ways and moral equivalency is drawn between Fascist and Communist regimes. As well, the holocaust looms large over this part of the world.

The latest article I have seen to address the issue is by Barry Rubin, in a piece called Unfinished Business and Unexploited Opportunities: Central and Eastern Europe, Jews and the Jewish State.

A somewhat simplistic summary of the article is that Eastern Europeans should be permitted to explore their suffering under Communism as long as it is not used to mask anti-Semitism. Indeed, Jews suffered massively under Communism too.

From my perspective, this article signalled that narratives need not be in collision. There could be parallel narratives of Eastern Europe.

However, Rubin’s article did cause some controversy. A rebuttal came out in the Jerusalem Post, claiming that Eastern Europeans use their narratives to mask their crimes (again – a simplistic summary – readers should go to the article itself.) I was troubled by the article’s claims of a “hidden agenda”. One can ascribe any agenda one wishes to if it is going to be hidden. Indeed, “hidden agendas” smack of conspiracy theory.

In contrast, I have just returned from a Santara conference in Chicago in which I talked about the historical sources of my novel, and while the reception there as very positive, at least one of the members in the audience took offence that I would explore the many partisan narratives (including those of Jewish partisans) rather than stress the heroism of those anti-Soviets who suffered in the bunkers after the war until they were annihilated.

Oh my.

This continues to be a raw topic – next week, more on the subject and links to other blogs and books.

The summer writing workshop at Humber is occupying almost every moment of this week, and for details of what’s going on there, see my posts at the Newsroom at Humber, starting this week.

On the home front, I am going through Janice’s edits slowly, but should be able to finish them pretty quickly once the workshop finishes. As soon as I do, I’ll hand in my corrected novel manuscript, pick up my research material for the next novel from the library, and  after that, I’ll be in electricity-free places in the north, and therefore out of computer contact and this blog will lie fallow until the end of August.

But before I sign off for the summer, I wanted to make a quick mention of another article that talks about the narratives in conflict in Eastern Europe.  This is Timothy Snyder’s article in the New York Review of books, one that talks about the fraught resistance movements in Poland at the end of the war.

The significant sentences are the following:

… For the Home Army (The Polish nationalist resistance army) the Soviet advance meant the arrival of a dubious ally against the Germans as well as an impending threat to Polish independence. For Jews it meant life. This basic difference in perspectives, a result of the Holocaust, was difficult to overcome ….

Considering that some of the Lithuanians fought against both the Home Army and the Soviets, the situation is even more complicated in Lithuania and more complicated yet again in Ukraine.

History can wait a little longer for further analysis –  at the end of this week I’ll be gone fishing.

It’s as quiet this windy afternoon as a Sunday of my childhood, when Toronto used to close down tightly for the Sabbath. It’s all silent streets because everybody seems to have left my part of town for the countryside for the long weekend, but there’s a flutter of the odd Canadian flag; we never used to hang out the flag. We left that to the more patriotic Americans, but more and more flags have been going up in recent years, especially since our deployment in Afghanistan.

Mentally, I’m still somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, a little stunned with jet lag after the hectic couple of weeks in Lithuania.

There were no objections to my novel at all, just enthusiastic endorsement – it was almost too good to be true. Around 250 people were in the audience for the presentation of the novel, a mixture of academics and artistic types. The publisher brought along 60 copies and sold out totally – the people were asking for more. Leonidas Donskis’s questions were brilliant – I knew I was in good hands. My own publisher was enthusiastic and another publisher who had declined the translation came over to express his regret at the error.

I also managed to do a lot of research toward my next novel, set in Kaunas, and was helped by Vilma Akmenyte and Arunas Antanaitis, who walked me around the town and gave me the historical context for the novel, which will be set between 1921- 1923. We were lucky to see a new show at the former presidential palace museum in the company of the former president of Lithuania, Valdas Adamkus and his wife. He happened to be at the conference I atended later as well.

VDU, the university in Kaunas asked me to go over in 2010/2011 in order to teach creative writing for a week – I’m ambivalent because my skills are so closely tied to the English language.

Now I’m back here and just going into my novel, Underground, for one more pass after a third set of editing notes from Janice Zawerbny. Janice is great to work with. We can be very intense on the text, but when we take a break, the conversation on literature branches out into many directions, any one of which might be worth a glass or two of cognac and a cup of coffee.

Just this afternoon, I worked hard on the first chapter and found at least a dozen places to make improvements in phrasing. These tiny touch-ups function, I hope, to reduce the friction, taking the reader forward effortlessly, employing what Tim O’Brien called “forward tilt”.

My own summer writing workshop starts in a week at the Humber School for Writers, so I don’t think I’ll get very far in rewrites before then.

While I was in Lithuania, I read Timothy Snyder’s excellent review  (in the New York Review of Books) of new volumes on Poland and the Holocaust – the review is called “Jews, Poles & Nazis: the Terrible History.”

There is much in the article that is germane to Lithuania.  My son sent me new articles about the holocaust in the Baltics, and the brilliant Lithuania poet, Tomas Venclova, addressed the issue at the conference I attended.

More on this subject in my next entry.

I’ll be at the launch of the Lithuanian translation of Woman in Bronze at a conference in Lithuania in the second half of June.

The event takes place in Alanta, a small town in a scenic Moletai region, a place of hills and lakes and forests. The site is a community college beside an old estate, now a museum. The estate has a rebuilt stately home and a fine park with a pond and swans, and I felt like a character in a Chekhov play when I walked around the place the last time I was there in 2007. See the manor house below:

Funny, none of us thinks about being a serf in those days, as most people were. When one bought an estate, one bought the villages and towns and serfs who lived in them. The whole system wasn’t much more than a modified form of slavery, really, that existed until 1861.

I’m curious to see the reception to this novel in Lithuania because the country was used as a contrast against the Jazz era and the rise of modernity. Therefore, in my novel, Lithuania was depicted as season-bound and backward.

Furthermore, the land I depicted was based on my reading and stories I had heard, so there are bound to be some inaccuracies in there.

I will try to explain that the Lithuania in the novel is an idea more than a place, but we’ll see how that goes over.

Luckily, the whole event is being run by Lonidas Donskis, interviewer, intellectual, and all-around genius in whose hands I feel utterly safe.

While I’m there, I’ll do a little research for my next new novel, the one that I’ll work on once the final details of Underground, which comes out in Spring of 2011, will be worked out.

This projected new new novel, untitled so far, will be set in the twenties. I’m interested in the establishment of a social/moral order after empires collapse, or, as we know, the failure to establish civil societies in the twenties and thirties in Europe.

The idea sounds a bit grand, but I’ll use a man I have mentioned in these posts before, Jonas Budrys, as my central character. He ran Lithuanian counter-intelligence in the twenties, and then helped seize the city of Memel / Klaipeda for Lithuania. He’s a fascinating historical character and I hope to build him into a compelling fictional one as well.

For purpose of research, I will walk the streets of Kaunas for a few days to get a sense of the world Budrys moved through.

Since I seem unable to get MobileMe working off the old laptop I’m taking to Lithuania, I won’t post here for a couple of weeks, but when I do, I’ll update on what happened there, as well as progress on Underground.

I’ll talk to you again around the beginning of July.

The Genocide Museum in Vilnius is a grim memorial housed in the former KGB headquarters on Gedimino Prospektas in Vilnius.  The names of many of the people murdered inside are etched on the stones on the outside of the building, as pictured below.

This museum houses brilliant and comprehensive displays of the incorporation of Lithuania into the Soviet Union in 1939 and the system of incarceration, torture, murder, and deportation that was used from that period right into the fifties. Some of the partisans I write about in my novel, Underground, were housed here for interrogation, torture, and execution.

So why is this place controversial?

It has been attacked because of its name. Can one appropriate this term, “genocide”  for what the Soviets did in Lithuania? Those who oppose the name say that the Soviets never intended to exterminate the Lithuanians, so their activities were not properly “genocide”. Furthermore, those who have issues with Lithuania claim it is a cover to mask Lithuanian crimes in the holocaust.

However, some Lithuanians point to Latvia, which barely has a Latvian ethnic majority now to demonstratee that the Soviets did indeed plan to exterminate or at least overwhelm and incorporate the Baltic States.  They add that everyone knows about the holocaust now, but very few people know about what happened under Soviet terror.

I can’t say I am comfortable with the name of the museum myself, but I will say this:

When I worked in an SLS writing seminar in Vilnius in the summer of 2009, virtually none of the fifty-odd students knew the story being told in the Genocide museum.  They did know the about the holocaust in Lithuania and learned more by visiting the chilling sites in places such as Paneriai on the outskirts of Vilnius and the Ninth Fort just outside Kaunas, just two of the major sites where tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered by Nazis and Lithuanian collaborators.

The narrative being told in the Genocide museum is not the story of the holocaust, but it is critical to our understanding of Europe and WW2, which we view, naturally enough, through a Western lenses, and which we imagined ended in May of 1945 with the surrender of Germany.

But in the East, The Soviets were considered invaders too, and fighting went on against them for several years, intense at first, but continuing sporadically into the fifties.

But why should one narrative usurp another? Why do we have narratives in collision?

Perhaps because the Jews suffered under the Nazis and their collaborators, and the Lithuanians suffered under the Soviets and their collaborators.

Not as much, I should add. No one tried to wipe the Lithuanians off the map as they tried to do to the Jews.

I use the word “collaborators” above advisedly, applying it to both groups, usage which might be as controversial as the name of the museum.

These issues keep coming up again and again as I follow current developments in our understanding of the war in the East. I don’t think the narratives need to collide. The horror was complex, and worse for some than for others.

I think all the stories need to be told.

As for the museum, I think it’s great, but I do wish it was called something else.

The Melancholy Town of Merkine intrigued me from the very first time I visited it back in 1989, when I arrived at dusk one winter’s night to interview a priest who had worked for the KGB. I felt as if I had stepped back in time, parked on a grassy knoll by an ancient church in a small town with wooden houses and picket fences and dogs that barked on the sandy streets.

Ghosts are somewhat common in Lithuania, and I felt their presence even then, although I didn’t yet know the hill town where the Merkys and Nemunas rivers meet had been inhabited for twelve thousand years. Instead of knowledge, I had intuition, and the sense of the place stayed with me as I mythologized the memory of the town and called it “Merdine” in my novel, Woman in Bronze. That was a kind of joke, for “merdeti” in Lithuanian means “to stagnate” and the word bears a close relationship to the French word, “merde”.

I didn’t have a chance to visit the town again until eighteen years later, in 2007, when I went there to retrace the footsteps of the partisans who had seized the town for a day in 1945.

But before that, I read up on the place and discovered it had once been an important city, with four posts marking its perimeter. Of these four brick posts, two remain, and they are deep in the fields, showing how dramatically the town has shrunk since the middle ages. It has suffered terribly from the burning of its caste by the Teutonic knights in the fourteenth century, by the Russians in the Northern Wars, and more recently during WW 2 when most of the town was burned down and the Jews were annihilated. In the past, Merkine had many more times the current population of fifteen hundred.

The mound where the old hill castle stood has a spectacular view over the loop in the Nemunas, and a strange little stream runs down from the top of the hill.

My old friends, Jonas Jurasas and Ausra Sluckaite-Jurasas have a summer house nearby, and I sat there on their back porch as the sun set in the summer of 2009. Fishermen were on the banks in the evening mist, the odd splash the sound of their occasional success. Down beneath me in the garden was a big anchor form the period when this had been a major shipping route.

Beside us that night, as we drank rather a lot of Trejos Devynerios, a bitter liquor, were a pair of Lithuanian TV producers who had done a twelve-part series on the major Lithuanian artist of the early twentieth century, Ciurlionis. One of them was the wonderful TV producer, Liudvika Pociūniene, whose father is a prominent sculptor (I sat in their orchard under an apple tree, talking about art a couple of days later). Jonas Jurasas had produced an opera in Traku Castle earlier that year.

The conversation was compelling because this is a place where culture still matters, but the melancholy of the place underscored everything. Jonas and his wife had been expelled form the USSR in the seventies because of a bloody production of Macbeth that was seen as an attack on the regime. Liudvikas’s late husband had been an investigator for the Lithuanian government who died under mysterious circumstances in Byelorussia.

And of course, the town had once been full of Jews, now all dead, perhaps a few survivors’ children alive somewhere far away.

The next day, Jonas and Ausra took me to a small lake in the middle of the forest where we swam out, and even pushed around a tiny island the size of a dinner table – a floating island.

The small lake, not much more than a pond, is called “Bedugne” in Lithuanian, “Bottomless” in English.

There are depths to be plumbed in this place. I know I’ll have to go back.

What drives a man or woman into the Underground? Roger D Petersen, Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT, studied the motivations and social support for resistance in his 2001 book, Resistance and Rebellion.

He tried to understand why, in his words, “… ordinary men and women, in the face of enormous risks, resist and sometimes violently rebel against powerful regimes.”

He studied the village of Svainikai in southern Lithuania, and pulled apart the strands of social support for the young men who had gone into the forests to fight the Soviets.

As Petersen tells it, much of the motivation was the chekist (KGB) massacre of villagers, particularly in Klepociai, where twenty-one of thirty-two houses were burned and twelve people killed on December 23, 1944. The inhabitants of other villages did not know who would be next.

A wave of chekist shootings, burnings, and interrogations under torture drove many young people into the forest, initially to hide and eventually, in many cases, to take up active resistance.

This study is particularly useful because it puts paid to the notion of anti-Soviet resistance as pro-fascist.

Why did the chekists perpetrate the massacre in the first place? The answer is not certain, but it may have been due to local resistance against Soviet partisans who demanded support. Thus the farmers, tied to their land, were in the unenviable position of having to choose between two armies and two types of partisans. One wonders why a farmer would ever support the Soviets, whose plan called for the expropriation of the farmers’ land.

Petersen’s book caused a prolonged shudder in me. Who can understand why one generation or another, in one geographical position or another, must be faced with a series of impossible choices? Here, in our safe haven, it’s easy to judge the players of the past, to take the moral high ground. But we’re lucky not to have face the same sorts of dilemmas.

I sat in a bunker in 2008 with one of the last surviving partisans from the South of Lithuania, Juozas Jakavonis, as he told me the story of how he missed the battle of Merkine and survived.

In 1945, he found an open prayer book floating in the river near Merkine and brought it to his superior, Adolfas Ramanauskas. The prayer book belonged to three partisans who had been ambushed and killed, and Ramanauskas wanted to strike back at the Chekists and their supporters to avenge the three dead partisans. Ramanauskas launched the famous battle of Merkine, in which the partisans seized the city and held it for a day, suffering high losses from a machine gun nest placed in the church steeple (see my second entry in the archive – The Machine Gun Nest – January 23, 2010).

But Juozas Jakavonis, code-named Tigras, was not one of them. For breaking a minor rule, he was punished by not being permitted to take part in the attack.

Jakavonis had great luck. He was captured when jumping out of a farmhouse window, but because he had no uniform or arms at the time, and because he had no other incriminating documents, he was sentenced to only fifteen years in the gulag. While there, he met his future wife, Zose.

While the gulag was potentially fatal, he would have been much worse off had he stayed behind. By 1948, when Ramanauskas wrote up his memoir of the attack on the town of Merkine, all partisans whose names he remembered were dead.

In my novel, Jakavonis’s discovery is transferred to a wandering cobbler. The actual battle of Merkine is depicted in an early chapter of the novel.

Jakavonis was a bright a cheery man when I met him in 2008, standing in front of his yellow farmhouse with his wife and granddaughter. His wife complained that their cow produced too much milk for a pair of pensioners, even if she gave away a lot of cheese and butter. She drew the water for our tea from a well with a wooden lid and Jakavonis and I went down to the reconstructed bunker where Ramanauskas and other legendary partisans had once spent months.

Even a simulated bunker like the one we sat in, with a roof slightly above ground, felt damp and stank of mold. The rusty oil lamp and typewriter were relics of the postwar era.

Jakavonis knew the stories of marginal players in the postwar partisan story, in particular a pair of drunken forgers, a husband and wife team who made it into my novel. Jakavonis suspected them of being spies.

First we talked about the partisans, and then inside the house, over homemade bread, cheese, and butter as well as many drinks, he told stories of the German occupation, of a wounded German soldier who walked back to Germany after the Soviet victory, of various partisan forays.

Writers are taught to be suspicious of happy endings. Jakavonis seemed too perfect, an old man honoured at last, living in a peaceful land with more milk from his cow than his wife knew what to do with.

But for every Jakavonis, there were hundreds if not thousands of others whose ends were not so happy, even if they did manage to survive. The names of around eighty of his comrades in arms are etched in the stone of the partisan memorial just outside the town.

Rachel Margolis, according to writer Dovid Katz, is the most tragic survivor of the holocaust. Her crime, he writes, is surviving the holocaust in Lithuania as a partisan with the Soviets. Apparently, she is now accused of war crimes by the Lithuanian government.

To read the full article, go to the link here.

I don’t know any of the details of her story, but Dovid Katz, whom I know from working together in the SLS writing program in Vilnius last summer, says her case is one of obfuscation by Lithuania, where the holocaust is not denied, but a parallel or equivalency is drawn between Soviet and Nazi crimes.

This is an uneasy subject for me, to say the least. I mentioned it in the post I wrote on Februry 14  about the documentary film, The Soviet Story. It is uneasy because the Nazis and their local collaborators perpetrated the holocaust. What Jews survived, a tiny number did so only because of the Soviet resistance and Soviet victory over the Nazis.

But the Soviets in turn killed or deported many tens of thousands after the war.

On the one hand, any attempt to minimize the holocaust is terrible. On the other hand, other victims want their sufferings to be known too. Does the one cancel out the other? I don’t think so.

A friend of mine, The Canadian writer David Bezmozgis, and I got into a discussion about this issue. I said to him that people need to know everything. In Polish terms, one must know about Auschwitz and one must know about Katyn. In my experience, hardly anyone knows about Katyn, which is just one of the more prominent stories of crimes under the Soviets.

But to imagine that we’re all going to get along and understand each other’s sufferings is a vain hope. I guess my own take on this is never to minimize what happened to others, so no holocaust obfuscation can be permitted. On the other hand, hardly anyone I know has any idea of the partisan war in Eastern Europe after 1944, and hardly anyone knows much more than the faint outlines of the sufferings of people there after the war. That’s the story I want to tell.

But I want to keep listening to the story of others, in this case the story of the holocaust in Lithuania, which remains painful, but which must be probed again and again to work out the details of the crimes, the depth of the sufferings, while never imagining that understanding will be enough and that some sort of “closure” must happen.

How many people does it take to write a book? At my count, 43.

Maybe the high number has something to do with writing historical fiction, because I found myself relying repeatedly on the kindness of strangers.

For example, when I walked into a partisan museum in Marijampole in 2008, I found Justinas Sajauskas studying the Luksa partisan memoir, a classic of the genre. When I asked him why there were no photos of the partisan code-named Lakstingala, the man who survived the ambush that killed Luksa in1951, Sajauskas reached into a drawer, pulled out a stack of photos, and offered me one to take home.

Then he did much better. In 1944, a female partisan code-named Pusele invited a group of communists to come to her engagement party. Then, she and her “fiancé”, code-named Mazvydas, shot dead all the guests and escaped into the underground. Both eventually died in firefights with chekist troops.

This historical scene is re-imagined in the first chapter of my forthcoming novel, and much of the atmosphere of that chapter exists thanks to Sajauskas, who walked me out into the town to the house near the train station where the events occurred. We discussed details such as the route the partisans took to get to a sled to whisk them away to safety.

Sajauskas is only one of the 43. In future posts, I’ll mention what some of the others did.

It’s remarkable to me how much people will help you if you just ask.

Below are a couple of photos of the house where the killings took place on the second floor.

Simon Schama, the British historian and art critic, says that the graves of many generations of soldiers and partisans can be found under the ferns in the Lithuanian woodlands.

My novel deals with Lithuanian partisans in anti-Soviet resistance in the forties and fifties, but there were other partisans too, notably Jewish partisans who fought the Nazis and their local helpers during the German occupation.

One such partisan was Sara Ginaite – Rubinson, who found herself in the Kaunas ghetto but managed to escape into the forest. She lived there for years and helped in the seizure of Vilnius from the retreating Germans.

This remarkable woman ended up in Toronto, where she taught for some years at York University.

Jewish partisans, Soviet partisans, Polish partisans – all of them fought there at one time or another, making the country a field of conflicting loyalties and battles. Picking apart the threads of these loyalties is fraught unto this day – and intensely political.

I won’t even go into the details, but the best thing one can do is inform oneself about all who fought there and why, and this excellent memoir is one that should be included on any list.

Of the nine spies smuggled into the Lithuanian Soviet Union by the British, and the eight dropped in by the Americans in the late forties and early fifties, none returned.

Some were turned and became double agents, some were executed or shot in battle, and some were imprisoned.

The most curious of them all was Anicetas Dukavicius, the last man sent into Lithuania by the British in 1953. Having spent almost two decades in prison, he lived to see Lithuanian independence in 1991.

Dukavicius then reportedly presented himself to the British and claimed that they had promised him ten pounds a week while on the job, and he now wanted to collect payment for almost forty years of employment.

Sadly, I don’t know if he received the money.

This story and others like it are part of a wonderful DVD television series called the Secret Files of the Twentieth Century in English subtitles, or Slaptieji XXa Archyvai in Lithuanian.

So much remains unknown about this part of the world, but historians have also revealed a great deal that makes for excellent cold war material. This is popular history at its best.

In the first series, there are shows about the Soviet kidnapping of East European dignitaries out of postwar Berlin and a detailed study of the most infamous murder of Jews in Lithuania, the Lietukio Garazas massacre, among other shows.

In the second series, one show tells the story of the Lithuanian partisan leader whom Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s successor, had flown to Moscow in 1953 in order to see if they could come to some sort of arrangement. But things ended badly for both of them. J. Zemaitis was executed in Moscow, and so was Beria. Still, one can’t help wondering how history would have turned out if these two men had survived and prevailed.

A compelling description of Britain’s attempts to run agents in the Baltics after WW2 is told in Tom Bower’s 1989 book, The Red Web.

Working with agents in Sweden, the UK sent in boat after boat of Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians to land on the beach of Palanga and make their way inland to determine Soviet military capabilities for the feared and anticipated sweep across the Western Europe.

For their part, the men going in had some of their own ideas. On the one hand, Lithuanian partisans were getting help from no one else, so they took what they could from the Brits as a way back into the countries that were still fighting a failing rearguard battle against the Soviets years after the war ended in the west.

On the other hand, some of those going back in were Soviet agents. Indeed, the whole operation as compromised from the very beginning.

Some of British spies were turned and some were killed, and at least one lived long enough to see independence (I’ll talk a bit more about him next week, when I review the television series, Slaptieji XX a. Archyvai).

Shortly after the British attempts, the Americans got into the act. Although these landings were not compromised from inside, they were no more successful than the British ones.

Bower’s book, fascinating in itself, was one of the building blocks in the late Liutas Mockunas’s book, Pavarges Herojus (The Exhausted Hero).

That book was a valuable source to me in the personality of Jonas Deksnys, initially a hero of the Lithuanian resistance, but a man whose end was worthy of chapter in the work of John Le Carré.

Since Le Carré had not written about him, I did.

Fragments from the Writing Life – New Novel Manuscript – Version Eight

This week I received my second round of edits from Janice Zawerbny, my editor at Thomas Allen, the house that is bringing out my novel, Underground, a year from now.

We sat side by side at my dining room table (she lives not far way, so it’s easier than our meeting at the office downtown) and I looked as she flipped through the pages of the manuscript and made suggestions and comments. We are really down to line work at this point, the kind of technical detail I love to fuss over.

For example, at one point she suggested the word “scared” to lose a repetition of “afraid”, but I can’t use that word in a novel set in Europe in the late forties. It sounds too American and too young to me. I proposed another solution that took me to a thesaurus first and eventually to rewriting the sentence altogether.

A good editor is a building inspector who crawls into the sub-basement of your novel and shines a beam of light on the supporting walls to make sure they are sound. She knocks on the beams to check for evidence of weakness. Sitting beside her as we pored over the manuscript, I followed her into the attic (third person omniscient, a rather “high” voice that isn’t used much any more) and examined the front porch (the prologue) and then we had a discussion about the back deck (the epilogue – most writing texts recommend avoiding both front and back end pieces like this, but she gave them her stamp of approval).

I’m now reading aloud through the manuscript, following her notes and finding new phrases that can be removed.

When in doubt, I trim. I want the reader to walk through the structure unimpeded, to find the movement so unresisting as to find the end of the house a natural conclusion, an inevitable reality. It’s amazing how many snags I find while reading this way, ones that might slow that progress.

I am going through the manuscript for the eighth time, and there will be at least two more trips through it before we finish it off by summer and I can get started my next novel.

The world of literature is sometimes themes and stories, but often simply craft like this, the phrasing that builds the details that make the sentences and go on to construct a house of fiction.