Atavism and the Lithuanian Holocaust

1941 Nazi propaganda poster in Lithuanian language.
Top: "A Jew is your eternal enemy."
Bottom: "Stalin and Jews -- one big gang of scoundrels!"

I'm excited about our trip to Lithuania this Spring and having been trying to come up with a bucket list for our time in Vilnius. In doing so I read this book: The Hill, by Antanas Jonynas. It is the story of the murder of Dr. Schmidt and his family by his patients and neighbors during the Lithuanian Holocaust. Though he was the only physician in Kraziai and had served the people well, he was a Jew. That was enough.

In June of 1940, the Soviets occupied Lithuania and initiated a redistribution program that seized the land of local farmers, and exiled 36,000 Lithuanians to Siberia and Soviet Central Asia. When the Germans displaced the Soviets in June of 1941 they disbanded the unpopular Soviet programs and won a measure of support from the locals. In place of Soviet programs was a pogrom of ethnic cleansing of Jews in Lithuania.  During the 3 year Nazi occupation 200,000 Jews were murdered with the complicity of the Lithuanians themselves.  This represented 94% of Lithuanian Jews, the highest percentage of any Nazi-occupied country in Europe. When the Red Army returned in 1944, the details of the suffering and injustices heaped upon the Jews were veiled and minimized behind the iron curtain and the Soviet oppression resumed in earnest.*

Antanas Jonynas makes no excuses for the good Christians of Lithuania and the role they played in the murder of their neighbors.  But he did describe the ease with which the nation slipped into complacency and complicity in one of the greatest horrors of the modern era.

Some dark forces were so terribly strong that, once awakened, they created waves that were nearly impossible to resist. If only all people would rise together and say no to violence then everything would stop--the live and burning hearts would restrain and subdue the bloody force all at once. Yet for some reason, the hearts fearfully crouched down and shrank, and people got swept into that wave. A paralysis of conscience, and attack of fear took hold of people and they were unable to resist any longer--and they fell, downed by the wave, or helplessly allowed themselves to be swept away by it. 

This wave of dark violence must have had something devilishly tempting, poisonously attractive, that lured many people and befuddled their minds. What was it? An atavism of the human animal, the revenge of the animal instincts against the centuries-long self-liberation of humanity from their terrible rule? Was it avarice? Was it an orgy of passions that yearned for the most bestial satisfaction and self-defilement?

The Lithuanian Holocaust is hauntingly familiar to the horrible violence that destroyed Nephite civilization at the end of the Book of Mormon. Mormon looked on helplessly as his people were similarly swept away 1500 years earlier:

And it is impossible for the tongue to describe, or for man to write a perfect description of the horrible scene of carnage which was among the people, both of the Nephites and of the Lamanites; and every heart was hardened, so that they delighted in the shedding of blood continually (Mormon 4:11).

It can be very discouraging to look around today and realize that these dark forces still remain strong. The poisons are more attractive than ever. Just as in times past, these forces use the alluring dark arts of fear, intimidation, violence and greed to paralyze conscience. Today people are still being swept away by violence, but also by other atavistic traits of the natural man: lust, idolatry and pride.  King Benjamin's beautiful description of how to halt the degeneration towards godlessness gives me great hope:

For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father (Mosiah 3:19).

Mormon went on to describe how King Benjamin's people succeeded in putting off the natural man and "had no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually (Mosiah 5:2). Though Mormon's people refused the Balm of Gilead that would heal their wounds, Mormon himself remained optimistic. This unfailing confidence that good will triumph over evil has been fundamental to the message of every prophet that has spoken since. Several years ago when President Hinckley was asked by a Protestant minister about how he felt about things he said:

I feel optimistic--guardedly so, yes, because of the extent of evil in the world. But, on the basis of what I see, goodness is gaining, and the work of the Lord is growing in strength and power.

I hear this optimism burst forth in every General Conference and in every Sacrament Meeting. As we incrementally beat back and subdue the natural man through the atonement, we come to feel this optimism in spite of the carnage all around. It's arguably the only way we can hope to attain peace in a terribly evil world.
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* see an the Preface of this book by it's translator, Yuval Lirov, for an excellent summary of the Lithuanian Holocaust 

Searching For Peace

Denisovich - by Leanne Rutter

I've been reading The Second World War (Antony Beaver) and been astounded at the magnitude of the suffering and hardship of the people that were caught up the the conflict. I had never known how unspeakably evil the likes of Hitler, Stalin and the leaders of the Imperial Army of Japan were until reading the details of their atrocities. It kind of shakes my faith in human decency to realize that these evil few were able to perpetrate the murder of millions with good propaganda and artful manipulation of people that all knew better. It's not exactly light reading, so I took a break by reading an inspiring work by a man that lived through these horrors and came through with his faith intact.

Fifty years ago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and let the light of day shine on the injustices of the Soviet GULAG (here for a related post). This book was almost impossible for me to put down and it still has me thinking. In the final minutes of his day, Ivan Denisovich chats with his bunkmate, Alyosha the Baptist. In a world of injustice and suffering, Alyosha was the one man in the camp that was at peace; his faith in Christ gave him hope for the world to come. Even though Alyosha's faith, hope and love were evident, his life remained hard--Ivan Denisovich thought it even harder than the other 'zeks'. Yet Ivan Denisovich concluded: "His voice and his eyes left no doubt that he was happy in prison." He may have been the only one.

It is sobering to realize that though we view Jesus Christ as the Prince of Peace, he warned his disciples that they would have tribulation in this life. 

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. (Matthew 10:34)

 Yet Christ's message promised peace because he had overcome the world and his followers had hope to enter into his rest in eternity.

These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world (John 16:33)

Moroni referred to men like Alyosha as "peaceable followers of Christ" (Moroni 7:3). Though his world gave him more than his share of the tribulation that Christ promised, he was still at peace within.  Alyosha's faith, hope and charity allowed him to overcome the trials and disappointments of his world (Moroni 10:20-23).

One of my favorite hymns is Where Can I Turn For Peace (Hymns, 129; lyrics by Emma Lou Thayne; music by Joleen G. Meredith; here and here to hear it). 

Where can I turn for peace,

Where is my solace ,

When other sources cease to make me whole.

When with a wounded heart, anger, or malice,

I draw myself apart, 

Searching my soul

Where, when my aching grows,

Where when I languish,

Where, in my need to know, where can I run?

Where is the quiet hand to calm my anguish?

Who, who can understand

He, only One.

He answers privately,

Reaches my reaching,

In my Gethsemane, Savior and Friend

Gentle the peace he finds for my beseeching.

Constant he is and kind

Love without end

Though peace often seems elusive, we are so blessed to know that through Christ it remains within our grasp. We need not look far to see those that have found it.

Solzhenitsyn & Mormon: Parallel Perspectives

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)
Taken while a prisoner in a Kazakhstan Gulag

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970 (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago).   A former Red Army captain, he was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp in 1945 for making derogatory comments about Joseph Stalin in a private letter to a friend. After being interrogated and tortured at Lubyanka prison in Moscow, he was sent to a Gulag in Kazakhstan to work and suffer. 

After the death of Stalin in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev assumed power. He ordered the release and exoneration of Solzhenitsyn in 1953, whereupon Solzhenitsyn secretly began documenting the horrors of the Stalinist regime and Gulag system. After the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, Khrushchev used this popular book to exploit public sympathy in his attempts to purge the stains of Stalinism from the USSR.

Solzhenitsyn became instantly famous. His ordeals had taken him through a broad spectrum of the stations of life: impoverished peasant, university student, Red Army captain, political prisoner, secretive dissident and national celebrity.  Though he lived life both as victimizer and as victim, in the end, he found himself embracing the principles of liberty and Christianity.  It is another great story affirming the ability of men to rise above the wreckage by finding peace through Christ.

In reading Solzhenitsyn's story, I found a fascinating quote that harmonized with my current reading in the Book of Mormon:

Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." *

Examples of people forgetting God and suffering the consequences of godlessness and unrestrained evil are so numerous that you can’t begin to list them all. But Solzhenitsyn's comment reminds me of Mormon’s powerful eye-witness account of a great people that met a similar fate.

And my soul was rent with anguish, because of the slain of my people, and I cried:  O ye fair ones, how could ye have departed from the ways of the Lord! O ye fair ones, how could have rejected that Jesus, who stood with open arms to receive you! Behold, if ye had not done this, ye would not have fallen. But behold, ye are fallen, and I mourn your loss. (Mormon 6:16-18)

Mormon's account of the final struggles and destruction of the Nephite people is almost overpowering in its sadness (see Mormon 2:11-15).  In some ways it surpassed the suffering seen in Solzhenitsyn's day, since it resulted in the disappearance of the Nephite civilization. In both cases, what makes the stories so sad is that the destruction was so needless. To turn from God is to trust in men; left to their own devices, men can do great evil.

In an ironic footnote, the need for men to root out their inner evil was emphasized by an unlikely messenger that played a pivotal role in Solzhenitsyn's life: Nikita Khrushchev. In a speech defending One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to the Politburo, Khrushchev (of all people) warned of the potential we all have to harbor great evil within us:

"There's a Stalinist in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil." **

Unlike Solzhenitsyn,*** Khrushchev never came to know that it is impossible to fully root out our inner evil without the atonement of Jesus Christ. Today it seems that history is doomed to repeat itself as men rush to forget God. As they turn away from the light of his gospel, they turn to darkness. Unfortunately, this darkness is the perfect environment for the Stalinist within us to awaken and flourish.

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* Edward E. Ericson, Jr., "Solzhenitsyn – Voice from the Gulag," Eternity, October 1985, pp. 23–4

** Peter Benno, "The Political Aspect", in Max Hayward and Edward L. Crowley, eds., Soviet Literature in the 1960s (London, 1965), p. 191
*** When asked if Russia had simply replaced the evils of socialism with the evils of capitalism, Solzhenitsyn said: "In different places over the years I have had to prove that socialism, which to many western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as "we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology". The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion. This is one point. Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive." (Joseph Pearce. "An Interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn." St. Austin Review 2 no. 2 [February, 2003])

Stripling Armies

My recent visit to the American invasion beaches of Normandy was unbelievably moving.  I'd recently finished Stephen Ambrose's best-seller D-Day to try and be ready for the experience. Despite almost 600 pages of minute by minute detail about the invasion, I wasn't remotely prepared. Our guide was simply fantastic and I can't imagine trying to do this without someone like him (Eric Le Deux-Turnbull) to put it into perspective (more on this another day).

A haunting picture of SS-Panzergrenadiers Sepp Bund, Klaus Schuh and Günther Hamel of Regiment 25  (12 SS-Panzerdivision “Hitlerjugend”) on June 12, 1944 in the orchard of the Abbaye d'Ardenne near Caen, Normandy. They had just been awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class for destruction of  a British tank using only their MG42 on June 9, 1944. Only Hamel survived the War. (Sources: i & ii).

While in France, I was also doing some reading the closing chapters of Alma in anticipation of my Sunday School lesson on Helaman's Army. This morning at 4:00 AM (still on French time . . . ) I was struck with the contrasts between two stripling armies.

In June 1943, Adolf Hitler exulted with the formation of the 12th SS-Panzer Division Hilterjugende. By the fall of 1943, training of 16,000 recruits from the Hitler Youth movement was complete. Many of the recruits were so young that they were issued sweets rather than tobacco and alcohol as part of their regular rations. These striplings had grown up in the propaganda programs of Nazi Germany and were fanatically committed to the cause. From their mother's knees they were taught to trust their Fuhrer, and were prepared to die for the Fatherland. The division had been equipped with the finest weaponry that Nazi Germany had to offer and had been extensively trained with innovative techniques. The Hitlerjugende was led by officers and NCO's that had proven themselves on the eastern front; it enjoyed a camaraderie and morale that was unusually strong.  Hitler moved 12th SS-Panzer Division Hilterjugende to Caen, Normandy in March 1944 to help defend the European continent from the coming Allied Invasion.

In June of 1944, the 12th SS-Panzer Division Hilterjugende played a critical role in the Battle of Normandy.  They faced the Canadians and British after they landed on the beaches at Juno and Gold and then moved inland to take the rail and road hubs at Caen. Hitler's stripling division offered up fanatical resistance and a fight to the death mentality.  They were without doubt the most effective German fighting force in France.  Unfortunately, their war crimes against unarmed British and Canadian POWs is well-documented as well.  Good soldiers are not always good people.

On the other hand was Helaman's army of two thousand and sixty young men. Their Ammonite parents were willing to sacrifice their lives instead of spilling the blood of their enemies; the sons made a seemingly polar opposite covenant to take up arms and sacrifice their lives in the defense of their country.

And they were all young men, and they were exceedingly valiant for courage, and also for strength and activity; but behold, this was not all—they were men who were true at all times in whatsoever thing they were entrusted.              Alma 53:20

Now they had never fought, yet they did not fear death; and they did think more upon the liberty of their fathers than they did upon their lives; yea, they had been taught by their mothers, that if they did not doubt, God would deliver them. And they rehearsed unto me the words of their mothers, saying: We do not doubt our mothers knew it.        Alma 56:47-48

And as the remainder of our army were about to give way before the Lamanites, behold, those two thousand and sixty were firm and undaunted. Yea, and they did obey and observe to perform every word of command with exactness; yea, and even according to their faith it was done unto them; and I did remember the words which they said unto me that their mothers had taught them.      Alma 57:20-21 

Both armies were very young and, on the surface, hardly intimidating as a fighting force.  Yet both armies were committed, firm and fearless; they meted out death and destruction to their enemies with incredible effectiveness. Both had been taught to trust their leader and to obey with exactness and without hesitation.

The ultimate difference was who they chose to follow.  The stripling Hilterjugende followed Adolf Hitler, one of the most evil men the world has ever known.  They were committed to the principles of Nazism, which called for the conquest of it's neighbors and the utter destruction of Jew, Poles, Russians and others deemed racially inferior. By the end of July 1944, their ranks were decimated and numbered just over 2000. In contrast, the stripling Ammonites selected Helaman, the prophet of God, to be their General. They were committed to God and the principles of liberty for all men. They held firm not for several weeks, but for many months and in a variety of trials and hardships that included hard-fought battles, isolation and near starvation. Because of "their exceeding faith in what they were taught to believe", not one soul was lost on the field of battle.

But behold, they have received many wounds; nevertheless they stand fast in that liberty wherewith God has made them free; and they are strict to remember the Lord their God from day to day; yea, they do observe to keep his statues, and his judgments, and his commandments continually; and their faith is strong in the prophecies concerning that which is to come.    Alma 58:40

We like to feel assured that we are not so vulnerable to be led astray as were the Germans under Hitler’s National Socialist German Worker’s Party. But Hitler, like so many of the forces that threaten our souls, was a master of misinformation, propaganda and praying on the weaknesses of others when they were most vulnerable. Furthermore, he was content to make his gains by degrees.   The only way we can be confident in our ability to stand as firm as Helaman’s army is to be uncompromising in our commitment to God and follow his commandments with exactness. This is the stuff that ‘exceeding faith’ is made of, and the stuff that makes you invincible to your foes, no matter the odds.