I know what he means on one level, coming here, I was well aware of its hideous Holocaust past. All the city's residents were forced into a ghetto and then killed in that ghetto. And then for good measure, the Nazis shipped another 25,000 Jews in from Lithuania and Poland and then *they* were killed.
There's a concentration camp tour right outside of town. Tonight, we ate dinner at kosher restaurant. It was a cozy place, but right behind the counter was a "Latvian Jewish Cemetery Guide" and a map of "Jewish Life in Holocaust era Latvia."
Here's the restaurant
The depressing point is this: you can't come to eastern Europe and not contemplate the miserably difficult truth. So we may be done for awhile. Not sure I'm really up for seeing the same scene in Ukraine.
Sorry to go so dark on a beautiful spring day, but the past here is inescapable.
2 comments:
It is everywhere in Eastern Europe . . . outside Vienna are camps. The Jewish cemeteries in Prague. Bratislava's synagogue was destroyed to make way for a hideous bridge. Yesterday we took a day trip from Moscow to Dmitrov and heard all about Stalin's atrocities building the canal system and the Moscow metro . . . not Shoah, but genocide nonetheless. I never made it to Poland because I didn't have the strength to visit Auschwitz.
Yes, I gave up going to Lithuania because it got to be too much.
BTW -Loved your blog on the 1945 posters all over town - now I don't have to go take the photos 'cause you did it for me.
Once again, feel like we're leading parallel lives in Moscow..
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