Rachel Kostanian
Rachel Kostanian was born 31st of January 1930 in Šiauliai, Lithuania, as a Jew. When Nazi Germany and Soviet Union concluded the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact on 23 August 1939, Hitler felt encouraged to start WWII; Lithuania was initially assigned to the German sphere of influence but was later by a secret protocol transferred to the Soviet sphere. After the Germans attacked Poland, the Soviets followed semi-constitutional procedures for transforming independent Baltics countries into soviet republics.
Germany controlled practically all of Europe, and the US and GB let Germany start the 2nd phase of WWII on June 22nd 1941, Operation Barbarossa: A surprise offensive into the Baltic region, Moscow and Ukraine, with the ultimate goal of ending the 1941 campaign near the Arkhangelsk-Astrakhan line, from the Caspian to the White Seas. Hitler's objectives were to eliminate the Soviet Union, exterminate Communism, generate Lebensraum ("living space"), enslaving the native population and guarantee access to the strategic resources needed to defeat Germany's remaining rivals. With the Nazis rapidly advancing and the Soviet army in chaotic retreat, fascist, pro-Nazi Lithuanian nationalists, many affiliated with the LAF (Lithuanian Activist Front) wearing white armbands, started butchering Jewish neighbors, including aged rabbis, children and women, in dozens of locations starting on the 23rd of June and extending to the variable number of days before German forces arrived and established control at any given location. A lecture by the leading scholar on the Holocaust in Lithuania, Christoph Dieckmann, explains details. Plunder, rape, humiliation, taunts of imminent genocide, and beatings were widespread - that was the beginning of the Shoah. Rachel Kostanian survived the Shoah at age 11, fleeing together with her mother and the Sowjets eastwards to Russia, (her father was killed during his own attempt to flee, which Kostanian learned only after the end of the war). Kostanian came back to Lithuania and, after Gorbachov took over, was allowed to create the Jewish Cultural Society. This gave her the possibility to collect material for an exhibition. That exhibition transformed later into a museum (in a wooden place) called the GREEN HOUSE, previously dedicated to the history of local Communism. Kostanian's "Green House" finally opened in 1991. Responsible were two Rachels (Margolis and Kostanian) and also some other elderly survivor women like Jenny Biber and "the Partisan" Fania Brantsovsky. They were allowed to teach about the Holocaust from the survivors' perspective. E. Zingeris ensured modest state funding, while much bigger founding went to the official and much larger "Genocide Museum" tasked to strengthen the narrative of Lithuania's repression under Sowjet rule - considered genocidal in Lithuania. Preserving a place for the very painful truth about the massive local Holocaust collaboration became more difficult after Lithuania's independence, with a desire to describe Lithuanians as victims only. Rachel Kostanian invested decades of energy into promotion and advancement of education, research and remembrance of the Holocaust, opposing revisionism and all attempts to recast local perpetrators as nationalist heroes, often at great personal cost. Two documentaries and her 2015 interview by Dovid Katz highlight this: "Rewriting History" and “Lisa ruft!”. Kostanian got repeated western Ambassadorial support and finally won for her lifetime achievements the distinction of the Federal Cross of Merit on Ribbon by the German Federal President, on February 9th, 2021. Representing the Federal President who signed the commendation, Andreas Görgen, Head of the Directorate-General for Culture and Communication of the Federal Foreign Office, delivered the Order in private, due to the pandemic, at her residence in Berlin, where she retired to live with her son in recent years.
Germany chaired the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and strengthened it by the Berlin Declaration dated July 7th 2020 "against attempts to rehabilitate the accomplices of the Holocaust" and by a chair statement regarding the suing of holocaust researchers.
In 1996, together with Salomonas Atamukas, she published a history of the Jewish Museum in Vilnius. In 2002, her monograph Spiritual Resistance in the Vilna Ghetto appeared with a preface by Sir Martin Gilbert. A collection of posters produced in the ghetto appeared under the title Vilna Ghetto Posters (1999 and 2006). In Germany, her new country of residence, she continued to work as a educator, giving talks, for example, with the Stanislaw Hantz Bildungswerk, which made her book "The Spiritual Resistance in the Vilna Ghetto" available again for some time.
Kostanian's efforts to revive the Lithuanian-Jewish symbiosis in the years of perestroika are all the more valuable, as soon after independence anti-Semitic tones became louder and it became more difficult to maintain personal integrity in times of geopolitical escalation. Rachel Kostanian spoke for those who feel hurt when anti-Semites who promoted a "Jew-free Lithuania" - like Noreika, Skirpa and Luksa - are honored as heroes of anti-Soviet resistance.
Dovid Katz on Kostanian's decoration: "For three decades, Rachel Kostanian played a unique and inspiring role in Holocaust remembrance and education, while becoming an important figure in the struggle to interpret history during a period of revisionism that engulfed much of post-Soviet Eastern Europe. With youthful vigour and unflinching, unhurried persistence, she built the Green House Museum, Lithuania's only authentic Holocaust museum, into a local and international address of knowledge, learning, and reflection. Even when she had to fight waves of revisionism, and not infrequently became a target herself, she would not be dissuaded from her mission to educate the thousands of Lithuanian schoolchildren who visited the museum, and thousands more visitors from all parts of the world. She insisted on a room devoted exclusively to pre-war Yiddish civilization, both religious and secular of Lithuanian Jewry, for her a necessary component of any Holocaust museum. As long as they were still with us, Vilnius survivors would gather there for a cup of coffee, allowing visitors to receive direct intimate accounts and replies. Much of Rachel's work — publications, exhibitions, films, recorded tours and lectures — urgently needs to be collected and preserved for future generations. And as for me personally, I never forget that she was my first teacher and mentor in the defense of history."
Lukas Welz Head of the German Chapter of Amcha (Hebrew for: Your People) for psychosocial, non-material and preventive help for Holocaust survivors and their descendants on Kostanian's decoration: "Rachel Kostanian sought out and found, collected and preserved evidence of earlier Jewish life in Lithuania, made available important sources on the Shoah and Jewish Vilnius and Lithuania. In the post-Soviet period, when Jewish identity was allowed to become visible again, she promoted recognition of the fate of other survivors of the Shoah in Lithuania. For decades, her work has contributed significantly to a deeper understanding of the Shoah in Lithuania in all its facets, and her work has encouraged Jews, fellow survivors and descendants to come to terms with their Jewish identity in a stronger and more self-confident way. This award in a time of increasing relativization and denial of the Shoah not only honours Kostanian's work. It also sends a clear message about the need for self-critical engagement with the Shoah across generations."
References[edit]
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