The Lithuanian government has announced that it will begin compensating the country's small Jewish community for property seized during the Nazi and Soviet eras. Over the next decade, 36.5 million euros will be allocated to fund Jewish educational, religious, scientific, cultural and social welfare projects in this small Baltic land.
Needless to say, there can be no full compensation for the suffering endured by Lithuanian Jewry. The Holocaust in Lithuania was among the swiftest and most thorough in all of Europe. During the Soviet era, Jewish culture was further crushed.
Even so, the restitution initiative is welcome. Symbolically, it serves to underscore Lithuania's moral burden. Practically, it will support Jewish life in this former heartland of Yiddishkeit. The restitution announcement, thus, is the latest step on a difficult road.
With independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Lithuania gained the right - indeed, the responsibility - to shape its own view of its 20th-century history. The new nation's effort to engage with its past has been riddled with controversy from the start.
On numerous occasions, the international community has been justly critical. Lithuanian prosecutors have been rebuked for declining to prosecute elderly Nazi war criminals, while initiating questioning of several elderly Jews who fought as courageous partisans against the German occupation. Alarms have been rightly raised when the call for greater recognition of Stalin's crimes has seemingly been bound up with an attempt to deny, diminish or distort Hitler's misdeeds.
Yet there have also been positive developments in Lithuania, and these deserve more international attention than they've received to date. I saw evidence of these positive developments when I first visited Lithuania several years ago. I went in an effort to connect myself with the land of my Jewish forebears, but my visit soon expanded into an examination of how a country scarred by genocide moves forward into the future. As I spoke with leaders of Lithuania's fragile effort to engage with the Jewish past, I found reason for hope.
I spoke with two women who were employed by the Lithuanian government to design curricula about the Holocaust for public schools. They stressed that the Holocaust was not only a tragedy for the Jews but for Lithuania as a whole. If Lithuania is to mature as a nation, they maintained, Lithuanians must ask themselves rigorous moral questions about Lithuanian actions during the Holocaust. "Our goal," they said, "is to transform ourselves from a society of bystanders into an active civil society."
Another young gentile woman, who worked for the Jewish museum in Vilnius, showed me the teacher's guide she was writing, which included searing questions for high-school students:
• Have you ever been in a situation where someone needed your help and you didn't provide it?
• Have you ever gone along with what other people were doing, even if you thought it was wrong, rather than listening to your own conscience?
• Is there a connection between your answers and the behavior of people during the Holocaust?
As I talked to people about the Jewish past, Jews and non-Jews alike often broke down in tears when describing their families' experiences. I heard about victims, collaborators, perpetrators, rescuers and bystanders. It seemed clear to me that the story of the Holocaust remains raw and unresolved in this country.
An organization called the House of Memory seemed to me to be on the right track. Its goal is to facilitate intergenerational communication among Lithuanian gentiles about the lost Jewish world. According to a leader with whom I spoke, as young people talk with their elderly relatives in small towns and villages, difficult truths emerge. The nearly vanished Jewish culture becomes vivid to the students, and they begin to question and to understand their views.
The approach to the Jewish past that I saw in Lithuania poses questions, rather than supplying answers. Rather than being forced to repent, people are invited to design their own vehicles of remorse. Along with mourning the tragedy, they are encouraged to celebrate the glories of the Jewish past. These efforts call on people to reach across disparate and seemingly irreconcilable histories - not only because some of them need to be taught a lesson, nor because everyone is encouraged to claim the mantle of victimhood. No, people are called to join together because all are needed in the difficult dialogue that must take place.
Those of us outside Lithuania have a role to play in encouraging that dialogue. When we believe things are going astray, we should speak up. But let us also be vocal in our support when we see things going right.
Ellen Cassedy is the author of the newly published book "We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust" (University of Nebraska Press ). She lives near Washington, D.C.
