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By SHIRA LI BARTOV<\/p>\n
R\u016bdninkai, LITHUANIA \u2014 Deep in the trees and swampy thickets of Lithuania\u2019s R\u016bdninkai Forest, a series of makeshift forts is sinking into the earth.<\/p>\n
These represent the remains of underground bunkers where Jewish partisans resisted their annihilation in the Holocaust. Under German occupation, some 400 Jews escaped the Vilnius ghetto to this forest and organized attacks against the Nazis.<\/p>\n
After World War II, the story of these partisans was folded into Soviet propaganda, leaving a shroud of mystery over the bunkers. Now, construction of a new German military base in the area is throwing into question the fate of the forts \u2014 and the memory of their fighters.<\/p>\n
Jewish former partisans and their descendants have traveled for decades to visit the bunkers, which mark the only memorial to their resistance in Lithuania. But in recent months, new obstacles have appeared: Signs forbidding entry and demarcating a \u201cdangerous area\u201d are installed on the road to the forest and pinned on trees approaching the forts.<\/p>\n
Lithuania is nearing the final stage of constructing a military base for German troops in R\u016bdninkai Forest, nestled about 27 miles south of Vilnius. The training ground near the former partisan camps was planned after Russia\u2019s 2022 invasion of Ukraine to shore up NATO\u2019s eastern flank. Strategically located some 12 miles from the border with Moscow-allied Belarus and east of Russia\u2019s Kaliningrad exclave, the troops will be Germany\u2019s first permanent deployment abroad since World War II. About 5,000 German soldiers will begin arriving this fall.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou cannot easily find the forts, so those who know how to get there, we just go,\u201d Au\u0161ra Mikulskien\u0117, a Jewish history tour guide from Vilnius, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. \u201cBut now, there are \u2018don\u2019t enter\u2019 stickers and stop signs. It\u2019s becoming impossible to get there because they are closing all of the forest.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mikulskien\u0117 has brought the children and grandchildren of Jewish partisans to R\u016bdninkai for 10 years. They need her guidance to find eight standing forts, covered in logs and soil, which are not marked on maps and GPS systems. In such remote corners of the forest, partisans planned to ambush their enemies, lay explosives on German trains and equipment and sabotage telephone lines and infrastructure in Vilnius.<\/p>\n
The bunkers are not protected by the Lithuanian government as cultural heritage sites, and they have deteriorated over years of neglect. But as the German base is completed and military training begins, Mikulskien\u0117 worries that prohibitory signs related to construction will turn into more serious barriers to the forts, and visitors could lose access altogether.<\/p>\n
Twists of history over decades plunged the forts into obscurity. Lithuania was occupied from 1944 to 1990 by the Soviet Union, which honored hundreds of Soviet partisans who went to R\u016bdninkai Forest to battle the Germans. The Jewish partisans who joined them, and who helped Russian forces liberate Vilnius from the Nazis in 1944, were not part of this narrative.<\/p>\n
The Lithuanian Soviet Republic, or Lithuanian SSR, began to commemorate Soviet partisans on the site of the R\u016bdninkai forts in the 1970s. Soviet and Jewish fighters only had access to wood and soil to build their bunkers. But the forts standing today are reinforced with concrete, an indication that the Soviet government fortified the structures to serve as memorials, said Mikulskien\u0117. She remembers visiting the site on a school trip in the 1980s and listening to lessons about how the forebears of Soviet citizens resisted the fascists.<\/p>\n
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, researchers have debated how much of the structures is original, and how much was reconstructed by the Soviet government for propaganda purposes. The first sign memorializing Jews was installed in the area by Bildungswerk Stanis\u0142aw Hantz, a German educational group, in 2024. A small silver plaque reads, \u201cIn memory of the Jewish partisans who fought out of these forests against the Nazi occupiers and their helpers.\u201d<\/p>\n
The legacy of the forts \u2014 and the memory of Jewish partisans \u2014 is now mired in Lithuania\u2019s repudiation of its Soviet past. Thousands of Lithuanian intellectuals, dissidents and other citizens were arrested, deported to Gulags and executed under Soviet rule. Once Lithuania gained independence in 1990, the stench of Soviet repression overpowered that of the Nazi occupation for many Lithuanians.<\/p>\n
Lithuania was for centuries a center of rich Jewish thought, religious life and secular culture; Vilna, as the capital was known in Yiddish, was nicknamed the \u201cJerusalem of the North.\u201d But after more than 90% of Lithuanian Jews were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators, few remained to commemorate the Holocaust.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe collective memory of Lithuanians basically sees only one occupation: the Soviet occupation,\u201d said Ilya Lempertas, a researcher and editor of books on the Holocaust in Lithuania. \u201cSoviet partisans, in Lithuanian memory, are those who deported Lithuanians to Siberia.\u201d<\/p>\n
That means the Jewish partisans of R\u016bdninkai Forest are often viewed not as heroes, but as traitors, according to Mikulskien\u0117. \u201cThey are not considered as fighting against Nazis, these Jews,\u201d she said. \u201cThey are considered to be fighting with the Soviets.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fania Brantsovsky, the last living Jewish resistance fighter of R\u016bdninkai Forest, died in 2024 at 102. She joined a Jewish partisan unit under the command of the writer Abba Kovner, known as the Nokmim, or Avengers. On Sept. 23, 1943, the same night she was smuggled out of the Vilnius ghetto, the Nazis began their final liquidation of the ghetto. None of her family survived.<\/p>\n
Brantsovsky led tours to the forest bunkers in the 2000s. Until her death, she advocated for the structures to be preserved and protected as a site of learning about the Jewish partisans\u2019 struggle.<\/p>\n
Dovid Katz, a Brooklyn-born, Vilnius-based scholar of Yiddish and the Holocaust who runs the online journal \u201cDefending History,\u201d was a friend of Brantsovsky\u2019s. \u201cHer one last request was, \u2018Dovid, please, never stop reminding Jews around the world to speak up for the existence of the forts,\u2019\u201d said Katz. \u201c\u2018Let our grandchildren be able to come to this place in the forest and see wooden forts in the ground, which were the only postwar physical remnant of Jewish resistance.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Germany\u2019s federal government has signaled that it will not disturb the site. In response to a parliamentary inquiry, the Bundestag announced in July that it was \u201ccommitted to preserving the former World War II partisan camp in R\u016bdninkai Forest, located on the training grounds of Panzer Brigade 45 stationed in Lithuania, as a place of learning and remembrance.\u201d<\/p>\n
The government added that the former partisan bunkers were not part of Germany\u2019s training facilities and would not be affected by construction, but it was in Lithuania\u2019s hands to manage the site\u2019s preservation and access.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Lithuanian government has been asked to examine whether the area in question merits protection and to take this into account in further planning,\u201d said the Bundestag.<\/p>\n
Lithuania\u2019s Ministry of Culture told JTA that the bunkers do not have protected status as cultural heritage sites because they \u201care not authentic and are not located at their original sites.\u201d Instead of being linked to Jewish fighters, the ministry said the forts were \u201cassociated with Soviet partisans.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDuring the Soviet era, they were included in the list of historical monuments of the Lithuanian SSR, while a significant proportion of such \u2018monuments\u2019 were intended to reinforce Soviet ideology and historical narratives,\u201d the ministry said in a statement.<\/p>\n
The area will be maintained in the future with an information board installed nearby, according to the ministry, which said the content of that information has yet to be decided. Visiting the forts won\u2019t be prohibited altogether, but those who wish to go will have to comply with military rules and obtain advance approval from the R\u016bdninkai Training Area Command, the ministry said.<\/p>\n
Katz believes nationalist factions in the Lithuanian government are revising the history of a site that hosts genuine remnants of Jewish bunkers. He views the government\u2019s resistance to protecting the site as an outgrowth of the \u201cdouble genocide\u201d theory, a nationalist narrative that emerged in Lithuania after the fall of the Soviet Union. This theory equates World War II atrocities committed by the Soviets, who occupied Lithuania in 1940-1941 following a non-aggression pact between Stalin and Hitler, with those of the Nazis, who took control after Hitler broke the agreement and invaded the Soviet Union. (The Soviets reoccupied Lithuania in 1944.)<\/p>\n
In this framework, the Soviets committed genocide against Lithuanians through mass deportations \u2014 with the complicity, some add, of Jewish communists \u2014 and only afterwards came the killing of Jews by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Soviets and their Jewish friends, as the narrative has it, committed the first genocide, and then came the reaction, the tragic second genocide,\u201d which was the Holocaust, said Katz.<\/p>\n
The equating of Soviet deportations with the Holocaust has been widely rejected by international scholars and Jewish institutions. The Soviet regime deported some 17,500 Lithuanians in 1941 to remote parts of Siberia and northern Russia. While individual Lithuanian Jews served in the Soviet administration, Jews were also disproportionately targeted in the deportations.<\/p>\n
Lempertas, who like Katz is Jewish, does not believe the forts standing in R\u016bdninkai Forest include genuine remains of Jewish partisan bunkers. He supports the government\u2019s view that the structures were built entirely as Soviet propaganda \u2014 but even so, he believes they should be protected.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has to be saved, from my point of view, for those who are coming there because of family,\u201d said Lempertas. \u201cIt serves as an exhibition.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mikulskien\u0117 said the forts are deeply important to the families of Jewish fighters. She watches visitors stand before them, recite memories of war and sing partisan songs passed down through generations.<\/p>\n
Yet in recent years, as Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine sparked security threats and surging anti-Russian sentiment in Lithuania, Mikulskien\u0117 has found it increasingly difficult to advocate for the memory of Jews who fought alongside Soviets.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou are seen as a follower of Soviet propaganda, and also now Putin\u2019s propaganda,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s a bit dangerous, being this person in Lithuania.\u201d<\/p>\n
Anna Avidan, who was born in Vilnius to Holocaust survivors and founded the Jewish history nonprofit Jerusalem of the North, said the bunkers should be treated as a memorial site with educational opportunities.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is a strong stereotype here that Jews were communists and they deserved the killings \u2014 this simplified worldview,\u201d she said. Dispelling such stereotypes \u201cis a good case for explaining why it has to be commemorated.\u201d<\/p>\n
One the eve of World War II, about 4 in 10 people in Vilnius were Jewish. But decades after the end of the Soviet Union, Avidan said the city has yet to fully recognize the Jewish world that vanished from Lithuania\u2019s cities, towns and forests.<\/p>\n
\u201cLithuania has been independent for more than 35 years already,\u201d said Avidan. \u201cStill, we have no clear memorial in this city to the victims of the Holocaust, and for me, that\u2019s a message.\u201d<\/p>\n