The Stories of Rescued Jews: The Factors of Cognition of Lithuanian Culture

Abstract

While taking into account the fact that the existing sources are limited both in terms of quantity and quality, and in view of the extent of the research carried out, as well as the relevance and sensitivity of the problem under discussion, the author of the current article seeks to focus the attention on the factors of cognition of Lithuanian culture and their possible influence on the motifs of actions of one or another national group in the extreme conditions of German occupation (1941–44), rather than presenting the usually escalated statistics of the rescued and rescuers and discussing the incredible humanism and heroism of the latter. The main references are both published and unpublished sources, accumulated and/or published by the Department of the Rescue of Jews and Perpetuation of Memory of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum, the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, and Yad Vashem Museum.
The features of classification into kin and alien, i.e. a different appearance, the ability to speak Lithuanian, knowledge of the Christian religious tradition and lifestyle, social integration, and the ability to find direct informal contacts in the neighbouring community have been chosen as the criteria for the angles of research, which allowed us to reconstruct at least partially the forms and meaning of cognition of Lithuanian culture.
The phenotypical actualization of the difference of Jews and Lithuanians, so distinct in the stories of rescued Jews, demonstrates the consciously realized – although schematized – and observation-based cognition of the society that surrounded Jews, which helped them to identify with and “melt away” in the Lithuanian environment in the war years. The factor of the language of communication, which in fact does not appear in the stories of rescued Jews who pleaded for help, shows that the knowledge of the Lithuanian language seemed obvious and self-understandable, and confirms the supposition that on the eve of World War II, the majority of the members of the Jewish community in Lithuania spoke Lithuanian, which fulfilled their daily needs in terms of their relations with the outside world. As the Jews found themselves in “the group of the eliminated” in the war years, Christening gave them a hope of a possibility of physical survival. On one hand, the reckless wish to convert to Christianity can be understood as  a conscious act of pragmatic nature seeking to avoid persecutions and survive. On the other, such actions reveal the moments of cognition of the social structure of Lithuanian society and religion as one of the basic parts of the Lithuanian world outlook and cultural identity, which implied corresponding modes of behaviour.
A large number of rescuers and a much smaller number of the rescued in Lithuania reveals that the organic integration of Lithuanian Jews and the tendencies of Lithuanian-Jewish cultural cooperation and better mutual understanding in different social groups was at different stages of development in the 1930s. The direct daily communication of Lithuanian and Jewish neighbours and friendships that had begun before the war in a home, professional or education environment appeared to be the most enduring and reliable contacts, which opened the ways to the outer world for the rescued Jews. There were very few cases of separate individuals or families hiding in one place with the same rescuers from the first to the last days of war; the absolute majority of the rescued Jews were impelled to change their hiding place at least temporarily and most often more than a dozen or even several dozen times, once and again finding themselves with new “silent strangers”. The latter constituted the largest group of Lithuanian rescuers and were a secondary and further link in the rescue operations. The success of finding these people was not related with the quality of the victims’ interaction with the Lithuanian cultural environment, but was proportionally dependant on the circle and closeness of social and family relations of their rescuers.
It is understandable that in Lithuania’s case, definitive conclusions cannot be expected without the statistical analysis of the rescuers and the rescued, and without the possibility to analyze all stories of rescuing. However, the analysis of typical examples which appear in one or another form in the absolute majority of stories of the rescued Jews allows us to make a supposition that the “Lithuanian-like appearance”, the knowledge of the Lithuanian language, studies in Lithuanian schools, and close professional, social, and personal contacts with the Lithuanian environment were not always the decisive factors of the rescue of Jews, but most often merely a big chance in the long chain of failures, disappointments, despair and coincidences. The prewar empiricism of cognition of Lithuanian culture in the war years was transformed into learning to recognize the cultural segments, which manifested itself in various models of adaptive behaviour. Like the rescuers’ motivation, the choice of the rescued was subjective, i.e. related with their environment or reversely proportionate to the level of cognition of Lithuanian culture.