Francis began his second day in the Baltics in Lithuania’s second city, Kaunas, where an estimated 3,000 Jews survived out of a community of 37,000 during the 1941-1944 Nazi occupation.
During Mass in the lush Santakos Park under a brilliant autumn sun, Francis honoured both Jewish victims of Nazi-era executions and the Lithuanians who were deported to Siberian gulags or were tortured and oppressed at home during five decades of Soviet occupation.
“Earlier generations still bear the scars of the period of the occupation, anguish at those who were deported, uncertainty about those who never returned, shame for those who were informers and traitors,” Francis told the crowd.
“Kaunas knows about this. Lithuania as a whole can testify to it, still shuddering at the mention of Siberia, or the ghettos of Vilnius and Kaunas, among others.”
He denounced those who get caught up in debating who was more virtuous in the past and fail to address the tasks of the present – an apparently veiled reference to historic revisionism that is afflicting much of Eastern Europe as it comes to terms with the Holocaust.
The issue is acute in Lithuania, where ordinary Lithuanians executed Jews alongside the Nazi occupiers, wiping out the Jewish population of the capital of Vilnius that was known for centuries as the “the Jerusalem of the North”…
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