Follow the English signs to this elegant baroque city's Museum of Genocide Victims and you reach a massive building resembling a respectable prewar bank. Every granite block on the facade's lower section now bears an engraved Lithuanian name, plus a year of birth and, judging from the dates, a premature death.

During almost 50 years of Soviet occupation this was where Stalin's secret police, the NKVD, and its successor until 1990, the KGB, held sway. The high-ceiling rooms tell a terrible story of executions and deportations to Siberia. A recording of a steam train chuffs softly beside photos of prisoners wrapped in felt jackets and children sitting bleakly outside wooden huts. Corpses caug...

Follow the English signs to this elegant baroque city's Museum of Genocide Victims and you reach a massive building resembling a respectable prewar bank. Every granite block on the facade's lower section now bears an engraved Lithuanian name, plus a year of birth and, judging from the dates, a premature death.

During almost 50 years of Soviet occupation this was where Stalin's secret police, the NKVD, and its successor until 1990, the KGB, held sway. The high-ceiling rooms tell a terrible story of executions and deportations to Siberia. A recording of a steam train chuffs softly beside photos of prisoners wrapped in felt jackets and children sitting bleakly outside wooden huts. Corpses caught by a ghoulish camera lie in the woods.

But as I moved from room to dismal room, I had a growing sense something was missing. Vilnius was once known as the Jerusalem of the North. What about the Jews? Did their fate not merit remembrance? In a corridor I eventually found a placard with a brief, though telling, mention. It gave estimates for the victims of Lithuania's Soviet occupation and of the Nazi one as well. The number summarily shot, or who died in prison and during deportation in the Soviet period, reached 74,500. During three years of Nazi rule from June 1941, those killed amounted to 240,000, "including about 200,000 Jews".

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Photo's like these are always depressing. For me, the fact that humans are capable of such horrendous acts always begs the question, "What are we?"

A year later the war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties. It destroyed not only the beauty of the countrysides through which it passed and the works of art which it met in its path but also shattered our pride in the achievements of civilization, our admiration for many philosophers and artists and our hopes for a final triumph over the differences between nations and races. It tarnished the lofty impartiality of science, it revealed our instincts in all their nakedness and let loose the evil spirits within us which we thought had be...

Photo's like these are always depressing. For me, the fact that humans are capable of such horrendous acts always begs the question, "What are we?"

A year later the war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties. It destroyed not only the beauty of the countrysides through which it passed and the works of art which it met in its path but also shattered our pride in the achievements of civilization, our admiration for many philosophers and artists and our hopes for a final triumph over the differences between nations and races. It tarnished the lofty impartiality of science, it revealed our instincts in all their nakedness and let loose the evil spirits within us which we thought had been tamed for ever by centuries of continuous education by the noblest minds. It made our country small again and made the rest of the world far remote. It robbed us of very much that we had loved, and showed us how ephemeral were many things that we regarded as changeless.

On Transience
Sigmund Freud