For years, the Catholic calendar, on Sept. 23, Holocaust Day, would remind one: "To pray so that man would not be brutal towards man". True, the phrase hasn't appeared there for some time now. I'd always get angry over the radio, and suggest that we attach the same reminder for June 14 or Jan. 13. Maybe someone heard me, or maybe the editors finally saw how inappropriate it was, or maybe they just got bored. Now the day remains open for Lithuania's Catholics to contemplate and pray as they will. Or not to pray at all, if they can't or won't.
I usually can't. But not just because of that old reminder about the brutality of human beings. After all, what could I ask of God when trying to recount the things that were being done to the Jewish people here and elsewhere?
I will never succeed, we will never succeed, to grieve in a befitting manner for those cowering, tattered, heartbroken little figures who once were herded along the streets of Vilnius, and on to the mass slaughter at Paneriai.
Some actually returned from the livestock wagons, but no-one ever did from that, and other similar processions. To pray for their eternal rest? If the Lord risked taking on the name of saviour, then he should gather unto himself the souls of those who were killed, of those murdered, helpless sacrificial lambs. And decorate the walls of his eternal kingdom with drops of innocent blood, like votive offerings. For we are too little and too weak to dare look them in the eye.
I could pray to heaven only for eternal discomfort for all of us who live in this land, in this city wreathed with the sweetest Jewish epithets - a city which over a period of months swallowed everything therein which had been Jewish, including every last one of that nation's people. As if their lives had been a mistake, a lie, an evil.
One didn't have to belong to any SS battalions, or fire a single bullet in order to moan, "Lord have mercy", when entering those places which should be filled with their life, their shops, schools and synagogues. My beloved city will never be as it could have been, had it not been robbed of that other history. Here and there in the Old Town, the Hebrew letters emerging from beneath plaster and paint will always persecute us - as if in eternal reproach that we were unable to protect, or at least defend those who built their lives here, peacefully and dilligently, over the centuries.
It's not even a question of brutality. I don't recall in whose diary I found entries from that 1942 period: war, occupation, a shortage of fuel and food. Vilnius, dark and cold. A glass of tea with jam or a morsel of sugar is a festive occasion. Everything is written in the diary, each detail of the intellectual's daily routine. I look for information about what was happening in the city outside the walls of that small bottle. Not a word, not the tiniest note. Once again: tea, conversations about household affairs, touching attempts to grasp at any sort of comfort and safety. The ghetto – is on the other side of the street. They didn't see or hear, didn't want to see or hear; there's not the slightest mention – for fear that their own so-called house of tranquillity might collapse? They silently prayed that man would not be brutal towards man?
And in other Lithuanian towns, when speaking to witnesses of those events, I was struck more than once by the emptiness in those places where one should be eternally flinching with horror. Several thousand of your neighbours slaughtered and dumped into pits a kilometer away from your home – and there is no memory of anything, not even bad dreams. Yes, there was talk in the village that all the Jews were gathered up and shot. But the German soldiers were happy, they gave the children chocolate, they smelled of soap, some of them even played the harmonica. We used to hide our chickens and bacon  from them... Worse for me than the crimes committed by the Lithuanian Jew-shooters, is the fact that many back then believed that it was possible for you and your own people to live, talk of freedom, even feel fortunate – out of fear, out of a dull-witted indifference to the discarding of others, as if they were less worthy of a place under the sun. Let the wheels of the death factory turn, you can't stop them, you have to live, survive, rebuild the state. The tea became bitter only later, with the front and the Red Army advancing, with thoughts of prison and the exile which had been prepared for you as well. Tears fell when raising a toast to the New Year, to 1944, when the situation called for reflection, and means were being sought for getting out of it.
I realize that there is nothing easier or more ludicrous than the writing of moral dictates after the fact, as if someone could have been a hero and a saint, but took care only of their own skin instead. It's easy to expostulate when not faced with laying one's own life on the cards in the name of elementary humaneness. But I don't believe that those infected with concern for the fate of people being annihilated were particularly courageous or heroic. One moves into such action without thinking about it, simply out of spiritual knowledge and an inability to act otherwise. But why did so little of that need to defend the misfortunate arise in this Christian nation, stuffed, as it was over and over again, with evangelical precepts? And are we any different today, after the oppression and suffering that "our own people" experienced? Would it be possible for a higher level of "I can't" to arise here now, if one were faced with coercion and injustice?
Many years ago I was treated to their festive matzos by neighbouring Jews, on what was then Lenin Prospect. Somehow I always found myself living beside those people who had miraculously survived, or who had come from elsewhere and not yet emigrated to Israel. Sitting on the benches in what is now the "French park" I could hear Yiddish being spoken; in a house facing the park we shared a common kitchen with Mrs. Suwalska, later with the intellectual Raya; at school we'd all laugh along with round-faced Lazarus, who later left for the land of his forefathers.
As for the matzos, it was the usual children's story: running in the stairwells, you'd be noticed and acknowledged by the adults; an accidental run-in would arouse in them a wave of gentleness and generosity. It was that same flood of good-will  that motivated a smiling neighbour to invite us in. She was explaining something about their traditions, and gave us a large crisp piece of flatbread. It wasn't any tastier than black bread sprinkled with sugar, but I ate it – at first shyly, but with each bite more aware that the hands which had reached out to give it to me could not be wicked or crafty.
Thank God, that along with everything that one tastes in childhood, there was that unusual bread of our neighbours: a part of that other world which had once been right here – alarming in its difference, but in an hour of mercy showing that life, both there and here, is worthy of the same gentleness and love.
I don't know if I have enough of that mysteriously heavenly strength to sew a Star of David onto my back if I saw a mass of condemned people being herded along the streets of Vilnius. But were it not for that taste of matzos in my childhood, perhaps I wouldn't fully understand what this city lost when it shovelled its centuries-old Jewish history under the earth. In grieving one becomes speechless, for it is futile to dole out words of prayer in such a place.

Julius SASNAUSKAS,
Franciscan priest.
"Laikas".

Lietuvos žydų bendruomenės laikraštis “Lietuvos Jeruzalė” 2006.