Here's something I found in my journal I wrote while still a Peace Corps volunteer in Kupiskis, Lithuania.Sept 14, 2001:
...Today Gaf and Regina picked me up and we went to Skapiskis. Regina is good at her job. A guide for Jewish people interested in their heritage here. She asks the locals if there are any old people around. Eventually she finds someone who can tell the whole thing. A man named Jonis. Great guy, 80, a character. Healthy! We went into the local cafe/bar, the pensioners received money today. Twelve noon, three tables of the six are full. Vodka bottles, beer bottles, one man sleeps drunk in his own arms, another's eyes roll around like egg yolks (Faulkner), sinister sounds bark around the concrete walls. We are taken to another room. Jonis and a woman who was a Lithuanian language teacher, now retired, begin to talk. When the Russians were here they came into the villages to collect men. They were used to dig defensive lines. The Germans got here so fast it was useless. The Jews saw the German aircraft flying above and knew it was over. That afternoon some fled Skapiskis on bicycles. A few got away. Most were intercepted in the larger communities. In Rokiskis, on the way to Latvia, the militia forced Jews into a pond, jabbing them with sticks if they tried to climb out, beating them, torture. Lithuanians formed this militia, wore white bands on their arms, rounded up Jews, marched them to pits, told them to give them all their money, to take off their clothes, everyone, old women, to humiliate them, then they shot them and buried them with a thin layer of earth, more people would be buried on top of them. Jonis was told by an eye witness that the soil was moving because many people weren't actually dead. He was a young man when this happened, 21. He was gathered with the other young people in town when one of the white bands, carrying suitcases full of Jewish clothing and wearing fur coats walked by them. He pulled a machine gun off his shoulder and fired into the air to scare the kids off. Jonis said the motivation was property and jealousy. The Jews were the shop owners and generally better off. They supported each other and that produced resentment among some Lithuanians. In the community at large, there was an undercurrent of misinformation and rumor about the Jews. Stories about breads made during a major Jewish holiday requiring the blood of a Catholic child. A dead baby wrapped in cotton sheets and rolled over nails. The blood soaked the sheet, which was then cut into small squares and distributed among the Jews for the recipe. That was a story Jonis heard from his grandmother who was in her eighties when he was a small boy. We walked around the village for a while; Regina interviewed quite a few people. They really want to talk, to tell their stories. I think it must be part of the human condition. Stories and story telling. Gaf gave each of these people a gift. Really generous guy. The last thing we did was visit the Jewish cemetery. Hebrew and Yiddish on the stones, old, some 1850, a lot are illegible, much much older...