The images burned into the minds of contemporaries encompassed the crowds of leftists, Communists and Jews welcoming the troops with flowers, a contrast to the sullen, sometimes hostile, but also curious Lithuanians — the resentful silent majority. But it is also noteworthy that the first hours of the invasion are described as a divisive shock to the society, albeit in a different context, by Jewish memoirs as well.

Sometimes, the clichés of flower-throwing Jews who welcomed the Bolsheviks (1940), or the flower-tossing Lithuanians who greeted the fascists (1941), are noted with sadness more than rancor. A Lithuanian officer remembers the day he escorted Soviet tanks into the town of Plungė:

When we reached the outskirts… I observed that quite a few people had gathered, mostly the town’s Jews. Since I was first in line, they assumed that I was the commander of the Soviet tank force and showered flowers both on my car and the tanks which followed. The blossoms were fresh, the shouts and greetings in Russian. True, not everyone did this, but such exalted enthusiasm was shown especially by young Jewish boys and girls.

I watched as the excited young Jews leaped into the Lithuanian gardens, tore up the flowers and threw them on my car and the Soviet tanks which crept along behind me. A trifle? Perhaps, but the impression then was horrendous, it burned in the mind.

One part of Plungė’s population exulted, the other wept. I saw how a young Lithuanian farm girl sobbed as the Jews uprooted her flowers. It seemed as if two peoples had split up, separated, never to live in peace again. And these momentary images are so ingrained in my memory that I can still see them today, forty-four years later.¹⁴

Naturally, there were non-Jews among the flower-throwers in the accounts of those first hours, but the Jews stand out in the collective memory, and not only among anti-Semites or “nationalists.”¹⁵

[…]

Police reports indicate that, just as some Jewish citizens took the opportunity to repay past slights utilizing the Soviet umbrella, so “there is talk among Lithuanians and Poles that, if the Germans would come, the Jews would suffer greatly.”¹⁸

In the new geopolitics of hatred each side had a foreign threat with which to bash the other. The political middle ground, where moderate leaders of both communities could meet, narrow during the best of times, had now vanished.¹⁹

Fierce ethnic antagonisms, expressed in accusations of “Jewish power” and betrayal by ethnic Lithuanians, who, in turn, suffered charges of fascist leanings by some Jews, intensified after the farcical elections to the People’s Diet (Liaudies Seimas) in July 1941. Even anti-Communist Jews initially succumbed to the prospect of improved status in the new geopolitics: “…we as Jews had no choice: under Germany we were doomed, under Russia we were free.”²⁰

Describing the Stalinist occupation as both destructive of a community’s religious, economic and cultural life and as a carrier of freedom and civil rights in the same breath, as we see in some Jewish memoirs, seems, at the very least, a bizarre incongruity.

[…]

In general, during 1940–1941 the country’s national communities, Lithuanians, Jews, Germans and Poles, turned inward as their geopolitical orientations became ever more incompatible.

Since most Lithuanians had underestimated, and many even approved, the growing anti-Semitic atmosphere of the 1930s, they tended to downplay the Jews’ very real fears. Even as some angrily threatened their Jewish neighbors with Hitler, few could have fully grasped the [Axis’s] capacity for devastation.

(Emphasis added.)

A partially unrelated note: when it comes to (English) discussions about Lithuania in the short twentieth century, I have noticed that works with the phrase “Lithuanian communists” tend to be somewhat more mature in content, tone or presentation than works that lack the phrase entirely.