Vilnius, Lithuania Genocide Museum (KGB Office)
Written: Feb 22 '06
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Product Rating:
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Pros: A highly recommended experience, if chilling.
Cons: Not for the squeamish or children.
The Bottom Line: A chilling look at what it was like behind the iron curtain. A must visit if you have a day in Vilnius.
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| pilotpat's Full Review: Museum of Genocide Victims, Vilnius, Lithuania |
This is a review in a series of reviews about Vilnius, Lithuania and the surrounding area.
This review was originally posted in the writer's corner, before this topic was opened.
OVERVIEW
The basement of the former KGB office and residential building in Vilnius was the site of a prison, execution, and torture facility during the Soviet occupation. Though the Soviets attempted to mask their atrocities by pouring concrete over the bloodstained floors and otherwise disguising the rooms, the area has been excavated with care usually reserved for archaeological digs and converted into a haunting museum.
LOCATION
The main entrance is accessible easily from Gedimino prospektas. From either old town or the Gedimino shopping area, the museum is a reasonable and pleasant walk, though bus and taxis are available as well. It sits across from a park, Lukiskiu Aikste, formerly known as Lenin Square. The park's statue of Lenin once pointed to the building, as if to say "that's where you're going," but has been taken down.
HOURS OF OPERATION: 10am-6pm, shorter hours during the winter.
THE MUSEUM
As you walk along the walls of the building, you see hundreds of names carved into the stone. Each is the name of an inmate who perished at the site (or at another location after their incarceration). As you turn south towards the entryway, look to your right and you will see a small, slitted window near the base of the building. Later on your tour, you will be able to watch passers-by from the same hidden location that KGB officers used, watching for collaborators or family members of those who had been taken.
Walking in the main doors, you will find a small bookstore with historical books about the Nazi and Soviet occupations. This is also where you pay your admission fee. An English-speaking guide was available for us, and he offered his services for whatever tip we thought appropriate at the end (by doing so, he made out very well compared with what he might have charged). The guide then brought us down the stairwell and into the nightmarish past.
AN INMATE'S FIRST NIGHT
To the right of the lower landing is a guard window, and a steel door lies ahead. The door opened to reveal a linoleum-floored hallway. On the left were two tiny, phone-booth sized closets with small benches in their walls. These were the holding tanks, where new inmates were stuffed to await inprocessing and incarceration. Nearby is a door marked "Electrical Equipment," actually the guard's armory.
The next rooms were restored, complete with era-correct props. A guard/communications room, inprocessing/photography room, and political education library were represented, along with the observation post, a darkened room from which you could peer out the previously mentioned slit window. In one room, bags of documents, hastily shredded during the KGB's abandonment of the building, lie stacked in along the walls.
THE FIRST HALLWAY
The following rooms were identified by the era which they represented. The rooms of the Nazi and Stalin regimes were Spartan, and would be filled with several prisoners, sometimes packed in so tight as to have to take shifts for sleep. Moving into the Lenin stages and beyond, the number of occupants dwindled and accommodations "improved" to the addition of metal spring cots.
An interrogation room complete with recording equipment lies next to a few rooms devoted to photos and story boards of Lithuanians who were imprisoned and executed, as well as those who collaborated with the KGB and Nazis (the collaborators' story board is emblazoned with red Lithuanian words translated, "They were killers.").
THE TORTURE HALLWAY
Following into the next hallway, one finds the room of bones that have yet to be identified, and the rooms of torture.
The water torture rooms had submerged floors which were flooded with water and open (but barred) windows that allowed the freezing winter air in. A small, hub-cap sized domed metal platform sat in the middle. An inmate being tortured would be left for days in bare feet, with only this tiny platform available to escape the freezing water or ice.
In the padded cell, a black straitjacket drapes eerily on a hangar with its arms outstretched to the walls. Our guide explained that the arms would be pulled tightly until shoulders and elbows separated, and then the inmate would be left alone in the cell in pain.
THE ROOMS OF HORROR
As if the preceding sights are not horrific enough, the tour then leads you past a small outside "exercise area," explaining that the windows looking down on this fenced courtyard represent offices and residences of KGB personnel. A set of closed barn doors lead to the street, where bodies were often left as warnings to locals of the dangers of opposing the regimes. A door leads down another staircase, the railing cut to accommodate the passing of stretchers, and visitors are given cloth shoe-coverings to don.
The next rooms evoke nothing but silence. The floors have been excavated to the original blood-soaked concrete, and visitors walk on glass tiles elevated about a foot above the floor, which is lit from the sides. Articles found during excavation, including clothing, glasses, bullets and casings, and shoes, litter the floor beneath. Etched glass panels show pictures of the executed and the executors, with grim stories of how thousands met their deaths. Another set of panels explains the pains to which modern-day archaeologists go to identify remains from photos and documents. In the execution room itself, a panel of glass covers the bullet-pocked wall against which prisoners were shot, near a drain in the floor where blood flowed into. In these rooms, we met a former inmate who had spent a bit less than a year before being sent to a labor camp in Ural. Our guide interpreted for us, and asked if we had any questions. What does one ask a survivor such as this?
LEAVING
Exiting the museum, our group was silent for a while, again pausing to read the names on the walls but this time in a different light. Having only an inkling of the horrors which they suffered even before their terrible deaths, we felt that we were looking through a new lens. This was an experience I recommend and am glad I was able to have, but wish even more did not have to exist. I echo azielinski's superb review of the museum in a warning that this is not appropriate for children.
Recommended:
Yes
Best Time to Travel Here: Mar - May
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pilotpat
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Member: Pat
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