Just arrived in Vilnius

It’s been a while since we were last in Vilnius. I hadn’t realized that nine months had passed by just like that. If you follow Living Imprint’s Facebook page, you may have come across the status update where I was lamenting that FlyLAL, Lithuania’s main carrier, has gone bust. As a result, no direct flights into Vilnius. And this, when Vilnius is the European Capital of Culture for 2009. What a pity!

All flights to Vilnius have to route via another city, e.g. Prague or Riga. This trip, we're going via Riga.

The opening of the Surviving History full exhibition at the Tolerance Centre is this Thursday, 10th Sept. So we have decided to come in today so we can sort out installation over the next two days.

The day did not begin well at all. At the check-in counter at London Gatwick, I realized I’d brought the wrong passport. Shivaun was trying to console me, that I was obviously tired and frazzled. Plus, and I only realized this when I was at the airport, I hadn’t eaten for over 23 hours. Sleeping only at 3 and 4 am the last two nights didn't help. Obviously, I’d packed everything but my brains.

So instead of carrying my Irish passport, I had brought my Malaysian one. Yikes! Okay, so the check-in lady didn’t make any comments. All seemed okay, but yup, I was still feeling frazzled and annoyed with myself ‘cos re-entry to UK would be a grief. The complications of dual nationality! Thank God that Jesse is coming only tomorrow, so I can ask him to retrieve my other passport and bring it along. So far so good, I thought. Fingers crossed.

So, there I was, tucking into a Magnum dark chocolate at the boarding gate. If you know me, you'd know I normally don't have sweets. But for some reason, I'd gotten myself this ice cream at the vending machine. Maybe I needed a sugar rush.

The flight was leaving on time. But I was still feeling a little nervous. When it came time to board, Shivaun got past the check-in gates while I dawdled at the back of the queue, chomping on my Magnum and suffering severe brain freeze trying to wolf it down. Shivaun walked ahead and I could see her disappearing round the corner. The flight attendant looked at my boarding pass. No probs there. Then he looked at my passport. ‘I think you need a visa,’ he said. Damnit. My brain starts racing a mile a minute - what other EU ID do I have on me that I can use? What flight can I get on later? “Shiv! Shiv!” I yell but Shivaun has disappeared from view altogether. He makes a couple of calls, asks if I have a return ticket, then tells me it’s okay. Little did I know then that this was an omen - a hint of the possible unpleasantness ahead.

We arrived into Riga. Now, I know nothing much about Latvia or Riga but Katya had told me that it was quite beautiful. Not that we would have a chance to encounter its attractions as we were only transiting for an hour and a bit.

It was about 6.15pm local time. I was surprised that even though we were just transiting, we had to go through the rigmarole of passport checks and luggage scans again. The immigration officer takes away my bottle of water. Without a single Latvian lat to rub between us, I start feeling a bit annoyed about this - having some liquids at hand gives me a sense of security.

Another officer asks me if I have a laptop; I pull it out of my bag and put it into the plastic tray. I walk through the detector and it beeps though I have absolutely nothing on me that should set it off. Another immigration officer gives me a disapproving look and says to me, ‘Check, check’ and starts feeling me up and down grudgingly; she gives me a look that says I have created trouble/work for her.

On the other side of the scanner, another officer says to me that I need to take the electronic equipment I have in my laptop bag out so they can scan them – an external drive and a mpeg player. He says this with an accusatory look on his face; as if I tried to sneak one past him by putting them through the scanner inside my bag. I want to protest that no one asked me to take these out of my bag too, only the laptop, but decide against it. I take them out of my case and start putting my laptop back into my bag; I figure he wants to scan the drive and player, but no, he wants me to put it back into my bag and send my bag through to scan again, minus the laptop; he’s annoyed with me and raises his voice. I feel like saying to him, ‘Chill, bud, so I misunderstood…”

The unpleasantness continues. I am tired, grumpy and thirsty. I want to have a cigarette. I go up to a boarding gate counter. There are three officers there; they see me. They ignore me. I wait. They avert their eyes, hoping I'll go away. Instead I say, “Excuse me?” The lady sitting behind the counter goes, “Yah?” with the what-do-you-want look in her eyes. I ask, “Is there a smoking room in this airport?” She tells me about non-Schnengen or something like that. I have no clue what she’s saying but her face lets me know that I should not ask again.

I walk to the transfer desk instead and despite feeling a little upset at the rudeness I have just encountered, I smile and say, “Good afternoon, can you please tell me if there is somewhere I can smoke in this airport?”
She says, “Outside.”
I ask, “How do I go outside?”
She doesn’t answer me, instead she asks, “Where are you going?”
I say, “Vilnius.”
She says, “You smoke in Vilnius.”
I am a bit confused. I stare at her.
I ask again, “So there is no smoking room in the airport?”
She smirks. “You smoke in Vilnius,” she repeats.
I am, at this stage, staring at her incredulously. My brain isn’t computing this unwarranted sarcasm. I start to say, “That really wasn’t necessary, I was just asking if there was a…” and then I give up. This is such a bizarre encounter. I can’t make out why she’s gone out of the way to be mean to me.

I tell Shivaun this. She’s sitting and waiting by the boarding gate. “Maybe they’re racist,” she says. Somehow, I think not. I think this is just business as usual here. Customer service and courtesy are not part of the program. I am, at this stage, feeling antsy and upset. There's a bad taste in my mouth I can't get rid off.

Finally, we get into Vilnius. It almost feels like home; at least I am more familiar with it. We cab it to the hotel, check in, and are out on the streets in 10 minutes to look for somewhere to eat. It is now 9pm. We arbitrarily pick a place called Café Libre.

The food is quite good. The waitress is very nice. She says ‘thank you,’ and ‘please’ and she smiles! At the end of the meal, she even asks if we like the food. I feel like hugging her. I feel like telling her ‘thank you’ for ending this day of horridness with some kindness.

Tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow, we begin installing the exhibition. I can’t wait for the sun to rise and melt away the yuckiness that has clung to me since we set off this morning. They say bad stuff happens in threes. Okay, that's the quota up now. Tomorrow should be a great day.

All Roads Lead to Vilnius – 26 days and counting...

Okay, things are really hotting up now. We are manically preparing last minute work for the opening of the exhibition in Vilnius on the 10 September 2009. I’m still tearing my hair out trying to get the packing list in order. We have different suppliers involved, from flight cases to actual exhibit items, and trying to amass the necessary information on weights, dimensions and packaging is driving me a little crazy. I am wary that we will need to put together a comprehensive list for custom purposes as it may be necessary to get an ATA Carnet (kinda like a passport) for the exhibits, so I am – I admit – being a little anal with the details. Virgo that I am, I relish and abhor the activity at the same time :)

So anyways, a few days ago, we realized we had run out of time on one activity. For one of the exhibition sections – there are five sections in all (you can read about what the exhibition consists of here) – the Shoah Memorial, we have 200+ bottles that need to be labeled. Quite early on, the intention was to have everyone who had participated – the artists, the designers, the team members spread across several countries (you can read about the team members here) – to write these labels by hand. But alas, it has taken a while to get the list of names and finalize this installation. So unfortunately, we’ve had to only involve the immediate team.


Trying to be as neat as I can

As I was writing my share of the labels – the name of the massacre sites and the numbers killed at each location – that while I was rushing this task, I couldn’t help but be mindful of the poignant and sad significance of what I was doing. Each location isn’t just a location – it is a burial site. And the numbers I was trying to print in as neat a hand as possible were people, lives… And then there are those places where no one even knows how many were lost. I cannot help but imagine what it is like be erased as if one had not lived at all.

Throughout this project, at various stages, I have often felt overwhelmed by the material. No matter how many times I have seen, read or heard it. It happens without me realizing it – I could be reading an interview transcript again, or watching a video clip, or looking at the narrators’ photos. The feeling passes over me like a shadow, often fleeting. It dissipates eventually but I feel something akin to a residual, lingering emptiness; it settles gently into the pit of my stomach and stays there. If someone asks me the impact of this project on me, I think I will tell them – it is like a gentle sadness that lodges somewhere in my gut. I don’t know if that makes sense, but that’s how it feels.

Only 26 days to go now to the full exhibition opening in Vilnius. And about a week and half to have the items shipped. Again, as in the past, whenever we prepare to go to Vilnius, I am struck by mixed feelings of setting foot in that city once more.

Surviving History documentary – 13,478 views to date

The other day, I decided to check out how many people had viewed the preview of our documentary on our distributor, Journeyman Pictures’ YouTube channel. I was really surprised to see that more than 13,000 views were registered. This does not of course include the trailer clips that have been viewed on our organisation Living Imprint’s YouTube channel, about 700+ views to date.

It’s great to see that quite a few people are interested in knowing about the Holocaust. But I must also say that it is really depressing too. It seems that most of the people who seek out documentaries like ours are fairly narrow-minded and have missed the point of Holocaust awareness altogether. They seem determined to find films like ours so they can deride the Jews and go on anti-Semitic rants for the world to see.

One comment even mentioned Madoff. But what has an American white collar criminal got to do with Holocaust survivors who survived World War II? Just because they are of the same race? By that irrational deduction, should we hate all Japanese for the crimes of their forefathers during the same war as well? Should we hate present-day Americans for the napalm bombing of the Vietnamese? Should we hate all Muslims for the murder of Daniel Pearl? The list could go on and on. It is mind boggling that such irrationality should exist and darn right frustrating!

A few comments were enlightened ones – thank God there are people who understand the point of Holocaust awareness tools like our documentary. What a great disappointment that those who missed the point altogether do not seem to understand that what happened during the Holocaust is a symptom, the tip of the ice berg if you will, of intolerance and misplaced hatred gone horribly wrong and warped. These are not just stories about the Jews. This is a reminder of what blind hatred can lead to. There is great injustice in the world, why are there so many people willing to join the mindless masses that perpetrate such conditions? Every time I bump up against such comments I am flabbergasted. Why are we so willfully blind?

If you’d like to see the short trailers, click here

If you’d like to see the Journeyman trailer, click here

If you’d like to watch the film for £1 on Journeyman’s website, click here

RIP: Margarita Civuncik, 23 June 2009

We received the sad news in late July that one of the survivors we had interviewed for this project, Margarita Civuncik, had passed away on 23 June 2009. Our condolences and prayers are with her family.

Margarita's life is a testimony to the courage of those who did not give in nor give up but found the strength and determination to persevere despite the odds.



Margarita was born Rita Tsives. She was the sixth child in a family of seven siblings. Together with the rest of her family, she was interned at Minsk ghetto and later forced into the streets during a pogrom, where convinced they would be killed, she escaped with her small daughter. She changed her name, forged identity documents, and fled, moving from village to village for the duration of the war, sometimes working, sometimes hiding, sometimes depending on the kindness of strangers. She found herself in Vilnius when the war ended and made it her home.

Her incredible experiences were recorded in her unpublished memoirs and the many poems she wrote for her children and grandchildren. Her family were her pride; she especially pointed out to us how they were a multicultural, multinational family - she told us: "The most important thing is to respect each other. It doesn’t matter what nationality a person is. I am against genocide. It is terrible… people against people. In my family, we are a mixture. We have become an international family, Lithuanian, Russian, Polish..."

We salute the amazing person Margarita was and the life she led. We are thankful for her generosity in telling us her story. The memories she shared, the gifts she gave us, her photos... these will be presented in the Surviving History: Portraits from Vilna exhibition, opening in Vilnius on 10th September 2009. We are honoured to have met Margarita, to be entrusted with passing on her experiences and the lessons she shared with us.

We salute an incredible woman, survivor, mother, grandmother.

Limmud Day, Brighton, 29 March 2009

Shivaun and I turned up at this year's Limmud Day. The event was sold out well in advance and the number and variety of presenters were formidable. We kinda squeaked in when Shivaun spoke to the organisers a few weeks before the event, and were, quite last minute, assigned a slot to show our 30-minute documentary Surviving History and for Shivaun to give a presentation. She spoke briefly about her research project and gave a short talk on the history of Jews in Lithuania, trying to squish hundreds of years of history into a 20-minute session. The room was packed and people drifted in well after the talk had started and there was only standing room available. It was very touching to hear afterwards that some had been moved to tears, another said, "I could have listened all day," as he had found it fascinating. Most of the audience, like those we had met at the talk at AJR in February this year, commented that much less is known about East European Jewish experience, on account of the Iron Curtain and decades of Soviet rule; so for them, this was quite revelatory. Which kinda sealed it for us, that despite the fact that much has been written and discussed about the Holocaust, there is room for much more, especially when it comes to personal experience and recollection, which are unique to the individual. Kinda like finding the particular within the universal; the human and the individual within the historical.

Then we squished in to hear Julie Birchell speak. I don't know anything about her, but she seemed very popular; the room was literally bursting at the seams. Her comments both shocked me as well as touched me. (You can read a bit about the session here.) Later I got the rundown and realised why she was so well known, she is, as she herself claims, to be a 'philo-semitic'. Which left me wondering whether one needs to take an extreme stand in order to be heard? If you are quite objective and empathetic, do you come across as a fence-sitter, and will others ride roughshod over your opinions? I still haven't come to a conclusion...

Why telling stories about genocide matters...

Today, I read on The Economist, the obituary of Alison Des Forges. It is titled "a witness to genocide." About Rwanda. To me, her life is a testament to why telling stories about genocide, mass murder, even historical ones, matter. Recently, I was at the University of Sussex for Holocaust Memorial Day. The speakers spoke of genocide episodes that have taken place globally. The Holocaust is an epitaph, a monument, a symbolic reminder of democide, killings meted out as state policy. "We must never forget." That is the supreme message we must learn from the Holocaust, as so many of those who shared their stories with us have told us. However, we must have, we must be ignorant of the lessons, or it has not sunk deep enough. To read about Alison, click here.

If you think ignorance, blind hatred and narrowmindedness is a thing of the past, think again

I haven't been surfing YouTube for a while, so after I had logged in, I was surprised to see that there was a comment left on one of the video clips I had posted. This was a short 3 minute segment of an interview with Gita, who had survived the liquidation of the Glubokoe ghetto.

The comment was "Bloody jews...." (see picture below; click to enlarge)



I'm not sure how I feel seeing this comment. A mixture of surprise, horror, shock, annoyance but mostly disappointment. I can appreciate that we live in a relatively free world where people can and should be allowed to express their views. But was it really necessary for this ignoramus to defile the site by leaving a comment on it? I guess I shouldn't have expected much from someone who chooses the username of Panzerfaust.

After much thought, I have decided to leave the comment as it is. As a warning to others and a confirmation that dangerous elements remain prevalent today. It also proves to me that this project's topic remains relevant, why Holocaust survivor testimonials deserve to be told and retold and retold again. Stupidity and ignorance transcends time. Surely genocide awareness and Holocaust memory should as well.