Kaunas

What a lovely and relaxing weekend! On Saturday morning, we took a train to Kaunas (formerly Kovno), the second largest city in Lithuania. We stayed in a lovely guesthouse, and rather than visiting lots of museums and churches, we spent our time wandering the city's beautiful pedestrian street (the longest in Eastern Europe), enjoying cafes, and admiring the two rivers that converge in Kaunas. We did stop in on one museum on Saturday, the devil museum. This is a three story museum containing about 2,000 devils of many different colors and materials, originating all over the world. There were a variety of perspectives on the devil as a benign trickster and as a dangerous evildoer. I was surprised by how rich the ethnographic and artistic content of this museum actually was - I anticipated something silly, along the lines of a haunted house, but this museum was quite informative and opened up a world of suoerstition, fear, and a sense of personal closenes to mysterious forces that was quite striking.
On Sunday morning we had anticipated meeting our group from the Vilnius Yiddish Institute to do a tour of Jewish Kaunas, but as we waited by the Old Jewish Cemetary, our group never came - we think perhaps this was due to the very strong storm that occured the previous night, which felled many trees along the roads and cut off many power and telephone lines. In any case, we visited the cemetary ourselves (pictures are on the site with the rest of our Vilnius pictures). After World War II, many of the gravestones were torn from this cemetary and used in construction. Toward the back of the cemetary however, one could find fallen over and overgrown tombstones dating back as far as a hundred years. On our way to the train station, we stopped at the Sugihara House, a museum at the former Japanese consulate, where Chiune Sugihara and his family once lived. Chiune Sugihara (1900-1986) was the Japanese Vice Consul to Lithuania in Kaunas for a brief period between 1939 and 1940. Together with the acting Dutch Consul Jan Zwartendijk he saved thousands of Jews over s short three-week period in 1940 by issuing visas against orders to get them out of what was at the time Soviet-occupied Lithuania and away to safety and a new life. The museum was small but quite informative, and we were glad to have the releif of a tale of honor, bravery, and survival in the midst of all of the gruesome death we so often learn about in association with the Holocaust.
We made our way home via train, and are glad to be going back to school this morning!