---

FILM | ARTS | OPINION | SHEDUVA | SAULIUS BERŽINIS

◊

FILM REVIEW

by Roland Binet  (De Panne, Belgium)

◊

◊

The history of Lithuania during the Second World War is complex and tragic. After short-lived continued independence in 1939-1940, following the playing out of the secret clauses of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939, the USSR effectively took over Lithuania in June 1940 and established a harsh regime. Tens of thousands of inhabitants were then deported to Siberia, with big blocks of victims just one week prior to Germany’s June 1941 Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. The Nazi invaders and high numbers of local collaborators slaughtered 96.4% of the Jewish population of the country, over 200,000 people, one of the highest rates of the genocide of the Jews in Holocaust-era Europe. In 1944, the USSR liberated the country from the Germans, and then went on to occupy it until its renewed independence in 1990. It has since rapidly evolved into a successful EU and NATO state.

I became acquainted with the work of the well-known Lithuanian documentary filmmaker Saulius Beržinis from his participation in a BBC documentary entitled The Road to Treblinka. Diverse images from the Kaunas Garage Massacre of June 1941 were shown as well as a description of the reactions of the spectators, local people and Wehrmacht soldiers who had not yet established their administration.

Saulius Beržinis has now produced the “initial version” of a documentary which is in fact a microcosm of what happened to the Jews in his country during the war. It is entitled Petrified Time and it centers on Sheduva, a small town in northern Lithuania (spelled Šeduva in Lithuanian, and known as Shádeve or Shádev in Yiddish). A gargantuan new museum, the Lost Shtetl Museum, will open its doors there later this year.

A big part of the problem of how to comprehend what happened to the Jews who were slaughtered in Lithuania is that they disappeared in hundreds of towns across the land almost without a trace. With their lives, the Jews of Lithuania forfeited their properties, their money and savings and just about all else that could have proven that they had had a life before it had abruptly been terminated by the Nazi regime and its henchmen. But Saulius Beržinis’s Petrified Time has restored not only the history of the Jews of Šeduva but also of their Lithuanian neighbors. He acquaints us with both major elements of the prewar population. In making such a long documentary (clocking in at around two hours and twelve minutes), that microcosm enables us to understand in a clear way, to be frank, what many books, articles and films had somehow failed to adequately make us confront one question. That question is, how, in a peaceful and normal small town all hell suddenly broke loose, how and why some of its truly ordinary people became “drooling killers” (timecode 1:47:34), how and why everyday people (banal people in the language of Hannah Arendt) is happy antisemitic ditties did so very well with properties, clothes and yes, golden teeth from their murdered Jewish neighbors, with whom they had lived in totally nonviolent harmony for centuries. 

This unique documentary imparts unique understanding of the fate of the majority of Lithuanian Jewry in its hundreds of shtetls (Yiddish: shtétlakh) or small towns (unlike the Vilna and other Ghettos which have received so much attention in films and events). It succeeds in this primarily because of Beržinis’s interviews with inhabitants of Sheduva who were alive when he began work on the project a decade ago, in 2015. These interviews are precious, and the contribution is inestimable as a genuine source of testimony over what happened to the Jews in 1941.

Only an artist with an intimate knowledge of human psychology can render what is in fact history with its human and inhuman aspects and leave us in awe of what we have been privileged to see. Despite the sense of violence and outrage that is perceptible in some of the most relevant and significant interviews when relating the murder of more than six hundred Jews in that town (that’s the number given by Wikipedia, but in the documentary the figure of four hundred is cited, ‘one stone for each victim’), I feel that Petrified Time is a work of love, the work of a craftsman who wants to chip away at the blanket of silence that has petrified the memory of what happened there in the summer of 1941. To me Breaking the Silence might have been a first choice as title.

◊

Near the start of Beržinis’s documentary, at timecode 0:57, we hear a strident high sound, then, we see men with a metal detector, one of them saying ‘It could be a bullet’ (a scene often seen in documentaries about the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, the “Holocaust by bullets” around mass graves and pits surrounded by forest or otherwise unbuilt land). Then (01:35), we see a snail crawling upwards on a tombstone with the ancient Jewish letters, then a scene of a Jewish cemetery, then a second sequence with the snail and the title of the documentary appears.

A scene unforgettable for its horror about some twenty-first century people shows us a group of contemporary Sheduva residents sitting around a table as one of them, a women, attempts to powerfully sing (she is no Callas, believe me) antisemitic ditties. The apex of these (07:35) boasts the hateful words 

• You’ll not eat challah on the Sabbath anymore
• You’ll not put a horn on your forehead anymore

while two black and white stills show Jewish men at prayer with a rabbi in the foreground. One of the old men near the singing woman cannot control his merriment. This woman had already appeared in a previous sequence and, on request, is happy to start dishing out antisemitic ditties. In a later sequence (32:42), that same elderly woman repeats the old blood libel that when Passover approached she was not allowed to go near Jewish homes or accept sweets from them, because “In the end, they put the bloody pieces of the sheet in the dough of the matzos”. This is forcefully accompanied by the background picturing of a priest with girls in white, the meaning of which will be unveiled later on. 

This sequence is complemented by another (starting at 49:01) where a woman – not so old – says to a driver, concerning today’s Jewish visitors from abroad: “There is a rumor that the Jews are buying up all of Šeduva. Because there is something buried somewhere here.” Near the end of the documentary (1:58:10), we see a woman, already seen earlier (she also appears in the trailer), who tries to persuade us that the tombstones that were brought to her at that time (for resale as stones for townspeople who now pass away) had to be smoothed out in order to erase any trace of those names in the ancient Jewish letters.

There is also a lengthy sequence (25:31), of a folk procession in the town with much rejoicing while chanting antisemitic song. With these sequences, shocking in revealing some local views of the disappeared Jewish part of Sheduva, it seems that Beržinis wants us to understand that more than around seventy-five years after the massacre, there were still human strata – not at all petrified – of deeply-felt rejoicing or opinions of some kind of preordained manifest history about the Jews and their total elimination.

From words to deeds can be a small step for a human but a gigantic step for crimes against humankind. When, at a certain time – verily petrified – the dam of hatred, envy, jealousy, and resentment broke, and Sheduva changed rather abruptly, as history goes, from a peaceful town into a nearly Dantesque version of hell with graduated horror stages until its final awful inhuman and indecent culmination at the site of the pits in August 1941. This final hellish apotheosis transpires after transportation in trucks of the local Jews to be killed with their Lithuanian guards-killers along what a witness calls “Death Road” referring t a road that appears in several sequences (for example at 1:07:57).

The horror begins in a quite innocuous way with a photograph of a public market displaying clothes on sale, a rather symbolic touch (48:47) that we fully understand when an old man tells us (49:39) that as a small boy in the fifth grade, he had no jacket. So, his mother went to a killer’s wife and bought a jacket for him “but the jacket was bloody and too poor for him.” The old woman singer tells us (52:01) that “there were those who went to shoot and to bury […] so they could take more clothes”. There is also a black and white picture (50:50) of a long row of men behind horse-driven carts fully loaded with the property of the town’s murdered Jews. A bit later a witness tells us that “There were shootings, at the same time the Jewish property was driven through the streets… And a relative of a classmate of mine belonged to the so-called white armbands who distributed the wealth of the Jews.”

For me, the epitome of absolute chilling and rather sickening testimony as far as thefts from the Jews are concerned comes when an old man says “Most of the Jews had golden teeth” (1:05:21). And then, one step higher in the horror catalogue an old lady tells us how the golden teeth were taken, from naked Jews waiting to be killed, still alive, the teeth being extracted by force (1:06:00). She bought one which – at the interviewer’s request – she rather proudly exhibits in her mouth (1:07:53). This latter scene is shown in the trailer too.

Then come the testimonies about the annihilation of the Jews of Sheduva. The same old woman who spoke previously about the white armband tells us later how the Jews were transported to the killing pits. “There were few days when they were shot, they drove as many as they could, a truck stuffed with people and two guards with rifles in the back…and then there was a road towards the forest” (1:08:16). A long sequence depicts “Death Road” and then, the interviewee tells us that it was on his birthday, the 23rd of August, that trucks were passing with Jews and the guards sang “Riding, brothers, to the war!”(1:08:53). He had seen trucks passing during two days. In response to the question whether there were any Germans, he replied no, only local Lithuanians. One night, he and a friend went to the pits, they were curious to see what had happened. As he testified about his friend who had jumped into the pit. “He saw some people still alive, some were still moving’ (1:13:15). A name is cited by an interviewee who testifies “I only heard from strangers, frankly speaking…they used to hit the children on a tree and throw in the pit. And the rest they would shoot, all in the same way. And they had to dig pits for themselves” (1:39:13). Another woman, a bit later, adds further details: “And one of them, an alcoholic who also participated in the shooting said: “We did not want to waste bullets on the children. So they would take a child by the legs and hit his head on a tree trunk” (1:40:06).

Two further witnesses had very detailed testimony to offer. The first one, (at 1:40:46 and reappearing at 1:45:07) had witnessed some of the killings as a child and was curious to see what happened in the forest and describes in detail how these killings occurred. The second one, perhaps a killer, said “You give a shot to the father first. That’s how it was. A child is unconscious” (1:46:06). 

But for people not knowledgeable about the Holocaust in the Baltic States, it is only near the end of the documentary that they would be able to understand how and why some local men, ethnic Lithuanians, felt they had received cart blanche license to kill the Jews. Judge for yourselves on the basis of the broadcast of Radio Kaunas, a sequence heard in the original voicing beginning at exhorting ‘Brothers Lithuanians! Take up arms and support the German army in liberation of our country […] to continue and support the campaign against the World’s enemy, Russian-Jewish Bolshevism!” (2:06:21). This goes a way to explaining the ‘Riding, brothers, to the war!’ cry of the killers in the trucks. They were, they believed, doing this as their way of going to war for liberation of their country.

One of the most moving aspects of the documentary comes from Beržinis giving us the possibility to counterbalance the ugly testimonies of thefts and murders with witnesses who had kind words to say about their former Jewish fellow inhabitants. A man says “If not for the Jews, Sheduva would still be a hamlet…Jewish houses were built to a very high standard” (27:14). To the question “What other good things did the Jews do here?” the interviewee answers “They cherished the town […] Because of them Sheduva became a town. […] One thing I can say confidently: I never heard that a Jew would cheat or harm somebody. […] They were very disciplined.” The same witness had this to add about the interactions between Lithuanian and Jewish boys: “Yes! They got on well together, played basketball together”. 

An old lady selling products at a market had this to say about the Jews: “There were a lot of the Jews, the entire city center belonged to them. They were quite good people, not vindictive, friendly” (4:53). She goes on to explain how the Jews chose chicken, but in a friendly way, smiling at the reminiscence. In one sequence an old lady recalls how the Jews were able to persuade the potential customers to buy their wares displayed in stalls when they said: ‘We’ll give to you without money, just buy it! If you don’ have today, you will pay back tomorrow’ (38:01). She adds: ‘Farmers used to come to the market. Where will they stay? In a Jew’s house. The hostess will always make tea and fry herring. We also learned how to fry herring. Jews weren’t tramps, nor were they drunks. You couldn’t see a drunk Jew on the street.”

She goes on further and tells us that her father fell in love with a gorgeous Jewish girl but as she and others witnesses explain, there was no opening in either religion for marital unions. But, the girl’s parents told her father “Vladas, you are a good man. We love you. We respect you very much. We will help you in all sorts of trouble. But we won’t give our daughter to you.”

Incidentally, some juxtapositions don’t seem to work and seem incongruous such as some of the above transpiring alongside background shots of a visitor at the Jewish Museum in Cape Town, South Africa. Perhaps the filmmaker wanted to show what “is today left” of the lost civilization, but such a sequence would best be handled separately with clear explanation of its role in the film.

Then there are the Lithuanian witnesses who either felt they had to do something in order to prevent the murder of the Jews, or, what these thoughts turned to after having seen the trucks pass along the Death Road and heard the volleys of gunfire from afar. One of the most poignant testimonies is that of a small sympathetic old man wearing a shapka, 91 years old when he was interviewed. After explaining what he and his father had seen during the hellish days of murder, this is what he had to add after having told how he and a friend had seen pits where they had also seen the corpses, in an interview filmed on the very spot where the Jews had been killed and that is now a memorial site. “It’s in my head to this day. Jewish people raised me. I’m so thankful to them. I can’t forget them…I can’t forget the Jewish people who raised me. They took me in as a little boy. I shepherded their cows. They dressed me, prepared me for school (…) Mommy couldn’t eat for two weeks afterwards. She just cried and became ill. She lost her health in those days. Daddy the same…Most of our work was with the Jews…I can’t get it out of my head” (1:13:37). 

Another important witness, a woman, who was thirteen years old at the time, recounts: “I just remember that men gathered at our house. My father was the leader there. The men discussed going with the sticks and hitting the wheels, to prevent transportation of the Jews. But, you see the others said ‘They will shoot us!’ But you see, all the people have suffered heavily”(1:38:38).

There are men searching in a forest and finding cartridge casings (sometimes erroneously translated as “bullets”). Another long sequence shows us people doing a survey of the location where a synagogue had existed before being destroyed and the site effectively erased from the townscape. A woman tells us that there had been two separate synagogues in the town, one for men, one for women.

One of Tolstoy’s most quoted axioms stated that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. Yet, when one looks at the millions of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, in retrospect and from a historical point of view, they seem indeed to have been petrified by the passage of time and appear to us now as a rather amorphous mass, indistinct as in a mist, a gigantic mass of human beings having disappeared from the earth without having left traces of their existence, except for some few pictures and other mementos. 

In Petrified Time Saulius Beržinis presents us with a near-miracle, the story of a Jewish survivor of Sheduva, having come back to the town where he had been born during the war with a busload of foreign visitors, including Dr. Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem (1:44:31). This is one of the highlights of the documentary and a welcome and poignant counterpoint to the abominable details some witnesses told us about the manner of destruction of the Jews in that small town.

This survivor, Pinchas Nol, whom we have already met previously in various sequences, talking in English to fellow passengers on his bus, walking in the streets of Sheduva with Russian-speaking persons in search of a house which had been erased since the war, leans his head onto the plaque at the memorial site of the killings (1:49:05). His Lithuanian name, given when he was rescued, was Petriukas Paluckas. He is the son of Salomea Gocaitė-Nolienė (her given name was Shúle or Shulámis). In a long sequence, we learn that she was one of the persons who had been baptized – thinking, undoubtedly, that such a conversion would spare them the fate of their fellow Jewish inhabitants (1:15:12). One priest referring to these baptisms termed them “the market of life and death” (1:18:51). Later that year in autumn, after the baptism of the family, policemen came to the house where Nolienė and her family were living. On a hunch, her mother found a pretext so that her daughter could leave the house – and thus not be taken along by the policemen. She was at first hidden in the church by the priest Karosas who often appears on pictures with girls dressed all in white (starting at 1:15:12). Later, Shulámis Nol aka Salomea Nolienė was hidden by a righteous Lithuanian family, indeed, the family Paluckas is shown on a memorial plaque. The Lithuanian grandmother helped her when she gave birth to Pinchos, a birth in the time of the genocide of all the town’s Jews. A deeply moving picture of Pinchas Nol in his mother’s arms is shown (1:32:37), and we see him on his return to Sheduva from Israel for this visit, with an elderly old lady who had known his mother and remembered his own birth.

Another survivor now living in Israel, a woman born in 1921, named Frida Vismant, sings a class-room ditty in Lithuanian, looking at pictures of former family members, but some of the passages about her are without sound in the version of the film circulating (16:25). In another sequence, interviewed in Hebrew, she tells how she survives looking at pictures, and singing to them, they are, she says, her “paper children”.

There is a long sequence of a ceremony of tribute to the Jewish victims of Sheduva with a rabbi chanting prayers (1:36:15). It is in its own way quite moving sequence. On the plaque where Pinchas Nol put his forehead one can learn that there were four hundred Jewish victims in Sheduva killed by the Nazis and their local collaborators.

The background music to the documentary is fine, contemporary and quite adequate to the sequences or shots.

Unfortunately, there are numerous mistakes in the English subtitles, and this should all be put right for a final version.

◊

If the wall of time has petrified the tragic events related to the destruction of the Jews of Sheduva, is it not our sacred duty to let the story of the victims of these barbarian acts be heard loud and clear, and what better way to do it than by allowing this remarkable documentary, Petrified Time, to be shown widely on screens around the world, but also by way of the internet. It is a remarkable piece of work exhibiting a wide diversity and top-notch quality of the interviews, interviews of people of that town who lived through those times, remembered and are certainly not among us anymore. In other words, just ten years after Sauliu Beržinis began these interviews, the townspeople who were able to recount the events are all gone.

Some of the interviews in Petrified Time are of kindhearted witnesses with sweet memories and regrets over what happened. Others are with sickeningly hateful antisemites who could only spin their disdain and mockery for their murdered cohabitants some seventy-five years after the massacre. Some of these from both categories are, in my view, on a par with interviews I have seen in the past in the best documentaries on the subject of the Holocaust, such as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, the German television series Holokaust and Michaël Prazan’s Einsatzgruppen.

But in its present long form of some two hours, 11 minutes and 57 seconds, I fear that only a very limited audience of astute specialists could hold out, specialists who would not shy away – or flee after 10 minutes’ viewing – watching classics such as Buňuel’s Le Chien Andalou, Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Kurosawa’s Kagemusha, Kobayashi’s Harakiri. Astute specialists versed in modern cinematographic techniques such as symbolism, leitmotivs, interviews interrupted by other sequences to be taken up again later in repeated discontinuity. A real problem for most people might be the seemingly non-linear story line and the total lack of voice-over giving us a historical background as to what happened in the Lithuanian town of Sheduva before and during the war. 

For the more general audience, of which we know thanks to countless studies, the usual time span has fallen in a dramatic way. There is the large audience of blockbusters of the ilk of Jurassic Park, Lord of the Rings, Matrix, Star Wars, Mad Max and the like. So let us just say it outright, that a younger public, even an adult one, is nowadays used to films with much action and that are not too difficult to understand or follow.

Furthermore, we have to realize that as far as the Holocaust is concerned, studies have shown that less than 20% know anything at all about the genocide of the Jews. I for one would plead that such a documentary needs to made accessible to a larger audience.

The version that is currently widely circulating informally (alas, the film was, it seems, somehow rejected by the very museum that commissioned and enabled it) needs to be cut dramatically. The plot lines can be tightened, redundant and extraneous sequences omitted, and the work edited down to an hour or at maximum around an hour and a half. Indeed, the ingenious core of original interviews with townspeople the filmmaker succeeded to interview need not be cut at all. So what can be shorn here?

Among the unnecessary or redundant sequences or shots: there are too many sequences of an open market displaying clothes and shoes. Does Beržinis insinuate that at the time of the shooting of such scenes, there had still been clothes stemming from Jewish stolen properties? If so, a voice-over should say so, once, succinctly, and a single shot shown once. Why these sequences of men rowing on surf planks on the sea? Or that sequence shown twice of a deep well? Symbolic? Yes, but who would understand? The first eight sequences (until 4:40) could be entirely cut out, they do not denote any interesting story line and the long sequence with the woman who later would sing antisemitic songs could be deleted almost entirely; the songs speak for themselves and are among the film’s “shocking treasures”. Among candidate segments for the shredding floor are artisans trying to cut the head off of a Catholic statue; numerous pictures of priest Karosas with young girls dressed in white without any mention of who they were and why it is shown (it is only later when Nolienė’s story of survival is told that we learn why it had been shown so often but that story stands well by itself). There are too many overlong shots of the Jewish cemetery without explanation.

We have to wait finally until near the very end (2:06:20) to hear the historic Kaunas Radio appeal to Lithuanian patriots to fight against Jewish-Bolshevism (which inspired so many to butcher their Jewish neighbors who had nothing to do with Bolshevism). The mention of Hitler’s Germany, without which none of this would have happened in a Lithuania that had one of the best records of tolerance for centuries and indeed the interwar state period, comes only at the end. It is needed at the beginning to give context. An outsider would think that this one Lithuanian town came up on its own with this sudden awful plan to destroy its Jews.

In other words, just as the overall film needs to be shortened dramatically, there is a need for historical introduction, one that includes in a nutshell the realities of peaceful interwar Lithuania, outbreak of World War II, Soviet occupation, Nazi invasion. Yes, in that context, it is even more dramatic to behold the violence engendered even before the Nazis took full control. We need a moment of history of Sheduva. I have learned that Efraim Zuroff gave an interview when he participated in the memorial ceremony shown. Why is there not an excerpt from that interview, taken during the compilation of the film, that would give historical context?

Making films is a very long, hard and expensive business. Being a film critic watching from the proverbial armchair can seem very easy, and I have always believed that criticism should come with constructive thought on how a provisional version of such a documentary might develop. In my sober judgment, with some ruthless editing out of the superfluous and insertion of short but vital historical background, a new version of Saulius Beržinis’s Petrified Time can — and would — join the rarefied and modest-sized pantheon of bona fide Holocaust documentary gems. I believe he himself understands the draft nature, hence the prominent words “initial version” under the film’s title. Hopefully, the new Lost Shtetl Museum will reconsider its own verdict on the film altogether, and working with its brilliant filmmaker, an icon of Lithuanian historical truth telling for over thirty years now, include a masterly final version in its grand opening in the summer of 2025, to which people far and wide look forward with great expectations.

---