The terrible crimes of the Red Army were hidden: they made public the gruesome records on the walls of the prisoners’ cells

In Soviet times, the heinous crimes committed by Red Army men were hidden from the public under nine locks. The veil of secrecy began to fall quite recently, when the Cretans themselves decided to reveal the long-disguised crimes of the Second World War.

From 2019 organized public excursions to the blood-spattered so-called St. The cellars of Antanas’ house, so you can see with your own eyes the carefully disguised former walls of the prisoners’ cells with a wealth of personal records opened by the restorers.

The names, surnames, initials, self-portraits, ships, houses, symbols, even drawings of animals and plants, a bicycle, etc. are carved on the walls, as if in ancient Egyptian temples.

For many decades, in the very center of Kretinga, near the old cemetery, St. For the modern generation, the building called Anton’s house is associated with educational activities. This multi-storey building now houses the Franciscan High School. But the White House has a varied history, and one that few know about.

St. The Antanas palace was built in 1933-1934 by the care of the then provincial of the Lithuanian Franciscan brotherhood, the enlightened father Augustinas Dirvelė (1901-1948). The original purpose of the building was to be a shelter for compatriots who emigrated to the United States during the First World War and returned in old age.

It is true that after the opening of the shelter called the American Palace, only 5 Lithuanians returned to their homeland from the USA, who for 10 thousand. received a one-time payment of litas, full maintenance until the end of his life, a separate room and a place in the parish cemetery. However, due to the threat of war, more compatriots were in no hurry to return to Lithuania. Later, about 10 elderly people from Lithuania, who were looked after by Franciscan nuns, took shelter in the building.

St. At that time, the Antanas Palace was considered the most modern and almost the most luxurious shelter for the elderly in all of Lithuania, because the spacious building was equipped with a high-quality heating system, equipped bathrooms, even a cinema, a billiard room, a chapel and 60 living rooms. Each Lithuanian has a separate room. From some of them it was possible to observe mass in the palace chapel through specially made internal windows.

The Franciscan printing house and book bindery were also located in the same palace, and later the girls’ dormitory-boarding house of the Franciscan Gymnasium was opened there.

Idyllic St. Life in the Antanas cottage turned into hell in the 1940s, when Europe was already shaking from the thunder of the Second World War, and the human welfare institution was turned into a citadel of pain and suffering.

Julius Kanarskas, the historian of the Kretinga Museum, wrote in his book “Features of the History of Kretinga” (2018) that in 1940 June 15 after the occupation of the country by the Soviet Union, its repressive NKVD (translated from Russian: People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs – aut. post.) department took strict measures to prevent the slightest resistance of patriotic forces to the occupier.

St. Anton’s palace was quickly nationalized, and the headquarters of the 105th squad of the NKVD border troops was located there. In the basements and on the first floor, the Red Army installed a secret detention center, places of torture and cells, and a large area around the palace was surrounded by a fence.

The small windows of the basement were barred and blinded to let in as little light as possible and the prisoners would lose their orientation to the time of day. 10-12 people were locked up in cramped rooms, interrogations usually took place at night. Fighters for the freedom of Lithuania were mostly imprisoned and tortured in the death chambers: shooters, former officers, more educated people.

What was going on in the basements and in the area carefully hidden from the eyes of passers-by, barricaded by a fence, was seen only later, in June 1941, by the soldiers of Hitler’s Germany who defended the Soviets.

The image was so gruesome that they even managed to exploit the legacy of the Soviet executioners for public relations.

Even the trees growing on the banks of the Gymnasium pond remind us of the cruelty of the Soviet executioners: the Germans, who later tortured their prisoners very cruelly there, found a metal hoop wrapped around a burnt coastal willow. Next to it were also found mutilated human remains: it is believed that the captives were tortured by burning them alive and then dousing them with water, and this procedure was repeated many times. Most of those buried were found buried under stones (it is believed that they were buried alive).

After taking over the palace covered in the blood of the NKVD executioners, the Germans continued their executions. It is known that the Jews brought from Skuodas and Mosėdis were particularly brutally tortured. Contemporaries say that before they were shot and thrown into a lime pit, which was dug near the palace, they were forced to climb the steep slope of the pond and swim. Those who stayed behind were shot.

St. Over 300 people, both Soviet and Nazi, could have been imprisoned in Anton’s hut, who either died at the place of execution or were taken to other prisons. She was imprisoned for a wide variety of reasons: from attempts to escape across the border, lack of identity documents, alleged collaboration with enemies, to personal revenge or other subjective motives.

For the first time, the underground cells of prisoners, hidden and disguised for a long time during the Soviet era, were discovered in 1989. while repairing the palace.

According to Mr. Kanarskas, who conducted investigations at the time, the builders found records of former prisoners under the plaster walls in four rooms.

“We managed to find recordings made in 1940-1941, so they were made by people tortured by the Soviets, the Gestapo and the SS. Later, it was possible to find contemporaries, Lithuanians who were still alive who were imprisoned there, who claimed that there were more prison facilities. If this is true, not all the secrets of the palace have been solved yet,” he said.

The historian especially remembered the inscription on the wall made by one Pole: “I did a bad thing to escape, but…” Because the Poles went to prison after unsuccessful attempts to escape from the occupied Klaipėda region, presumably because they believed the Soviet propaganda, but when they found themselves in the territory of the USSR, they were caught as “Nazis spies” and imprisoned.

“Inscriptions were also made on the walls by people of French and Belgian nationalities. How they got there is not entirely clear. St. When the Germans settled in Anton’s palace, party and Soviet activists, as well as Jews, were arrested and imprisoned before they could escape. However, the latter were shot very quickly, either on the spot near the lime pit, or further beyond Kretinga,” said the historian.

He managed to find and write down the memories of more than one of the Lithuanian patriots imprisoned there who were still alive.

“The interrogator called two people from Red Army, who, according to the interrogator’s orders, turned my hands behind my back and, putting iron shackles on them, stabbed the finger tips of one hand with needles. This is how I was tortured from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. evening He used very dirty words and called him a German spy. After that, with the help of two Red Army men, he performed the same ceremony as yesterday with the fingers of my other hand. He was tortured for 8-9 hours a day for three days”, – these are the written memories heard from the lips of K. Vyšniauskas.

Since 2019, the Kretinga District Tourist Information Center (TIC) has been conducting themed tours of historical cellars with inscriptions on the walls for pre-registered groups of people. The author of these lines had to visit the dungeons a few years ago, accompanied by the monk Gediminas OFM.

As he led down the angled corridors into the dungeon, the Franciscan pointed to a well in the floor and a metal double-sided hook in the ceiling.

“People said that they used to dive headfirst into that well and were tortured like that. Also – and hanging on this hook,” he said.

After scraping off the surface layers of plaster of the walls in the former cells, the restorers opened entire galleries of records and drawings. Even fish and flowers can be found carved on the walls with shards of glass or shards of glass, which the prisoners specially looked for in the yard during short walks.

A meter-long fishing boat, a smaller one a sailboat, are carefully carved on several wall fragments, so it is not surprising that the walls also contain the inscriptions “Memel”.

Mostly, sensing their sad fate, the prisoners carved their names, surnames, year of birth, places from which they came or came from, what they were imprisoned for (“walked across the border”, “caught at the border”, “tried to escape”, etc.), and in one on the wall you can even find the sad-looking sentence “There is no evil that does not lead to good”… In another, a prisoner (Polish) carved his own tombstone…

There are also dashes or crosses in the boxes marking the days spent in prison: from just a few to several weeks. By the way, there are no Jewish records, because the Jews did not have such a tradition of recording themselves. However, one can find five-pointed and six-pointed stars and swastikas on one wall: even the symbols are mixed.

Those who wish to participate in the tours organized by the Kretinga district TIC “Dungeons of Kretinga. If the walls could speak” please register by phone +370 670 93 890 or e-mail by mail [email protected]. The price for a group of up to 20 people is 100 euros, for a group of 21 or more people – 6 euros per person. More detailed information at www.aplankykkretinga.lt