Seite - 31 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Band 4/2018

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 4 2o18 Katy Beinart | Khlebosolny/Bread and Salt 31 Kerterz (1921) of a blind gypsy violinist being led by a boy along a dirt road, he recognized “the straggling villages I passed through on my long ago travels in Hungary and Rumania”.49 The photograph of the women and their babies in the museum seemed in a horrible way to connect to the family photographs in my archive. In a family archive, a scene of a woman holding a baby might be a photograph that marks a happy point in their lives and the start of a new generation; but instead this photograph is a point of final departure, from which there is no return. More than the list, or the places I have visited on the trip, this image stays with me as knowledge of what our family avoided by leaving. Later, I found a reference in ‘Out of the Depths’,50 a document that lists members of the Lithuanian Yeshiva (religious schools) who were killed during the Holocaust, to a Shimon Leib Beinart who died, aged 20, in Panevezys, one of the sites listed in Jaeger’s report, in August or September 1941. He was born around the same time as my grandfather and his brothers. That my grandfather grew up in South Africa, and went on to become an anglophone Professor of Law in Cape Town, now seems to be an amazing feat of escape, one dependent on his father Woolf’s decision to migrate. As we continued our journey, it became clear that the ownership of the tragedy of the Holo- caust was a complex issue in Lithuania. The culpability of the Lithuanians who had aided the Nazi Einsatzgruppen in mass murder was often sidelined in favour of a narrative that tells of the genocide of Lithuanian people carried out by the Nazis during the war. The narrative continues with how the oppression carried out by the Soviets during the Russian occupation of Lithuania was felt by Lithuanians, rather than by the Jewish community specifically. Many Lithuanians were deported and, it is claimed, thousands were killed under the Soviet occupation.51 This is now much emphasized in national history, and, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, it feeds into a narrative of Lithuanian nationalism and identity.52 But perhaps because of Lithuanian collaboration, and the lack of a Jewish presence after the war, the voice of the Jewish community has been silenced. Rokiskis Museum is a regional museum, housed in a former country manor and estate at the edge of the town. The museum emphasizes the oppression of Lithuanians by the Russians and the uprisings of Lithuanian nationalists.53 There is little information provided about the Jewish families who constituted over half the population of the town before the Second World War and who had lived there since the eighteenth century.54 However, one of the historians at 49 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 45. 50 Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, ‘Out of the Depths (translation from Mima’amakim, published in New York, 1959)’, trans. Yocheved Klausner, p. 282; available from the JewishGen website, <http://www.jewishgen.org/Yizkor/ lithuania7/Lithuania7.html#TOC> [accessed 13 July 2017]. 51 See, for example, Dalia Kuodytė, a Member of the Lithuanian Parliament and former Director General of the Centre of Genocide and Resistance (LGGRTC), ‘The tragic story of one third of Lithuania’s population became victims of Soviet terror’, Vilnews website, <http://vilnews.com/2010-12-the-tragic-story-of-how-one-third-of- lithuania’s-population-became-victims-of-soviet-terror> [accessed 20 December 2017]. 52 Daniel Brook, ‘Double genocide’, Slate, 26 July 2015, <http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/his- tory/2015/07/lithuania_and_nazis_the_country_wants_to_forget_its_collaborationist_past.html> [accessed 13 July 2017]; Timothy Snyder, ‘Neglecting the Lithuanian Holocaust’, New York Review of Books, 25 July 2011, <http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2011/07/25/neglecting-lithuanian-holocaust> [accessed 13 July 2017]. 53 Museum text, Rokiskis Museum. 54 Raphael Julius, ‘Rokishok’ (translation of ‘Rokishok’, a chapter from Pinkas Hakehillot Lita) in Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities in Lithuania (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1996), available from <http://www.jewishgen.org/ yizkor/pinkas_lita/lit_00646.html> [accessed 13 July 2017].