This is the fifth interview in the series “We Too Are From Vilnius.” Listen by pressing the PLAY button on the NARA player or through the podcast apps listed below:
The Jewish community in Lithuania today is small—estimates range from 2,000 to 4,000 people. Like nearly all Lithuanian Jews, Daniel, Efim, and Natan lost family members during the Holocaust: their grandfather was saved by evacuating to the East (see NARA’s video documentary about him, the first and only Jewish dean in the history of Lithuanian universities), but they never knew their great-grandfather. Other family members fled the Nazis to Central Asia, only to return to Lithuania to find other people living in their homes.
The brothers believe that that era belongs to history and should stay there. “I don’t feel the need for someone in Lithuania to say to me, ‘My grandfather did something bad, and I feel guilty for it,’” says Natan, co-founder of the Vilnius-based financial technology company Kernolab.
“What happened occurred within a certain context, under certain conditions. Today, the situations and people’s mindsets are completely different. I want to believe that, given the collective consciousness of today’s society, it would be impossible.”
Natan's brother Efim Hiterer, who has extensive experience in the real estate sector, adds, “I think we’re not talking about acknowledging personal guilt but rather about collectively aligning on historical facts as a first step.”
This collective alignment on historical facts could open doors to a new vocabulary and new heroes for Lithuania.
“It matters what words we use when talking about multiculturalism in Lithuania. I’m curious whether many nations live in Lithuania—or whether many ethnic groups make up one nation. How is identity formed—is the Lithuanian nation defined by Baltic genes? Or are Lithuanian Poles, Lithuanian Russians, and Lithuanian Jews also part of Lithuania as a society? Do we say ‘foreigners’ or ‘fellow citizens’?” asks Daniel Hiterer, an educator at Cornell University in New York and co-creator of the “We Too Are From Vilnius” project.
“If we said ‘fellow citizens’ more than we said ‘foreigners,’ it would raise the question of whether we can choose national heroes who come from different ethnic groups,” continues Daniel. “If Lithuania accepted Jews as fellow citizens more than as foreigners, then maybe Abraham Sutzkever (a Yiddish poet from Vilnius and a leader of the unarmed Jewish resistance in the Vilnius Ghetto—ed.) would be considered a Lithuanian hero. Something he didn’t live to see himself but perhaps his descendants could.”
“I’m curious whether many nations live in Lithuania—or whether many ethnic groups make up one nation.”
NARA podcast editor Karolis Vyšniauskas speaks with the interviewees. Listen to the full conversation in the recording below, and share your thoughts about this and other project interviews at nara@nara.lt. The project’s interviews will soon be available on a dedicated project website in the NARA space, continuing the conversation about Lithuanian society today and the role of Lithuanian Jews within it.
Eighty years after the liquidation of the Vilnius Ghetto, NARA presents the podcast series “We Too Are From Vilnius,” featuring conversations with young Jewish people in Vilnius exploring their connection to a city scarred by immense loss and a Lithuanian society balancing multiculturalism and nationalism. Listen to previous interviews in the series: with Naomi Koc, Ani Gandžumian, Miša Skalskis, and Mark Liberman. These episodes were created in collaboration with a team of Vilnius high school students.
While producing this series, the conflicts in Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon reached new levels of destruction, affecting both Jewish and Arab communities in Lithuania. This inevitably became a topic of some conversations. We invite you to read and listen to NARA’s publications about the situation in the Middle East in Lithuanian and English.
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