NEWS AND VIEWS: Descent into a man-made Hades (05/02/99)

NEWS AND VIEWS

Descent into a man-made Hades

by Lubomyr Luciuk

VILNIUS - Descent into this man-made Hades is, at first, unremarkable. The stairwell is lackluster, the hue institutional. Then you reach the first guard post. Beside it there is a utensil called "the box." Prisoners were entombed in these standing coffins on arrival, kept for however many hours it took to process their papers. Sometimes they were left in them much longer. Malicious guards liked to pretend they had forgotten someone was in "the box." A simple ruse, inspiring terror.

Inmates were then stored in cold, overcrowded cells. There was no privacy. Peepholes ensured that. A corner plastic toilet bucket was emptied only once a day. A cold or scalding hot shower, temperature mirroring the guards' moods, was a monthly event. No rest came during the day and only troubled sleep at night. The evening hours were reserved for the torturers.

They prepared well. The central corridor of this infernal region was thickly carpeted. This muffled the cries of the anguished. Two purpose-built cells could be partly flooded. Prisoners would have to stand on a small central pedestal, in the dark, for hours on end, to collapse into the swill below when strength gave out. Their tormentors were also well-equipped with mechanical and electrical devices for dismemberment.

Once brought here you could try to resist, to pray to your God, and to await your fate. A visitor today can still touch a name, a date, and sometimes even a few words scratched into the cell's concrete by the confined. These epigraphs of the doomed are all that remain of many. Once the inquisitors had gouged out whatever they needed, those who lived that long were taken to another room beneath the courtyard and shot. Their bodies were then dumped into a mass grave, at Tuskulenai, not far away. It all happened like an assembly line.

The butcher boys did enjoy some conveniences. When their day's work was done they would wash their hands of the blood of innocents, then retire upstairs. That's where their cafeteria was. Presumably they were untroubled with thoughts of what the next shift was doing to human beings only a few meters below. Even fleshers have to eat.

Most of this inferno's cells, located beneath a Ministry of Justice building in downtown Vilnius, are now open to the public. Anyone can pass into this sepulcher and see where some of Lithuania's finest sons and daughters perished at the hands of the Nazis, or during the two Soviet occupations. The government of Lithuania finances a national Genocide and Resistance Center. They have made this NKVD-Gestapo-KGB prison into a museum, a place of memory and of education. Soviet war crimes and crimes against humanity in Lithuania during and after the second world war are, finally, being documented. Displays honor the memory of the patriots of the Lithuanian Army of the Forest who organized armed resistance against the Soviet regime, a struggle lasting into the late 1950s.

The center's researchers also provide evidence about the atrocities perpetrated by the many communist and Nazi war criminals who escaped justice. Two such men have recently been identified. One, Petras Raslanas, is now a resident of Russia. In 1941 he and his henchmen tortured several dozen Lithuanian patriots in the Rainiai forest. Many of the eyeless, castrated, skinned-alive corpses were unidentifiable, even by their families.

The other, Nachmanas Dusanskis, lives in Israel. In 1941 he helped the Soviets exile Lithuanian Jews to the gulag. His signature, for example, appears on the deportation order that sent the Volpert family to their Siberian graves. Unconscionably, given the compelling evidence of wrongdoing by these two men, both countries have refused to extradite them to stand trial in Lithuania.

I looked in every cell save the one where they keep the remains of the massacred. I didn't ask for that door to be opened. I had no desire to see the skeletal remnants of those men and women, most of them martyrs to their Catholic faith or to their desire for Lithuanian freedom. Plans exist for their eventual reburial in hallowed ground. But the authorities are holding back. A few of the dead may also have been evildoers, collaborators during the Nazi occupation. The government fears an international outcry should they rebury the bones all together. And so the remains of many good and brave Lithuanians, possibly intermingled with a few of the not-so-innocent, lie in a kind of limbo, in a cell just like the one in which most were brutally murdered, mostly by the Soviets and their local collaborators.

They may stay entombed there forever. But, even if these bones are never reburied, at least the deeds of the victims, are now being recalled and incorporated into an uncensored history of this Baltic country. Is that enough? I think not. For these victims' remains also remind us that some of their murderers remain unpunished, perhaps even in our midst. In Eastern Europe everyone understands why communist war criminals should be brought to justice, as surely as the Nazis were. Incontrovertible evidence of Soviet war crimes and crimes against humanity is being rigorously compiled at the center, and elsewhere. Certainly no excuse remains for any country knowingly providing safe haven for communist war criminals and Soviet collaborators. Any that do should be branded as pariahs, deserving of nothing but the contempt of civilized nations. And how unfortunate, I thought as I left Lithuania, that Ukraine remains so far behind in its national effort to catalogue the crimes of communism and bring the evil-doers responsible to justice. If communist killers can not be hauled before the bar of justice at least they must be condemned before the bar of history. Otherwise there is no hope for a democratic future for independent Ukraine.

Lubomyr Luciuk, is a professor of political geography, has recently returned from Lithuania where he lectured in Kaunus and Vilnius on how the proclivities of the Canadian system undermine attempts to bring alleged war criminals to justice.

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