A Lithuanian visit to the POLIN museum holocaust gallery

ENIn April 2015, in conjunction with activities commemorating the Shoah, an International Conference on Holocaust Education convened in Vilnius. A presentation by Piotr Kowalik about the exhibits of the POLIN Museum raised some questions. Could there be a model here for something similar in Lithuania? What perspectives would the Warsaw museum’s Holocaust Gallery unlock for contemporary Lithuanians that would provide an insight into their own past? Discussing such questions is a highly subjective enterprise. No visitor to a museum arrives as an empty vessel. Everyone brings the filter of his or her expectations, suppositions, prejudices, as well as collective memories incul-cated through family histories, social media, or the educational system. Visitors arrive with emotional and perceptional baggage. Discussing this is a highly sub-jective enterprise, and requires some assumptions. I suspect that the Lithuanian visitor will carry more of this luggage than most, especially in traversing the Holocaust Gallery. Over the past decade, Lithuania’s International Historical Commission, charged with investigating the crimes of foreign occupiers and their collaborators, has sent more than three hundred teachers to Holocaust education programs at Yad Vashem, Auschwitz, and most recently, to POLIN. What might the gallery reveal to them about the Holocaust that would relate to their own experiences? Let us assume that the Lithuanian visitor is a person of average education, possessing an interest in the past (otherwise why go to a museum?), and having some knowledge of modern history. When I speak of Lithuanian perspectives on the Holocaust, I mean primarily the manner in which non-Jewish Lithuanians relate to the Shoah, not only in academia, but in the society’s collective memory and understanding as well.