The geometry of remembering

In September 2019, I visited Kretinga, the small Lithuanian town from which my family emigrated to England in 1888. I had just finished six months of intensive Yiddish study and, inspired by the rediscovery of a family memoir, I wanted to see this corner of “the old country” that had once been home to my own ancestors. 

I knew that this visit was likely to be a difficult one. In 1941, Kretinga lay just across the border that separated the German and Soviet zones of then-occupied Poland. One of the first towns invaded by the German army, Kretinga (Krottingen) was also one of the first places in which the mass murders of Jews that began the Holocaust took place. 

Somehow I was still unprepared for the sinking feeling when, driving into the town, the first thing I spotted was a big sign pointing into Kveciai forest reading “site of Jewish genocide”. I pulled the car over and walked into the forest. In a small clearing stood a stone monument with a simple inscription in Yiddish and Lithuanian: “700 Jews were murdered here in 1941.”

I continued into the town centre. Finding the tourism office, I bought a guide to the town’s Jewish history and set off in search of memories of the old Jewish Kretinga I’d read about. Nothing was left. An abandoned building stood in place of the old synagogue, which had been burned down by the Nazis following the first massacre — an act for which the Jews were subsequently blamed. The only thing that remained of the Jewish community which, once a major part of the town’s population, had been eradicated in that one bloody summer, was the old Jewish cemetery.

The sun shone over the crooked stones, most of which were too broken and faded to read. Two more stone monuments told me that this graveyard — the century-long resting place of the Jews of Kretinga, among them generations of my own family — had also become a site of mass murder. From July to September 1941, this was the principal spot to which prisoners — communists, Soviet officials and Jews, among them most of the town’s Jewish women — were brought to be murdered in so-called “cleansing” operations. Jews from other nearby towns were also murdered here.

This history was far from new to me. Like many Ashkenazi Jews of my generation, I grew up knowing very little about how the Jews of Eastern Europe lived, but I had always known how they died. Armed with my newly acquired knowledge of Yiddish language and culture, I had come to Kretinga hoping to correct this imbalance. Yet, searching for the remnants of a once vibrant Jewish community, I found only monuments to their destruction. Standing in that cemetery, I found myself overwhelmed not only by the tragedy of the Holocaust, but by the weight of its memory. 

The politics of memory

While I had grown up knowing almost nothing about the people they had been, the ghosts I encountered in Kretinga were nonetheless fundamental to a narrative that had, for a long time, dominated my understanding of both the Jewish past and the Jewish present. Portraying the Nazi genocide as the evilest incarnation of millennia-long persecution, this narrative — still dominant in many Jewish communities — sees a resolution of this terrible history in the creation of the State of Israel. Presenting the Holocaust as a unique atrocity, and Israel as “an exceptional case by extension”, this Zionist narrative of the Holocaust – described by Adi Ophir as a “new religion” —  is frequently employed to justify Israeli crimes, supposedly perpetrated in the name of Jewish safety in a world that always has been and always will be threatened by an unresolvable antisemitic hatred.

In the decade before I travelled to Kretinga, my belief in this narrative had fallen apart as I confronted the realities of Israeli occupation and apartheid. With my realisation that the genocide of my ancestors was being used to justify the ethnic cleansing of another people, the reassuring belief that I lived in a world committed to “never again” also started to unravel. Employed to justify Israeli crimes against the Palestinians, by insisting on support for Israel above all else, the Zionist narrative of the Holocaust also allows European nations to avoid confronting their antisemitic pasts and even their complicity in the Nazi genocide. Insisting on the “exceptionalism” of the Holocaust to the extent that it removes it from the contexts of nationalism, colonialism, war and violence in which it took place, at its most extreme this narrative also prevents us from addressing the systems that allowed it to happen. 

The Israeli flags that peppered the various Holocaust monuments I visited that 2019 summer therefore no longer brought me any comfort. At the same time, other iconography reminded of the ways the memory of the Holocaust has been mobilized, ignored, manipulated and contested in the countries where it took place. A second monument in the Kretinga cemetery, built during the Soviet period, is dedicated to the “Lithuanian working-class comrades, communists … all others murdered by German and Lithuanian nationalists during the German occupation” who “sacrificed themselves so the motherland could live free.” That the majority of those “comrades” and “others” were Jews is markedly absent. 

Reflecting the Soviet presentation of the war, this monument is also a reminder that in the aftermath of a conflict that took millions of lives and reaped unimaginable destruction, the specific persecution of Jews often went overlooked. This dilution of the genocide, alongside the widespread failure in both Eastern and Western Europe to address the antisemitism that led to it, seems to have played a part in the postwar turn of so many Jews — among them many members of the communist resistance I now study — to Zionism and its presentation of the Holocaust as a singularly unique atrocity.  

In Vilnius, I had been left lost for words when, asking a taxi driver to take me to the Choral Synagogue, he told me: “It was the Germans who killed the Jews, by the way. We Lithuanians were also victims.” In Lithuania and elsewhere, the fall of Soviet communism saw the revival of narratives of national victimhood and resistance that, in the immediate post-war period, obscured the extent to which, in both Eastern and Western Europe, the Germans were assisted in their crimes by willing and enthusiastic local helpers. Soviet crimes are now frequently presented alongside and as equivalent to those of the Nazis, obscuring the ways in which the Holocaust was, indeed, exceptional. With the return of old accusations that Jews supported communism, this “double genocide theory” is also used to excuse those who collaborated with the Nazis, portraying them as heroes fighting for their own national liberation from an oppressive regime. 

Standing in Kretinga, where anti-Soviet Lithuanian nationalists enthusiastically collaborated in the murder of the Jews, with proclamations encouraging such behaviour circulating months before the German invasion, the taxi driver’s words rang in my ears. At other memorial sites, faced with the symbology of competing national narratives, I had sung anti-nationalist songs and read poems that reasserted my commitment to keep fighting for a world in which nothing like this could ever happen again. Now all of the prayers and poems I could think of somehow felt not enough, or too much. I didn’t want to just memorialise the dead and assign to them some legacy. I wanted to connect to them and, even briefly, to set them free from all these claims we make on their memory.  

Talking to the dead

I had recently become interested in cemetery measuring — an Ashkenazi Jewish women’s ritual and one of several popular customs that involved communicating with and connecting to the dead. Feeling like something inside me was snapping, I walked back into town and, in the supermarket that stood over what used to be the mikve, I bought a ball of grey wool and a bottle of bubbles. Back at the cemetery, I asked my friend to hold the end of the wool, while I walked off with the ball, unrolling it, wrapping it around the faded gravestones and the stone monuments. Wanting to see the air moving, I blew bubbles as I went. Perhaps knowing more about what I was doing than I thought I did, I also spoke and sang to the dead. I told the people murdered there that they didn’t have to lie under the weight of these monuments, that they were free to move like the bubbles, and we would remember them. I also spoke to the generations who had died here peacefully, asking them to help both the murdered and the living to heal from this trauma. I looked and felt like I’d completely lost it, and I didn’t care. A drunk man threw a beer can at me and shouted at me in Lithuanian. I shouted back at him in Yiddish that if anyone still spoke Yiddish there, I’d have been able to explain to him what I was doing. 

Practically speaking, I did almost everything wrong that day in the Kretinga cemetery. Among the spirits I spoke to that day, I may well have disturbed some resting feldmesterins, whom I still often imagine gawping at me and wringing their hands as I try to practise and teach what was for them an incredibly holy rite. Yet, in that first attempt at feldmestn, I learned a lot that I could never have gleaned just from studying texts. 

Five years later, I can still remember the hills and contours of the space and the sense of connection and calm it brought me. Performing a ritual from the pre-Holocaust Yiddish world, I also recovered the sense of resistance I had felt two days earlier, speaking and studying Yiddish with friends in Vilnius — a sense of mir veln zey iberlebn. I learned that, in the early twentieth century, there was a renowned soul candle maker in the nearby town of Plunge, where my great grandfather once studied and where we stopped on our way out of Kretinga. I wondered if she ever measured the Kretinga cemetery. 

When there is not enough thread

Back in my flat in Paris, I tried using the wool to make my own candles for Yom Kippur – a common use for what was known in Yiddish as toyter fodem (dead thread) that had been used to encircle the cemetery. Using the thread to make a wick, each time it is dipped in wax, a different ancestor is called on and asked to help the living on the upcoming day of atonement. I quickly learned that wool does not make good candle wick, and that there was a reason that most feldmesterins seem to have used cotton thread. I have since used the Kretinga wool in rituals and performance art, and to make wristbands — another less common use. At some point, my cat Shofar decided that it belonged to him, and since then it has mostly lived in a child-locked drawer.

After the massacres of 7 October and following the vengeful genocidal statements made by Israeli leaders, I took the wool out of the drawer. Every Friday evening, I made candles from the wool. Thinking about the similarities between what was unfolding in Gaza and the “Holocaust by bullets” in Lithuania — where Jews were also seen as “security threats” and as supporters of an extremist “Judeo-Bolshevik” regime — I called on my Kretinga ancestors to witness what was happening and to help us stop it. Incredibly, this time the candles burned. During the first internet and phone blackout, I also burned the stumps of old soul candles — a form of protection magic.

As the massacres went on and increased in scale, I mostly stopped making soul candles. Witnessing a live-streamed genocide, with so many people ignoring, denying or even supporting it, often invoking the Holocaust as justification, was simply too much. As Avery Oberfield wrote in a collage for this year’s Radical Jewish Calendar, “there is not enough thread in the world for the feldmesterin to make soul candles for all of Palestine.” I have read similar sentiments in the memoirs of Holocaust survivors, reflecting on the destruction of their communities.

Debating with the dead

With millions murdered and millions more displaced from their homes, their towns and also their cemeteries destroyed, the Holocaust seems to have greatly hastened the decline of local Ashkenazi customs like cemetery measuring and soul candle making.  Following such devastation, it is perhaps unsurprising that Yom Kippur soul candles, made by women calling on the ancestors to act as divine advocates for the living, have been replaced by yortsayt candles that simply remember the dead. The martyred (as Holocaust victims are often called in Yiddish) need to be remembered, but it does not seem appropriate, except in very rare circumstances, to call on them for help. 

Despite my own sense of spiritual crisis, over the past fifteen months, I have found myself reflecting on what significance these rituals might have in a world scarred by modern warfare and genocide. In Kretinga, I used cemetery measuring — usually employed in times of crisis to ask the dead to help the living — to ask for healing for the dead. Encircling the cemetery, I also felt like I was somehow symbolically bringing the murdered back into the community they had been ripped from. I have subsequently learned that cemetery and grave measurements were sometimes used as a way of returning wild spirits to their resting places. 

For those of us of Ashkenazi descent and for whom the Holocaust is personal, these rituals can also be ways of getting beyond all the claims that are made on the memory of the genocide of our ancestors, to simply connect with and mourn the dead. This is perhaps especially important now when, in the context of the deep-seated fears triggered by 7 October, we have seen the legacy of the Holocaust manipulated to dangerous extremes  — from Israeli delegates wearing yellow stars at the UN security council to Douglas Murray’s despicable and revisionist claim that Hamas are worse than the Nazis. 

While today’s memorial culture tends to reflect presentist concerns, the Yiddish prayers that accompanied rituals like cemetery measuring explicitly centre the living — a more honest custom that I would argue also reflects a human need. You tell the dead about the struggles that are taking place on earth, you remember the qualities and experiences that might allow them to help you, and you ask them for that help. The reality is, I don’t know how my traumatised ancestors in Kretinga would have reacted to the genocide in Gaza, or to any other events that followed the Holocaust. In these rituals I get to — as is often described in Yiddish memoirs — “debate things out with them” and ask them to recognise things from my perspective. Whether or not they are listening, it always feels like some light is shed. 

A couple of years ago, I tried my hand for the first time at making the kind of huge soul candles that were traditional in many Ashkenazi communities over Yom Kippur, each with a wick from an entire cemetery measurement. Having produced “wicks” that looked more like torches, my co-candle maker and I decided to save them for Succot, which we were going to spend on a rural retreat in Connecticut. On the second day of the retreat, I overheard a British accent on a guided walk in the woods and asked the man speaking where he was from. He was from Sunderland, and had known some of my family. I told him that they had come to Sunderland from Kretinga, and he chuckled, “All the Jews in Sunderland are from Kretinga.” He had also visited Kretinga and its cemetery, and we compared stories and photos. That night, when I lit my first ever full-size soul candle, on the other side of the world from both Kretinga and Sunderland, I was joined by this man and his children and grandchildren — three generations of Kretinga Jews.▼

Annabel Gottfried Cohen is a researcher working towards a PhD in Modern History, and a Yiddish teacher and translator.