A Sense of Dread by Laima Vince - Lithuania in the World

The only relief that political prisoners experienced in the basement cells of the KGB headquarters in Vilnius came when students at the Academy of Music next door practised their music. Sometimes a brave student would play the banned national anthem on 16 February, Lithuania’s prewar Independence Day, brightening the prisoners’ otherwise bleak existence.

Directly across the street on Lukiškių Square, a statue of Lenin pointed at the building as though directing the doomed towards its doors. From this location in the very centre of the city, after months of interrogation and torture, prisoners were either led downstairs into the catacombs and shot, or were shipped to hard labour camps in Siberia, where most of them died from exhaustion, starvation or disease.

Today, when you walk along the walls of the building, you see hundreds of names carved into the granite façade. Each is the name of a prisoner who died in this prison or later. To the left of the entrance there is a small, slit window near the base of the building. KGB officers once monitored the street outside the building from this window, vigilantly on the look-out for family or friends of prisoners who had come searching for their loved ones, and who could be the next to be imprisoned within these stone walls.

During the postwar period, from 1944 to 1953, teachers, students, farmers and former military personnel formed a nationwide armed resistance that fought the Soviet army in skirmishes, using guerrilla tactics. The resistance movement was roughly 50,000 strong.

Members of the resistance were imprisoned in a steady stream in these dank, underground cells. According to statistics published by the Museum of Genocide Victims, 200,000 people were imprisoned during this period, and more than 27,000 were killed in partisan battles and in prisons, or later in hard labour camps.

Antanas Kraujelis, the last partisan, took his own life in 1965, rather than allowing himself to be arrested. The end of the armed resistance did not end Lithuanians’ determination to be free. The Lithuanian Freedom League was formed in 1978, and in 1976 a Lithuanian branch of the Helsinki Group was established.

The Catholic Church became a source of resistance to Soviet ideology and a target for the KGB. Lithuania was the only Catholic country in the Soviet Union. In the spirit of Marx and Lenin, the Soviet authorities sought to uproot religion by terrorising its practitioners.

In the 1970s and 1980s the authorities committed political prisoners to mental institutions. Psychotropic drugs were used to permanently damage the psyches of prisoners in a clean, hands-off manner.

Priests and nuns and religious sympathisers were targeted. Until 1987, most were held just after their arrest in the KGB basement prison.

In August 1991, as the Soviet Union was crumbling and Lithuania’s independence was being recognised by the world, crowds of people joined hands, encircling the KGB headquarters, demanding that the archives be left intact and that the personnel vacate the premises. The KGB leapt into armoured cars passing outside the building, which took them to safety within the confines of the Soviet military base at Šiaurės Miestelis.

Russian KGB personnel left Lithuania in 1993, together with the Soviet troops; while the Lithuanian KGB workers mostly reintegrated themselves into society. No retribution has been made in independent Lithuania against former collaborators and KGB agents.

In the early 1990s, seeking to avoid a witch-hunt, the fledgling democratic Lithuanian government chose not to bring former KGB agents, prison guards and collaborators to trial. As a result, former prisoners in the torture chambers of the prison cells may run into their former tormentors on the street and in public spaces.

When crowds entered the building in 1991, they found sacks and sacks of shredded documents, and most of the archives missing. Nonetheless, 200,000 files had remained. Although that number seems large, it represents only a fraction of the files maintained on citizens of occupied Lithuania.

The basement torture chambers remained more or less intact. On the directive of the minister of culture and education, the Museum of Genocide Victims (at 2 Aukų g.) was established on 14 October 1992.

Today visitors may see the former prison cells, preserved for the most part as they were used throughout the Soviet period, and may view an exhibition on Lithuania’s decade-long postwar resistance against the Soviet Union.

Nineteen of the cells in the Museum of Genocide Victims are as they used to be then. Tests done in the 1990s reveal that the prison walls were repainted 18 times. This was not done to beautify the cells, but rather because prisoners would scribble their names and other information on the walls.

A tour begins with the viewing of two narrow cells the size of a broom cupboard. Here prisoners were held when they were first brought into the prison. As many bodies as could be squeezed together would be shoved into the cramped isolation cells, and held there for hours. Only in the 1970s were planks fixed to the walls so that prisoners could sit down. Inside the cells, prisoners were not allowed to speak to each other.

From these cells, they would be moved to another cell, where they were photographed full face and in profile. Near the entrance to the museum, hundreds of these photographs are displayed, bearing witness to the sheer numbers of human beings who have passed through the prison.

In another cell, a prisoner’s clothing was confiscated, and all sharp objects removed. Names and contact information would be recorded. From this point, the prisoner would be moved to an unheated prison cell where he or she would sleep on the bare concrete floor, along with dozens of other prisoners. A single naked light bulb illuminated the cell day and night. The prisoners were woken every few hours for interrogation and torture.

Among the cells a few stand out for cruelty. One of these, the padded cell, was used for torture. It contains a straightjacket. Left alone in the padded cell, the victim’s screams were muffled by the padded walls.

Another cell, the water cell, reveals a disc the size of a Frisbee in the centre of a submerged concave floor. The floor was flooded with cold water, and the sleep-deprived prisoner was ordered to stand for long hours in bare feet on the disc. When the prisoner lost his or her balance, or nodded off, he or she would tumble into the freezing water. A single barred window at the end of the cell let in the cold from outdoors.

A room in the basement, used in later years as a carpentry shop, after careful research revealed itself to be an execution chamber. Here, thousands were shot. Seven hundred sets of remains, found in the mid-1990s in the suburb of Tuskulėnai, proved to be those of individuals shot in this execution chamber.

A sewage system was put in place for the drainage of blood, and bullet holes still riddle the stone walls. Several square metres of blood-soaked concrete were removed, revealing a dirt floor replete with artefacts and fragmented remains.

Out of respect for the victims, a glass floor has been placed about a metre above the dirt floor, illuminated from the sides. Through the glass, bullets, casings, glasses and shoes can be seen.

Outside the prison there is a small “exercise area”. The windows that looked down on this courtyard were those of offices and the residences of KGB workers, who occupied several blocks in the neighbourhood. A set of barn doors leads to the street, where bodies were often dumped as a warning to passers-by.

In an on-line posting on Vilnius Travel Guide, a museum visitor who identifies herself as Dabs, wrote: “This is one of the most unsettling places I’ve ever visited. I’m finding it hard to put into words the overwhelming sense of dread I felt while walking the halls of this former KGB prison where many prisoners perished at the hands of the KGB.

During the first decade of the museum’s existence the tour guides were former prisoners themselves. These days, due to the poor health of most of the elderly former prisoners, tours are led by two young historians. Both have spent years absorbing the original prisoners’ stories, and weaving them into their carefully researched historical narratives.

One former prisoner, however, is still well enough to occasionally lead visitors through the prison’s labyrinth. Nijolė Sadūnaitė, a nun, was the last prisoner of conscience to be held in the prison. She was imprisoned and interrogated there in 1974 and 1987.

“I was never so happy in all my life,” Sadūnaitė said, referring to the months in 1974 she spent incarcerated. “I was given the opportunity to stand up and speak out for the truth.”

On 27 August 1974 the KGB raided her flat in Vilnius and caught her seated at her typewriter transcribing the text of The Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania. A neighbour, who had agreed to inform on her, heard her begin typing and promptly called the secret police. Typewriters, under Soviet law, had to be registered with the government. Possession of a personal typewriter was illegal.

An underground network collected information on human rights abuses in Lithuania and smuggled it to the Catholic Religious Aid Center in New York, where it was translated into English and German, and disseminated around the world. The staff of the American embassy in Moscow would accept the typed pages photographed on to microfiche, and would mail it in the diplomatic bag to New York.

The KGB was interested in finding others involved, but Sadūnaitė frustrated her interrogators’ efforts to coerce her into implicating others.

She had an answer to every question, though usually an answer that either used word-play against her interrogators or was so honest, sincere and implacable that the interrogator would storm out of the room in a fury. For example, she baffled them by telling them, with a bright smile on her face, that she felt sorry for them and would pray for them, or that she would gladly die for them.

She sang in her cell, and did exercises in the prison courtyard. Never did she allow herself to cry or despair. This behaviour unnerved her captors, who conjured up punishment after punishment, finally exiling her to six years in a hard labour camp in Siberia.

Despite her strength of spirit and her conviction that the truth would prevail, over the months of interrogations, Sadūnaitė felt herself growing physically weaker. Although on the brink of death, her captors kept her alive in the hope of finally eliciting information from her.

Years later, in 1990, before the prison cells had been officially opened to the public, Sadūnaitė and Archbishop Stankevičius, with whom she had shared a prison cell, visited the prison.

Outside the cell, against the wall, they found two large X-ray machines. The prison guards would apparently turn on the machines, and allow them to shine radiation on her and the archbishop for hours. Only then did Sadūnaitė understand why her hair had fallen out while she was in prison, and why her bones had grown brittle.

She was tried in 1975, and chose to be her own defence. During her final statement, she said: “Love of one’s fellow man is the greatest form of love, while the struggle for human rights is the most beautiful hymn of love. May this hymn forever resound in our hearts and never fall silent. I have been accorded the inevitable task, the honourable fate, not only to struggle for human rights, but also to be sentenced for them. My sentence will become my triumph! My only regret is that I have been given so little opportunity to work on behalf of my fellow man.”

The text of her defence made it to the West, and later returned to the East, where her words were inspirational to thousands living in captivity.

Sadūnaitė, animatedly and full of mischief, described how she managed to smuggle her speech out of prison, right under the guards’ noses.

After her trial, she was returned to her cell. She had put on her best clothes for the trial: an attractive sweater, and a skirt, with matching shoes. She had also done her hair. A gypsy woman, being held for petty crimes, shared her cell. When she saw Sadūnaitė’s outfit, she gasped with pleasure.

The woman agreed. Sadūnaitė asked the woman if she had any gypsy friends in the city. She did. Sadūnaitė then undressed and gave the woman her clothing.

She asked the woman to take the text of her speech, put it in an envelope and send it to a gypsy friend. She told the woman to write a note asking the friend to deliver the speech to her own friends in Vilnius. The plan worked, and the speech travelled through the underground to the West.

Sadūnaitė survived hard labour in Siberia, and returned to Lithuania in 1980. After 1982 she lived in hiding, eluding the KGB by wearing wigs and disguises whenever she went out or visited friends. She was detained briefly in 1987, the same year she joined a public protest against the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which had divided Eastern Europe between Stalin and Hitler at the beginning of the Second World War.

When asked whether it is difficult to return to the KGB prison cells to lead tours, she shook her head vigourously. “I’m glad to do it,” she said. “God was with me down there.”