Media

   Lithuanian re-enactment replays pains of Soviet past
   by Marielle Vitureau
    NAUJASODE, Lithuania, March 10, 2010 (AFP) - When they arrive in the snow-bound forest, they face guards screaming orders at them in Russian and goading them with snarling dogs.
   Crammed into a van, they have no idea where they are going.
   That was the scene at a former Soviet bunker at Naujasode, 25 kilometres (15 miles) from the Lithuanian capital Vilnius.
   Fortunately for these captives, this is 2010, not 1950: the guards were actors and the deportees, student volunteers.
   For as Lithuania remembers its 1990 secession from the Soviet Union, one group has found a way to give the new generation of Europeans a stark reminder of the horrors of the communist past.
   Hundreds of exchange students from across Europe have volunteered to take part in gruelling re-enactments of the mass deportations, which in the 1940s and 1950s spared few Lithuanian families.
   "The majority of European aren't aware of the atrocities of Stalin's regime," said organiser Ruta Vanagaite.
   But the Soviet dictator's brutality is branded into the memory of Lithuanians.
   For three hours, students in Lithuania under the European Union-wide Erasmus exchange programme get a taste of life in that time of terror: the screaming guards, the snarling dogs -- and the van taking them who knows where.
   "It seems to me that if more and more people experience what deportation meant, then there's more chance that history won't be repeated," said Vanagaite, whose project is funded by the EU which Lithuania joined in 2004.
   She has a personal score to settle, she said.
   Her grandfather died in Siberia after being sent there for ripping up a portrait of Stalin in 1941.
   The rough welcome for the students at a recent re-enactment set the tone.
   To give them just an inkling of the back-breaking slave labour the Soviets forced the deportees to do, they were put to work.
   "You become an object," said Sabine Loewenstein of Belgium, shovelling snow.
   "We're not human beings any more. If we resist, we don't know what they'll do to us, so no-one says anything."
   After arriving in Vilnius two weeks ago to study business management, she decided to join a re-enactment to try get a better understanding of what the locals lived through.
   The guards at times flipped out of their roles -- which included interrogating and humiliating the prisoners -- to give hair-raising facts about Lithuania's years under the Soviets.
   "I play one of the guards watching these young deportees," said actor Irmantas Jautaitis.
   It's tough for me too to put them through this, because it's a tragic part of our history," he added.
   "I don't think these young people think this is only a game."
   Lithuania was seized by the Soviet Union during World War II under a 1939 deal with Nazi Germany. It became a battleground when the Berlin-Moscow pact collapsed in 1941, before the Red Army drove out the Nazis in 1944.
   The Nazis wiped out over 90 percent of Lithuania's once-flourishing Jewish community of 220,000 Jews, aided by Lithuanian collaborators.
   The Soviets brought their own form of brutality as they sought to crush real and imagined opposition.
   Some 360,000 Lithuanians were jailed, killed or deported to the gulags of Siberia and central Asia in the 1940s and 1950s.
   In later decades, lower-level repression became the norm.
   Lithuania declared independence in March 11, 1990, becoming the first Soviet republic to secede.
   In a last gasp, the Soviets launched a failed crackdown in January 1991, killing 14 civilians. Lithuania finally won recognition later that year as the bloc crumbled.
   At Naujasode, Lithuanian student Vaiva Maslauskaite was forced to sign a blank page which her interrogators then filled in with her "crimes".
   "Psychologically, it's tough," she said.
   "The soldiers shout the whole time. You sign the paper, and that decides your whole life, there's no going back. It really hit me emotionally."
   Dane Britta Knudsen, who researches how tourism can deal with past pains, also took part.
   "You forget this experience far slower than if you'd seen a museum or read a book about it," she said.