On 26 January 2010, International Holocaust Day was marked at the Centre for Tolerance of the Vilnius Gaon State Jewish Museum. This year the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp will be commemorated. Sometimes laughter and irony, which were the cornerstones of spiritual resistance in Jewish ghettos, were the only way to survive and not to lose human dignity. Chaplin’s comedy “The Great Dictator” (a 125-minute-long film) made in 1940 was shown. The exhibition “Spiritual Resistance in the Vilnius Ghetto” organised by the Vilnius Gaon State Jewish Museum was on display.  

  The museum director, Markas Zingeris, spoke about the untraditional idea of the event: “Here at the Centre for Tolerance, remembering a well known feature of the Jewish nation, we have decided to break the usually solemn commemorative atmosphere of the events to mark the Holocaust. It is the ability to meet disasters and sometimes to retaliate even against Nazi killers with irony, sarcasm, and satire.” Zingeris spoke about Chaplin’s comedy “The Great Dictator” which is full of realities of World War II.

“The Great Dictator” is the first talking picture by Chaplin. It was made and released in the US a year before America gave up its neutral policy and joined the war. The film was nominated for several Oscars, including the Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Screenplay.

 Present at the event also were the deputy foreign minister of the Republic of Lithuania, Asta Skaisgirytė–Liauškienė, the Israeli Ambassador for Latvia and Lithuania, Chen Ivri Apter, as well as the American Ambassador Anne Elizabeth Derse. They spoke about International Holocaust Day and its commemorations. In his address, the Israeli ambassador Chen Ivri Apter underlined that “the annual report by the Bureau of Fight against Anti-Semitism draws the conclusion that over 2009 the number of anti-Semitic attacks increased, and a new form of anti-Semitism became even more refined and is directed against the idea of the State of Israel.”

The collection of posters on display on the commemoration day consisted of 13 original posters from the museum stocks. A group of partisans, former ghetto prisoners, who had returned to the homeland, discovered them at the end of the summer of 1944. Then many valuable documents of the ghetto were discovered and saved from destruction in the ruins of the Jewish quarters, various hiding places, and among waste printed matter piled at the paper-processing factory. Among them were over 200 posters from the ghetto.

Present at the event “The Comedian against the Dictator” at the Centre for Tolerance also were: Faina Kukliansky, the chairwoman of the Vilnius Jewish Community; the Austrian Ambassador to Lithuania, Helmut Bernhard Koller; Ivan Dantchev, the Bulgarian ambassador to Lithuania; the French ambassador, Francois Laumonier;  Latvian Ambassador Hardijs Baumanis; Belgian Ambassador Serge Wauthier; the first secretary of the Czech Embassy in Vilnius Martina Heranova; the PR officer for the US Embassy, Jeffrey J. Cary; and the cultural assistant of the US Embassy, Jūratė Butkutė.