VILNIUS (Reuters) – It is not your run-of-the-mill museum. Exhibits include water torture cells and banal documents ordering the execution of prisoners.
Located in the former KGB headquarters in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, the Genocide and Resistance Center offers visitors a chilling first-hand look at a dark chapter in the Baltic state’s past.
Better known as the KGB Museum, it is the only one of its kind in the former Soviet Union.
“This building stands as a symbol of Lithuania’s suffering,” said museum director Eugenijus Peikshienis. “Almost every Lithuanian family suffered during the Soviet occupation.”
Six years after Lithuania celebrated its newly-acquired independence by dynamiting a huge Lenin statue across the road, the center attracts more than 10,000 visitors each year. Many of the guides are former inmates.
Eerie displays depict chilling past
Built in 1899 to serve as a courthouse in what was then czarist Russia, the sprawling building was appropriated by the dreaded NKVD, the KGB’s predecessor, when dictator Joseph Stalin snuffed out Lithuania’s independence in 1940.
Used by the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation from 1941 to 1944, the NKVD returned in 1944 after the advancing Red Army swept back into Lithuania.
That initiated a new wave of terror from 1944 to 1953, which saw some 350,000 Lithuanians packed into cattle cars and shipped to Siberia.
In the same period, 15,000 people suspected of anti-Soviet activities were brought to the NKVD building in Vilnius for questioning. More than 700 were shot, and what is believed to be their remains have been uncovered in a mass grave a few kilometers from the city center.
“Many of the people brought here were tortured in the cells in the basement,” said Peikshienis.
Sleep depravation was a favorite method of extracting information. In the two water isolation cells, prisoners had to stand on a cement slope built into a wall to avoid standing in a room flooded with cold water several centimeters deep. Falling asleep meant toppling into the water and a rude awakening.
In another basement cell used for interrogation purposes, padded walls muffled the victims’ screams. Prisoners who violated the rules were locked in the unheated and windowless solitary confinement cell for up to seven days. Their daily ration of 300 grams (10.59 ounces) of bread and a half liter (about a pint) of water was pushed though a tiny slot in the heavy wooden door.
Famous inmate
The prison’s inmates included former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Arrested in Vilnius in September 1940 for heading a Zionist youth organization, he was detained in the NKVD building for several days of questioning and later transferred to another prison.
In an ironic twist of history, he was deported to Siberia one week before Hitler’s June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. That trip probably saved his life. More than 90 percent of Lithuania’s prewar Jewish population of 220,000 perished in the Holocaust.
Begin’s NKVD file is one of thousands now stored in the KGB archives.
“The KGB personnel who fled the building in 1991 only shredded and burned documents implicating themselves and those who worked for them,” said the museum’s deputy director, Virginija Rudiene. Several bags of shredded documents are on display in the museum.
“But from the earlier periods, most of the documents on prisoners are intact,” she said.
One of the files is that of Adolfas Ramanauskas, 1918-1957, a leader of the “Forest Brothers,” Lithuanian partisans who waged guerrilla war against the Soviet military until 1962. Arrested in October 1956 and shot in November the following year, his prison photo and execution order are displayed outside the grim confines of his former cell.
The building may still yield more grisly secrets.
“We think this was the room where condemned prisoners were shot,” said Rudiene as she pointed to a bullet-sized hole in a dank, dark room with a low curved ceiling.
The room is closed to the public as archeologists begin digging to see what lies beneath the floor.
“This room is not included in any KGB map of the building, and they built a second, thick cement floor over the original floor,” she said. “They must have had something to hide. We are going to find out what it was.”