1939 - THE YEAR THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING IN LITHUANIA’S HISTORY 1

Introduction

1939 – The Year that Changed Everything in Lithuania’s History is about the crossing of visible and invisible boundaries between the various populations in the city that was officially known as Vilna before World War I under the Russian czars, then Wilno between the two world wars under the Polish Re- public, and then, after it was transferred by the Soviets to the Lithuanian Re- public in October 1939 – Vilnius. From September 1939, when Soviet troops conquered what had been eastern Poland and gave the Vilnius region to Lithuania, until June 1940, when the USSR held rigged elections to make all of Lithuania a Soviet republic, Vilnius and its region stood out in the whole of Europe. Unlike western Poland, it had not fallen to the Nazis. And unlike Grodna or Brest, which were immediately added to the Belarusian SSR of the Soviet Union, Vilnius, with a large Polish and a large Jewish population, was under Lithuanian rule during those months. This makes it a special unit for study in World War II history.

This book will deal with the often disputed questions of cultural and so- cial presence in the Lithuanian Vilnius, the Jewish Vilna (Yiddish Vilne) or in the Polish Wilno. Its subject is the encounter between differentpolities in the city and the dynamics of the encounter, and the various roles played in this process by individuals, social groups, and the state administration. The Jewish-Lithuanian encounter is an essential part of the story of how and why in the years of the destruction (1941-1944), the so-called integration of the Vilnius question into the mass political consciousness of the citizenry of the Lithuanian Republic was one of the elements that later played right into the hands of the desensitisation of the local population towards Jewish suffering during the Holocaust, and indeed the genocide of nearly the entire Jewish population. The previous research on the subject is highly fragmented and does not allow the formation of a coherent picture of the events. Serious pub- lications on this topic in English are practically non-existent. There is a need to concentrate on the critical events in history and to analyse the actions of the main actors, and to reconstruct the detailed sequence of events that be- came the pre-history that, after the outbreak of the Soviet-German war, later 2 Šarūnas Liekis led to the complete alienation and isolation of the Jewish community, not only in Vilnius but across all of Lithuania.

The book aims to assist the reader in the pursuit of understanding the sequence and complexity of the events. Present-day Lithuania, and especially its capital Vilnius, is becoming attractive not only to international (and par- ticularly western) tourists, but also to people who appreciate the city’s di- verse cultural and religious heritage, and finally want to see examples of how present-day modern society draws upon the historical lessons and examples of deeds from former times. Its purpose is to intrigue readers in the period that destroyed the prevalent understanding of social continuity, identity and loyalty to the state. This stormy period touched the City of Vilnius, lying on the borders of four countries: Lithuania, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Germany, in a unique way. The rapid collapse of international order that unfolded brought upon the whole world the disaster that was World War II. The city lies at the crossroads of Western and Eastern civilizations. Its treas- ures are popularly conceived intimately as their own by the different peoples (Jews, Poles, Russians, Belarusians and Lithuanians) living on various sides of borders.

The book will cover the Vilnius episode of 1939, the rapid change of bor- ders as the city moved between the hands of the Polish, Soviet and Lithua- nian armies. In addition to the international politics that pre-determined the fate of the city, the book will also deal with the issue of war and its impact on everyday life. Special attention will be given to the economic and political development in the interwar years that pre-determined the policies of the Lithuanian government towards the newly acquired territories around Vil- nius. The author claims that the failure, in 1939, to retain Klaipėda (Memel) for Lithuania and the overall previous ineffectiveness of Lithuanian rule in the largely ethnically-German Memel district had direct consequences on the behaviour and administrative standing of Lithuanian rule in Vilnius. The Memel episode and its annexation by Nazi Germany, and the collapse of Lithuanian rule there in March, 1939, will be discussed in detail. The book will describe the collapse of the microcosms of the social ties that affected every family. It will discuss the shift in the ethnic composition of the inhabitants of Vilnius and of its neighbourhoods; it will also glimpse