From Russia with Lunch (17 page)

Despite the fact that Ralph would have been 106 when this book was being written, I wanted to let him know that he had succeeded on all counts with his map. However, a laborious cyber-search proved fruitless in the months after my return to Sydney so, Ralph, wherever you are: mission accomplished.

The task of neither forgetting nor forgiving has been taken up by the Lithuanian government with some gusto. Aside from mass burial sites around the country being signposted and maintained, it has displayed a determination to recognise both those who saved lives and those who extinguished them. On the latter score, it is like one of those feisty terriers that don't give a thought to their own size or power as they take on errant Dobermans. In fact, this is a trait which can be applied to Lithuanians in general. Proof lies in the strange case of Yitzhak Arad.

At eighty-one, the Israeli citizen is widely acknowledged as one of the world's pre-eminent Holocaust historians. He served as director of the Yad Vashem (Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Authority) for twenty-one years and is also a member of the International Commission for Evaluation of Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regime Crimes in Lithuania.

On 20 September 2007, however, the
Baltic Times
newspaper revealed that Lithuanian authorities believed Arad was guilty of committing the crimes he had spent a lifetime condemning. Which is tantamount to accusing Mother Teresa of child abuse. According to the Lithuanian Prosecutor General's Department, Arad is suspected of murdering civilians, prisoners of war and guerrillas while serving in the NKVD, Lithuania's equivalent of the KGB. Apparently, indications as to his involvement were sourced from Arad's autobiography as well as testimony he gave during the trial of Nazi war criminals.

As is often the case with such matters, the local press was filled with op-ed pieces either justifying or decrying the public monies being spent on prosecuting an octogenarian who may or may not have committed atrocities over half a century ago. Which raises the question, is there ever a point where enough solemn remembrance has been paid to the lost? According to Rachel Kostanian, director of the Jewish Museum in Vilnius, the answer is a resounding no. After I arrived on her doorstep unannounced and unarranged, she graciously invited me into her modest office for a chat. Petite of stature but fiery of eye, Kostanian reminded me of my paternal grandmother, a short and bolshy woman who smelt of Estée Lauder's Youth Dew, presented herself immaculately and tore those who crossed her to shreds.

In the heady days of newly minted independence, Kostanian joined the museum with the fervent belief that Lithuania's Holocaust would at last be given its due acknowledgment by the government. ‘I will never forget it,' she says, her nostrils flaring ever so slightly. ‘At a meeting with the director of the national museum of ethnographic sciences, I put forward the idea that the killing of Jews should be taught as part of the Lithuanian history syllabus. He replied, “These children barely know their own history, why should we teach them yours?” '

As is often the case, catastrophic en masse inhumanity elicited its opposite in rare individuals. While certain Lithuanians were undoubtedly complicit in the country's genocide, others risked their lives for the sake of anonymous Jews. Ona Simaite, for example, used her position as a librarian at Vilnius University to enter the city's ghetto on the pretext of retrieving books from Jewish students. What she actually retrieved were historical and literary documents while providing residents with food and medical supplies. In 1944, she was arrested and tortured by the Nazis before being sent to the Dachau concentration camp.

Then there was Elena Kutorgiene, who by virtue of being both gentile and a doctor, could have avoided much Nazi persecution had she fallen into line with the Third Reich's protocols. Through her work with a Jewish welfare organisation for children in Kaunas, she established close ties with the community and would not stand by to see them slaughtered. Kutorgiene literally brought her stand home by hiding Jews in her house, disseminating anti-Nazi literature and, perhaps most dangerously, obtaining firearms for the underground resistance.

Following the city's liberation in August 1944, Kutor-giene worked on the Special Government Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes. Among her many accolades, including the Order of Lenin for her extensive social and medical activity, Kutorgiene was also recognised by Israel's Yad Vashem Museum, which is dedicated to the Holocaust. Its ‘Righteous Among the Nations' honour has been awarded to over six hundred Lithuanians, often posthumously, who helped save Jewish lives.

In 1992, the Lithuanian government decided that it too should acknowledge the valour of the citizens who risked their lives – and often paid with them – to aid Jews during the Holocaust. To date, almost one thousand Life Saviour's Crosses have been awarded in this respect. The best known of these heroes was not Lithuanian but Japanese. Chuine Sugihara was a New Year's Day gift to his middle- and samurai-class father in 1900. As wilful as he was intelligent, he defied his doctor father's expectations of following in his footsteps by writing only his name, ‘Chuine Sugihara', on his entrance exam papers and thus deliberately failing. His passion was for language and after majoring in English literature, German and Russian, he was recruited by the Japanese Foreign Ministry. Sugihara's first posting was to Harbin in China. Charged with negotiating with the Soviet Union over the Northern Manchurian Railroad, his tenure was brief. Unable to stomach Japanese mistreatment of the Manchurian Chinese, he quit his post as Deputy Foreign Minister.

Returning home with a new faith, Orthodox Christianity, and a White Russian wife – the first endured, the second did not – Sugihara was seconded to the Information Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. After a stint as a translator for the Japanese delegation in Helsinki, his superiors decided that Sugihara was unlikely to again make the mistake of putting his conscience above his diplomatic missions. In 1939, he became a vice-consul of the Japanese Consulate in Kaunas, where one of his chief duties was to report on Soviet and German troop movements.

The Soviet takeover of Lithuania in 1940 presented Sugihara with a dilemma he could never have anticipated. Bearing in mind the Soviets' ideological disdain for religion and those who defined themselves by it, thousands of Jewish refugees from Poland and Lithuania besieged embassies, including the one-man Japanese consul, for exit visas. The key to securing one of these precious passport stamps was a so-called ‘third destination'. In other words, the country issuing the visa wanted proof that the refugee would merely pass through on their way to somewhere else. Dutch consul Jan Zwartendijk had exploited this loophole by providing some fleeing Jews with an official third destination to Curaçao, a Caribbean island and Dutch colony that required no entry visa, or Dutch Guiana (later to be known as Suriname). In order to get there, or simply out, however, a transit visa was required. Enter the slightly built Sugihara, above whose quizzical eyes rested a civil servant's jet side parting bisected by a single grey streak.

The Japanese government's policy on the matter was a strictly enforced neutrality. If visas were to be issued, the recipients not only had to go through appropriate immigration procedures, they also had to prove they had enough funds to make the journey to Japan then on to another destination. Realising these criteria bordered on the realms of fantasy for the beseeching Jews who daily thronged the consulate, Sugihara dutifully asked his superiors back home whether the conditions for issuing visas could be relaxed given that these refugees, in his opinion, genuinely feared for their lives. Three times he made his case. Three times he was told that anybody granted a transit visa had to provide a further one to prove they were not seeking refuge in the land of the rising sun.

The rebellious streak that saw him deliberately fail his medical entrance exams in Japan and quit his Chinese post in protest once more came to the fore. Putting principles over protocol, Sugihara began issuing visas of his own accord. Often ignoring the official requirements for this documentation, he furnished Jews with a ten-day visa to transit through Japan. Such gross violation of direct orders was so extraordinary given the culture of the Japanese Foreign Service as to be without precedent. What's more, the distance between Tokyo and Kaunas – not to mention the sociopolitical atmosphere – meant there was little that Sugihara's bosses could do to stop him. Sugihara went one step further by personally negotiating black-market travel arrangements with Soviet officials. For five times the standard ticket price, they would allow Polish Jews carrying his visas to travel through the country via the Trans-Siberian railway.

Unlike the stamped visas of today, those issued by Sugi-hara were painstakingly written by hand. Between 31 July and 28 August 1940, it's reported that he spent 18–20 hours a day processing these documents. His output was staggering, with a month's worth of paperwork being completed in a day. Although his consulate was officially closed on 4 September, eyewitnesses recalled him still writing visas at a hotel while in transit en route to Japan then throwing even more out of a carriage window to a crowd of refugees as his train pulled out of Kaunas station.

The precise number of Jewish lives saved by Sugihara is unclear, with estimates ranging from 5000 to 10,000. The reason for this disparity is that many of the visas he issued were to heads of households, thus allowing for the passage of an entire family. Sugihara's widow and eldest son put the figure at 6000. It seems there was no end to his cunning. In researching his 1996 book
In Search of Sugihara,
author Hillel Levine discovered ‘some Jesuits in Vilna were issuing Sugihara visas with seals that he had left behind and did not destroy, long after the Japanese diplomat had departed'.

Some of those saved by Sugihara ended up in the United States and the then British mandate of Palestine. Most, however, remained in Japan until they were deported to Japanese-held Shanghai, where there was already a large Jewish community. Approximately 20,000 European Jews survived the Holocaust thanks to their internment in the Shanghai ghetto until the Japanese surrender in 1945. German demands to either kill or hand over the refugees were refused by Japan. One hypothesis for this action – posited by Rabbi Marvin Tokayer in his book
The Fugu Plan
– was that it stemmed from gratitude for a $196 million loan that a Jewish banker from New York, Jacob Schiff, had given to Japan, which helped them to victory in the Russo–Japanese War of 1905. Another suggestion was that Japanese leaders had been somewhat impressed by anti-Semitic propaganda which stressed the Jews' financial prowess, and thought ‘we could use some of that'.

For his part, Sugihara was reassigned to Romania where in 1946 he and his family were imprisoned in a POW camp for eighteen months. Returning to Japan, a wave of postwar downsizing saw him retire from the diplomatic service. Using his linguistic skills, Sugihara took a series of low-key translating jobs in the Soviet Union and it was not until 1968 that any of the Jews he had rescued were able to track him down. In 1985, forty-five years after the Soviet invasion of Lithuania, Sugihara was honoured with Israel's ‘Righteous Among the Nations' award. That same year, a visitor to his Tokyo Bay home asked his reasons for issuing visas to the Jews. Sugihara responded:

It is the kind of sentiment anyone would have when he actually sees refugees face to face, begging with tears in their eyes. He cannot just help but sympathise with them. Among the refugees were the elderly and women. They were so desperate that they went so far as to kiss my shoes. Also, I felt at that time, that the Japanese government did not have any uniform opinion in Tokyo. I felt it silly to deal with them. So, I made up my mind not to wait for their reply. I knew that somebody would surely complain to me in the future. But, I myself thought this would be the right thing to do. There is nothing wrong in saving many people's lives … The spirit of humanity, philanthropy … neighbourly friendship … with this spirit, I ventured to do what I did, confronting this most difficult situation … and because of this reason, I went ahead with redoubled courage.

He concluded this remembrance by quoting the Samurai tenet that ‘even a hunter cannot kill a bird which flies to him for refuge'.

The quietly spoken career diplomat died a year later. Despite the acclaim afforded him in Israel, Lithuania and the United States, his deeds remained virtually unknown in his home country. Only when a large Jewish delegation from around the world, including the Israeli ambassador to Japan, showed up at his funeral did his neighbours find out what he had done.

By the most conservative estimates, Sugihara saved the lives of five times more Jews than the celebrated Oskar Schindler, yet there has not been and probably never will be a movie about him. All that stands is a modest Chinoise monument outside the Jewish Museum annexe in Vilnius and a name that is still included in Hebraic prayers of thanksgiving from Hoboken to Haifa.

9

Life of brine

An old Jewish woman is walking along the beach with her grandson when a freak wave washes him out to sea. She immediately drops to her knees and wails, ‘Lord. Please deliver my little Hymie back to me. He is the light of my life, my joy. Bring him back and I will promise to be a more devout and observant Jew. I will spread the word of your glory for the rest of my days.' Within seconds, another wave dumps the boy at her feet. At which the woman looks heavenward and says, ‘He had a hat!'

After the bitches brew of hideousness that was Naishtot, or rather its ghosts, I wanted a holiday from history. Lithuania's coastline – all 99 kilometres of it – beckoned. My first stop was Silute, which began life as an inn 500 years ago then quietly prospered as a fishing village. Marooned in a lake of windblown meadows with lilac wildflowers for whitecaps, Silute's borders are marked by the traditional Lithuanian outpost of a disused factory.

This verdigris of Soviet industrialisation came into being because of a policy of self-defeating specialisation. Industrial plants were designed to manufacture only single components such as springs, brackets or flanges (a word I've been wanting to use for decades). These were shipped or freighted elsewhere where they were then combined with other doodads to make a whatever. Apparently, this all had something to do with that phrase so beloved by Marxist undergrads, ‘controlling the means of production'.

Come the 1991 revolution, however, Lithuania was left with an industrial infrastructure and workforce with precious little experience in producing a functioning anything. Still, Silute seems to be doing okay for itself with a dairy that has been producing rich cheeses for even richer Germans since 1842. Its surrounding countryside is scarified by peat works which have also been in operation since 1842 and export some 50,000 square metres a year of the dense dark soil.

In the centre of the town was a chipper market that spilled beyond the corrugated iron tarpaulin built to contain it. Most of the stalls were given over to food. Mushrooms mushroomed from plastic buckets in masses of bulbous ivory. Still bearing yesterday's dirt, dinky varieties the size of a snail were on offer for a dollar per kilogram. Salted gherkins lay submerged in vats and were ladled out to order then sprinkled with enough vinegar to turn a human mouth into a feline rectum.

Other stalls offered nothing but creamy pale walnuts and tubs of 24-carat honey. Handfuls of fragrant dill and basil went for next to nothing, as did sacks of opalescent white onions and tubs of vermilion currants. Pale persimmons and marbled quinces stood in higgledy-piggledy pyramids while perfect dusted-ruby raspberries peered over the rims of two-litre ice-cream containers. Which went for under two bucks each. Less if the vendor next door was prepared to get into a bidding war with her neighbour.

Unlike the market experience I was used to, where retired stockbrokers sell their tree-change artisanal sourdoughs and sly operators demand retail prices without the premises that might necessitate them, Silute's version was a Monday to Friday place of business. This was not a faux rustic and slightly hokey departure from malls and high streets. It was the alternative option to the town's supermarket and one it seemed many preferred. The queue at the butcher's, for example, was three deep and when you wanted a ribeye or sirloin, Harry Cleaver would liberate it from a hanging carcase on the spot, before plunging his blood-flecked hands into a bowl of kidneys glossed like J Lo's lips to serve another customer. Beside this and incongruous to no one but me sat a florist. It was testament to the scrupulous cleanliness of both retailers that as I watched the butcher weigh a palmful of tripe, all I could smell was jonquil.

Lunch was a pair of herrings that had been swimming the day before and smoked that morning. Most Jews will tell you that they have had this fish every which way – chopped, pickled, marinated in the Danish tradition and boiled until it had the flavour and consistency of a hand-me-down nappy – but this was a revelation. Still brine salty, the faintest trace of wood lingered in the flesh which ceded to the teeth like third-rate startlets to a second-rate director. I topped this off with a bucket of raspberries. Eaten by the avaricious handful, they impart the type of viridian goatee most often sported by Hannibal Lecter after ‘having a friend for dinner'.

Perhaps one of the most chilling fictional characters of recent years, Hannibal ‘the Cannibal' is actually a Lithuanian export. It seems that when author Thomas Harris was searching for a landscape and historical juncture that would set an impressionable protagonist on the path to gorging murder, Lithuania during the Soviet–Nazi War answered the call. Naturally, an enterprising Lithuanian thought ‘He used us so why not use him?' and set up a themed travel experience for fans of the books and films. For several months preceding my journey, tourism agency Aurimas Jukna was offering visitors to Vilnius a visit to a nearby estate for a ‘Hannibal feast' and a meeting with ‘Lecter' for 100 euros. The first apparently involved much red meat, fava beans and chianti. The second, an ageing amateur actor who all but chewed the scenery when he was supposed to be threatening as much to the audience. Unfortunately, the experience was no longer on offer when I was in town. When I asked why these tours had been cancelled, the receptionist at Aurimas Jukna said, ‘The people. They didn't come.' Go figure.

Walking off lunch, I decided to explore the market's clothing section. By which I mean several stalls selling enormous beige undies the gussets of which went on for days. There were also mottled grey leather jackets with matching zipsided shoes and polyester suits that seemed to have been designed in a dark room by a method actor preparing to play a dictator who had been on the run for decades.

The most intriguing establishment, however, was that of the bag lady. This rather dignified
babushka
with potato dumpling limbs and a garrulous demeanour sold nothing but shopping bags, and second-hand ones at that. These had somehow been sourced from upmarket stores, presumably in Europe, so that a shopper in Silute could convey the impression that he had just nipped out to Prada at lunchtime. She haggled with the best of them and had little time for explaining why an Emporio Armani pack cost half as much as a Giorgio Armani one. There was but one word she knew in English and it was ‘diffusion' – which is fashion-speak for a designer's more budget-friendly streetwear line.

An hour up the coast lies Klaipeda, Lithuania's third largest city and its only commercial port. Its provenance came to pass as a result of some serious chutzpah from the interwar independent republic, which claimed it as part of Lithuania in 1923. Until that point it had spent almost its entire history – stretching back to 1252 – as a German city, save for a brief spell from 1629 to 1635 when it was overrun by Swedish forces, who no doubt arrived on blonde-wood vessels constructed with nothing but allen keys.

By the seventeenth century, it was the nexus of a burgeoning grain, flax, hemp, linseed and timber industry with Britain. So lucrative was this trade route that large contingents of Scottish and English traders decided to settle in the town, then known as Memel. There then followed two cataclysmic fires which all but destroyed the city, and a period of plague and famine that lasted from 1709 to 1711 and saw the local population thinned by some 3000.

Its heyday came in 1807 when King Wilhelm III decamped there after Napoleon forced him to flee Berlin. It's not much to go downhill from, but Memel managed it when the local Teutons became increasingly vociferous against Lithuanian rule following the Nazi Party's ascension to German government in 1933. On 23 March 1939, Hitler heeded their call. This turned out to be the last of the Fuhrer's territorial annexations before the outbreak of the war which would see two-thirds of the place reduced to rubble.

This was a pity on two fronts. The first was that it wrecked one of the most characterful cities in the nation. Memel/Klaipeda – depending on who was ruling at the time – was once distinguished by the architectural style known as Fachwerk. Utilising timber frames and decorative wooden fretwork that lends an austere geometric motif to the ochre walls, the aesthetic is a combination of illustrated storybook and gingerbread Bauhaus. While a handful of these buildings remain, a walk through Klaipeda is more often an exercise in rueful hypotheticals of what once was as opposed to what is.

The second misfortune to befall Klaipeda lies in what was constructed in the wake of World War II. By the mid-1950s, the Soviets had transformed their only ice-free Baltic harbour into an industrial hub featuring a trio of oil terminals and 55 hulking cranes spread along 17 quays with a total length of 32 kilometres. All of which makes Port Kembla or New Jersey look like Cannes. Everywhere you go in Klaipeda that is in proximity to the water – which is to say most of the town – monstrous meccano sets leer over proceedings. As does a rusting leitmotif of shipping containers and diesel-belching freighters.

Klaipeda's Old Town offers a pleasant but brief distraction from the port, which is the city's lifeblood. Arranged in a grid of narrow streets, it features several fine examples of Fachwerk. Which for the most part house drab banks and their life-sized window cut-outs of overjoyed families who have recently taken on a lifetime of housing loan debt. What separates this Old Town from most others in Lithuania is the absence of churches, the three of which were obliterated during the war. The focal point is undoubtedly Teatro Aikiste, an intimate cobbled square edged by tatty souvenir shops, barely-in-the-black cafés and a fetching whitewashed drama theatre that will forever be remembered for providing the balcony from which Hitler announced the city's reincorporation into the Reich.

Klaipeda's beautiful people head to Fredericho Pasazis, an enclosed laneway that houses half a dozen restaurants of varying ostentatiousness. On the day I was there it was apparently hosting a mutton-dressed-as-lamb festival where aluminium blondes old enough to know better paraded their size-14 derriéres, knock-off size-12 Diesel jeans and skittish Pomeranians only to be ignored by too-cool-for-school tech boys who were engrossed in their machiattos and BlackBerrys.

Those who call this area home are Lithuania's equivalent of Catalans or Basques. Although Klaipeda's original inhabitants were predominantly Samogitian or Curonian, the Germanification of the city saw them embracing some aspects of this culture while rejecting others. Unlike many other Lithuanian towns, the vast majority of the faithful here were Protestants, which fostered an influx of Scandinavians and Scots, who in turn married into the population. So distinctive were these folk that the greater Lithuanian population decreed them a ‘new' ethnicity known as
lietu-vninkai
, while the area surrounding Klaipeda came to be referred to as Lithuania Minor.

Considering themselves neither Lithuanian nor German, the language of choice in the region was Lithuanian, their allegiance lay with Prussia and their traditions were mainly Curonian. As was a doozey of a myth regarding the city's origins. The story goes that two brothers decided to search for the ideal location for a new settlement. As you do. One stayed close to shore while the other reckoned that paradise lay in the kilometres of marshy bog at what is now Klaipeda's back door. No one ever got to ask swamp boy why his vision of happily ever after entailed daily squelching as he was never seen again. All that was found was a single footprint in the mud. Most probably delighted to be rid of his dimwitted sibling, the surviving brother named the town after the man he would no longer have to carry or cover for. Klaipeda is thus a hybrid of the term
klampi peda
which means – wait for it – ‘marshy footprint'. The romance never ends.

Klaipeda's New Town reveals the city for what it is: a hardworking commercial port which is reluctantly going along with the idea of becoming a tourist destination. Its primary artery, Manto Street, is bedecked in office blocks the colour of week-old silverside, all seemingly vying to make the abstract notion of gormless into a concrete architectural reality. Amid these are four-star business hotels whose clients talk in tonnage and whose idea of luxury is an onsite table-dancing venue with in-room extras. Throw in the dingy slot machine caverns, bat's nest themed cocktail bars and cheesy Americana steakhouses (‘Entrance For Smiling People Only'), and Klaipeda's New Town is the cultural equivalent of a bowel scraping.

At least it was until I found two of the most beguiling and quirk-filled museums. The first was devoted to the art of blacksmithery. With a working forge at its centre, it not only carried with it an undeniable element of glistening-bodied, spark-shedding showmanship but also provided a poignant link to the past in the form of curlicued traditional metalwork which was salvaged from the town cemetery before it was bulldozed by the Russians. Then there was the Clock Museum. Brand me a pointdexter if you will, but there are few more magnificent testaments to human ingenuity than the timepiece. Splayed out like dissected frogs were dozens of watches whose tremulous innards danced to their own metronomes. There were clocks made of candles, clocks powered by fire, clocks that depended on water to function. Time flew.

Klaipeda's saving grace, however, lies a ten-minute ferry jaunt across the harbour at Smiltyne, the northernmost village of the Curonian Spit. Before disembarking, however, you have to negotiate the body of water which inspired
The Hunt for Red October.
On 6 April 1961, Jonas Pleskys set out into the chop with an audacious plan to defect to Sweden. It's at this point that Tom Clancy decided the yarn needed to be sexed up. You'll see why shortly. Unlike the fictional Marko Ramius who nicked a cutting-edge nuclear-powered submarine, the 26-year-old Lithuanian captain in the Soviet navy had at his disposal a 300-tonne self-propelled barge. There was no dastardly pursuit as enacted by Sean Connery in the 1990 film version. Instead, Pleskys had simply set off on a mission to dump a load of chemical waste into the neutral waters of the Baltic Sea. Unusually high tides prevented the crew from fulfilling the task and Pleskys informed them that they were going to turn around and head for home.