I walked around the Kaunas Ninth Fort Museum sensing an indescribable weight that grew stronger with every step, which had burdened me once before while visiting the Auschwitz concentration camp museum in Poland. Although I have always been interested in history, carried every painful and important date in my memory and was familiar with the details, being in the place where those events happened really affected me emotionally. I believe that it is useful, and maybe even necessary, for everyone to feel it, to get to know all of it.
I was introduced to the Ninth Fort from up close by one of the people who know the history of this place best – the director of the museum, Marius Pečiulis. He has been working in the museum sector since 2006, he spent the first eight years at the Vytautas Great War Museum, where he got a job while still studying history. “Yes, Ninth Fort has its own aura – people say it’s a “murder location” but, in my view, now it is a very interesting place with a lot of potential. We, the employees haven’t discovered it fully yet; there are many gray spots in the history. I believe that interesting details awaken curiosity, which gives birth to creativity and the desire to create, to delve into what has not yet been discovered, and to look for ways that would help tell it to everyone”, M. Pečiulis answers when asked why he works here and not somewhere else. By the way, he has also been the Chairman of the Board of the Association of Lithuanian Museums since 2021.
As you emphasized in an interview, it is very important to spread the word that our country’s museums are innovative, attractive to visitors, and create added value for the state. Do you personally feel a positive change or greater interest?
Most museums still have to deal with stereotypes. Back in 2006, when I started working in this field, the prevalent view was that museums are storage spaces where objects are kept. So, if I visited it 30 years ago, probably nothing has changed since then. But actually, great changes have taken place, especially in the last decade.
Most of the museums in our country have become very modern – from the attitude to the internal changes of the institution. It is probably important to mention the fact that society itself does not change so quickly, so it is not that easy to dislodge old stereotypes. Not only in the cities, but also in the regions of the country, we have many interesting museums that people pass by every day, but never go inside. Museums have become dynamic multi-functional cultural centers where events, exhibitions, conferences, and publishing are organized, and everything is being moved to the digital space. We always compare ourselves with Western Europe. Yes, our financial capacities might not be so favorable, but in terms of creativity and attitude, we are definitely not inferior to our Western colleagues, and sometimes we are even more resourceful. We operate in slightly more complicated conditions, we are hungrier, so we do more.
Let’s talk about the Ninth Fort. Museum organizes tours, during which you can see the defensive walls, and the inside of posterns, get acquainted with the period when the place served as a branch of hard labor prison, and learn about the everyday life of prisoners. The museum also recreates the episodes of repression carried out by the NKVD and the extent of the crimes committed by the Nazis is revealed. How do young people react to the tour guide’s stories? Have visitors changed in the last ten years?
Generations are really changing; society is moving in a good direction. In the past, museum visitors usually just listened to the historical facts or objects mentioned by the tour guide, but now they want to get involved themselves. I am talking about educational activities when the participant is not a passive observer but becomes an active player or even a creator. This type of educational process makes it much easier to absorb and understand everything. In my eyes, this is a very positive process, although it requires time and effort. Especially when it comes to more complex topics, about what we present here at the Kaunas Ninth Fort Museum, i.e., Holocaust, exile, and killings. It is not that easy to take the road of societal realization, for people to understand what type of history unfolded here, and why it is so complicated. For this reason, it is important that not only the school, but also the family, higher education institutions, and museums join the process. If we want to develop a conscious society that understands and appreciates its history, we have to look at it in a complex way.
Ninth Fort is the last and most modern fort of the Kaunas Fortress built during the period of the Russian Empire. After the First World War, it was no longer used for its original purpose. There was a lack of prisons in the young state, so it was decided to turn the fort into a branch of the overcrowded hard labor prison of Kaunas. How did the repurposing go? What kind of prisoners were imprisoned here?
When Kaunas became the temporary capital, the state needed to be rebuilt, so everything was missing: from administrative buildings to prisons. The Ninth Fort was chosen due to its convenient infrastructure. The prison was established there in 1924.
Different types of prisoners were jailed in the fort but since 1926, when Smetona’s government came to power in Lithuania, the Lithuanian Communist Party was banned as a political entity. At that time, persons convicted of communist activities were imprisoned here, and later also persons who held very high positions in Soviet Lithuania, for example, Antanas Sniečkus, head of the Lithuanian Communist Party. It also contained people jailed for hooliganism or those who were temporarily detained. However, during the interwar period, it was better known as the jail for political prisoners.
On June 22, 1941, after the start of the war between the Soviet Union and Germany, the latter’s army-controlled Kaunas and carried out extermination campaigns against Jews and communists. One of the main locations for that was the Ninth Fort. Perhaps you could tell us what happened here from June 1941 until August 1944.
I would like to mention the period from 1940 to 1941 when the Soviet occupation began. This period is very important in the history of the fort, albeit often forgotten. When the first Soviet occupation began, the fort still functioned as a prison, only the contingent had changed. Prisoners convicted of communist activities were replaced by various Lithuanian public figures, politicians, and teachers, repressed by the Soviet authorities, and sent from here to the far east of the Soviet Union. It was like a stopover for political prisoners.
This episode is still very little known to us as well because when withdrawing from Lithuania, the Soviets tried to destroy or take away all the information. The same thing happened during the Nazi occupation, which is why the Ninth Fort is probably best known not only in Lithuania but also in the international arena as a place of mass killings. According to our calculations, about 50,000 people were killed here during the Nazi occupation. We also know the main dates of these mass killings. About 30 thousand of those killed were of Jewish ethnicity. Ninth Fort is a unique place in Lithuania in that not only local Jews were killed here, but also those brought from other countries occupied by Nazi Germany.
Today, due to the lack of documents, we still have not identified all the people and determined the exact number, although we have all this space for historical research. In addition to the collective story, we want to tell individual ones as well, to present the cases of specific people. The museum is now very focused on such research.
The nazis did not only carry out mass killings at the Ninth Fort from 1941 to 1944 but also destroyed the victims’ remains. In 1943 the Nazis launched a special operation to destroy the evidence. In other words, they realized that the retreat of the Nazi German army was beginning, and they might have to answer for what they’d done. Graves were dug up and bodies were burned in the Ninth Fort. The news that this was happening, did not spread by chance – 64 Jewish prisoners managed to escape from the Ninth Fort on Christmas night in 1943. It is truly a miraculous story. 11 of the escaped prisoners lived to see the end of World War II and told what happened there. Such fragments help us put together a clearer picture.
How do you work and communicate with people whose family members were killed or imprisoned here?
As I mentioned, our policy is aimed at identifying individuals, we are looking for people who can provide us with information. We maintain relations with certain people, communicate, and exchange information.
They care about what happens in the museum, they are very sensitive to what the museum presents, and what it says about their loved ones. As an institution, we try to take everything very seriously. We understand that when dealing with such topics, we sometimes have to double-check before releasing any message to the public. Sometimes very interesting projects appear, and we may not see anything wrong with them, but we always need to evaluate how our target audience will see it, and whether it will not violate other moral beliefs. We seek to receive information from people, but we also feel a responsibility toward them when we use the information that turns into an exhibition, exposition, publication, or other cultural product.
Do you think that anyone could work as a tour guide in this place? I am talking about the emotional side, the psychological preparation.
I don’t think that anyone could do this job and I am not talking about the Ninth Fort only. If you want to be a good specialist, that field must be interesting to you. Especially when talking about the Holocaust, exiles, or political prisoners. It is not enough to learn the text accompanying the tour; you need to feel everything. In the long run, with that feeling comes an interest in the topic, the realization that every visitor is different, so the available information must be tilted in a certain direction, taking into account the audience you are working with.
Ninth Fort is a place of massacre, so it is important to understand your own emotions. I always talk to employees that emotions need to be transformed into interest. We are here for a reason – we work in a place where many people have died, but we must strive to ensure that they are not forgotten. The goal of the Nazis was not only to kill physically but also to erase the memory. This goal was not achieved. We, as an institution, will not restore the destroyed communities, but we can certainly preserve and foster their memory.
