Difficult Heritage and Memory in the Making

by Thomas Van de Putte

Medieval realms of memory are effective nationbuilders: the facts are too old to be controversial, the homeland ‘we’ is stretched a few centuries into the past, and who would not sympathise with a bunch of glorious knights? The inherent risk in the prominence of medieval realms of memory is that it destines more recent and controversial events to forgetting. Visiting the castle of Medininkai seems on first hand sight an exemplary case: a whole room of the exhibition is dedicated to the battle of Grunwald, but the POW camp where Polish Home Army soldiers were kept in 1944 is not even mentioned.

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by Jason O’Connor

The day began when a couple of us visited the Paneriai Memorial Museum. Located 10 kilometers from the center of Vilnius, the Paenriai forest, where around 100,000 were murdered, is a layer of difficult heritage in the way the history and horrors of the war are commemorated.  The memorial complex is varied in the sense that it commemorates the victims of the Holocaust an estimated 70,000 Jews. As well as other 30,000 victims including Roma, communists, Polish resistance fighters and Soviets prisoners of War. In 2004 a new commemoration monument dedicated  to the local Lithuanian Local Squad who were engaged in acts of mass murder themselves was erected. This provides opportunity to have a debate about how Lithuania has come to terms with what occurred during the Second World War and why they felt it was necessary to commemorate this group.

Memorial to the murdered soldiers of the Lithuanian Local Squad

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 by Uladzimir Valodzin

On August 2 we spent most part of a day in Vilnius Jewish Library at Gedimino pr. There we found two small exhibitions. One, with weird name „The genetic pool of Wilno“, showed photographs of Wilno’s jews from interwar period. Second had Lithuanian passports of Jonava’s Jews from the same period on display.

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On Monday, the 1st of August we finally started our International Summer School on difficult heritage. It was still an arrival day so the whole team gathered just till the evening.

On the very first day we had two main activities. The first was a Guided Tour to the Memorial Complex of Tuskulenai Peace Park where participants received a snack peak of what we will discuss during the whole event, i.e. problems of unveiling, presentation and public consumption of previously hidden, rejected or somehow forgotten, uncomfortable past and its remains.

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Our Summer School begins in just two weeks!