Troutworthy's Travel Blog: Kaunas

The Neris flows into the Nemunas at sunset.

More than twenty years ago, as an eighteen-year-old in 2003, I followed a lush carpet of green grass through the trees and into a clearing. Birds were singing, and the early autumn sun shone upon the scene with barely a cloud in the sky. In the centre of that clearing was a squat, red-brick cuboid that nature was doing its best to reclaim.

That building was a gas chamber where hundreds had been murdered, and I was a visitor at what remained of Dachau concentration camp.

It seems to be my luck that I get to visit the most nightmarish places on earth on the most achingly beautiful days imaginable. Today, after a winding bus journey to an unremarkable suburb of Kaunas, I make my way through a narrow concrete underpass to the city's Ninth Fort.

The fort.

Built as part of a system of fortifications in the early twentieth century, the site proved utterly useless for this purpose, and was taken by the Soviets within a couple of days. Today it is best known for being a prison and site of mass extermination of Jews during the Nazi occupation, the most horrifying of all such sites within Lithuania, its centripetal death-pull drawing in the doomed from as far away as France and Austria.

The fort sits atop a gentle rise. Though it's a low, ugly building, the site is monumental: the visitor centre, car parks, memorials, and the fort itself are laid out on a swathe of grassland punctuated by old, silent trees. The sky is a limpid blue, though there is a little mist on the grass. The focal point is not the fort itself but the dreadful, breathtaking memorial sculpture by Ambraziūnas, evoking something between a ruined power station and the clawed, desperate hands of a titanic buried humanoid, reaching a hundred feet up into that sky as if trying to grasp the winter sun. Perhaps an avatar of empathy or suchlike, whose time has passed.

Memorial.

The horror of the place can't really be put into words. Tens of thousands died here, this we know; but numbers also seem unable to capture what the place connotes (“Ninth Fort”, just one fort among many). When they burned the bodies, the heat was so fierce that glass began to melt. In one of the cells there's an exhibition where several people who narrowly escaped genocides across the world are quoted as saying the same thing: when you emerge from such a place, it's not always clear whether you really survived or are instead experiencing a different form of death.

The Japanese vice-consul at the time, Chiune Sugihara, helped thousands of Jews flee Lithuania in 1940 by writing exit visas for them, in defiance of protocol. Reportedly, he was still writing them until the moment his train departed (the consulate having been closed down). Even a bureaucrat can be a hero. Would I have the backbone to do something like this, if in a position to? More likely I'd take to Twitter to register my displeasure in a dry QT – if that. I hope that's not the case, obviously, but the atmosphere of this place isn't conducive to positivity.

After a while I head back into town. Kaunas is Lithuania's second city, but the small, quiet Old Town doesn't make it feel like a settlement with a population of three hundred thousand. I realize later that the heart of the modern city is elsewhere. Can't blame its inhabitants for wanting a clean break from the past. Unlike Vilnius, Kaunas is fairly geographically central in Lithuania. It lies at the confluence of the rivers Neris and Nemunas. These two rivers have quite different characters: the Neris brings hundreds of ice floes from Belarus via Vilnius, depositing them in the more sluggish Nemunas for transport to the Baltic. I walk to the end of the long spit of land that separates them and take in the view.