News
About Ponary in Vilnius
At the invitation of Andrius Kubilius, the prime minister of Lithuania, a group of experts met in Vilnius with the goal of holding a debate with the persons in the Lithuanian government responsible for the reorganization of the Memorial in Ponary. Among the group of experts were Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Jacek Nowakowski of the Washington Holocaust Museum, Avner Shalev, director of the Jerusalem Yad Vashem Institute, and Piotr Tarnowski of the Stutthof Museum. Also participating in the meeting were Arunas Gelunas, Lithuanian Minister of Culture, and ambassadors and diplomats from Poland, Israel, the United States, and Germany, as well as representatives of Jewish circles and Vilnius Poles and Lithuanian institutions concerned with remembrance and monuments. It was the first international working meeting in contemporary Lithuania that considered the form of the commemoration of the victims of extermination in Ponary.
"Today the space of the place of the mass execution in the forest outside Vilnius is built around with various monuments from various epochs, sometimes bearing contradictory contents," says Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński. "This causes disorientation among the few visitors and makes it difficult to understand the course of the tragedy that occurred in this place during the war," adds Piotr Cywiński.
The meeting was part of the Lithuanian effort to create a completely new concept for the Memorial at Ponary. Experts told about the role of authenticity and personal experience in teaching about genocide, the many dimensions of education among today's generation of young people, and the role of memory in shaping identity. Above all, however, they all felt that there is no sense in creating a new legibility of a Memorial if no concrete educational policy comes into being, if Lithuanian teachers are not prepared for lessons on the subject of the Holocaust and extermination policies during the war, and Lithuanian schools do not visit the new commemoration in Ponary on a mass scale.
As a result of this meeting Rolanda Kvietkauskas, the advisor to the Lithuanian culture minister who is in charge of the project, announced ambitious efforts aimed at formulating the first proposals for concrete suggestions before the end of this year on the basis of guidelines based on the priority of respecting the authenticity of Ponary as a site that should take its place in the awareness of future generations and the decided linking of this place with the Lithuanian educational system.
The Germans, with considerable help from Lithuanian collaborationist units, committed the murder, according to estimates, of about seventy thousand Jews, more than ten thousand Poles, and smaller groups of Red Army prisoners of war and Lithuanians.
