This skinhead is holding a poster saying "Lithuania for Lithuanians" during the March 11 nationalist parade down Gedimino Prospect. While the city government has never curtailed the far-right processions, it has bent over backwards to bar pro-gay rights events. Is Lithuania's tolerance of intolerance going too far?

A few weeks ago, some friends and I went out to Vilnius’ Šnekutis microbrewery for some beers to celebrate my return from Paris.  We talked nonsense, made jokes, and generally had a good time for a few hours.  There were some skinheads in the bar, and they were staring us down (keep in mind, here I am generally recognizable as a “foreigner”), but we were ignoring them for the most part.  They kept approaching our table, but they didn’t say anything, so we assumed that everything was fine.  We were wrong.  When we left the bar, they were waiting for us in the street and they immediately attacked my roommates. After a few minutes of screaming and trying to get the bar owner to help us (he ignored the entire situation, getting skinheads drunk must make him a lot of money) while watching helplessly as my friend was being kicked on the ground, it ended.

We called the police and they quickly picked us up. In the police car we learned that this particular bar is a common place for skinheads to gather (it would have been nice to have been told this ahead of time) and the police did all they could to get us to just go home and not press charges.

This included making us wait for an interpreter for two hours, telling us that we could write our statements, but we might as well be writing poetry for all it would matter, telling us that the officers needed to deal with a robbery when there were four officers just sitting in the reception area, making us drink out of the tap because they “don’t have any cups,” ignoring us some more, and refusing to give us a copy of my roommate’s statement that was written by a person who claimed he didn’t speak any English without the benefit of the translator’s assistance.

I was lucky to have a translator and consular officer present when I made my statement the following day. While I have little faith that the police will follow up in any meaningful way, it was nice to have some support during the process from people that truly care about my well-being and who recognize the severity of the crime.

Two days after the attack, I was asked to come in to identify pictures and the police translator was not available. The woman asked me if I spoke Italian or Spanish, and since I don’t we were forced to rely upon gestures and my very, very limited Lithuanian to communicate. There was a man next to me that was writing a complaint or something with the officer at the next desk.

The office was tiny, so we were pretty much sitting in each others’ laps; it was hard not to pay attention to what the other person was doing. About halfway through, after I was done trying with little to no success to explain “she’s thinner now, and has different hair” in Lithuanian, he started talking with the officers half in Lithuanian and half in Russian about how stupid it is to come to a country where you don’t speak the language, I let him talk, because still no one had asked me if I speak Russian, so I thought it best that he get it out of his system.

At the end of my interview, the officer that he was speaking to came over to try to verify the rest of my statement because she had very limited English and my officer had none. Seeing that it was going to take a while, I decided to just speak Russian. After he realized that I understood the things he had been saying about me, the man suddenly remembered that he knew a little English, and tried to translate what she was saying (“call 112 if you see them again”), but even my crappy, American-taught Russian was up to the task without his help. It would have been a lot more helpful an hour before, when he was simply responding to my struggle to communicate with derision.

I can say that I breathed a lot easier when that week was over, and when I made close friends with a can of pepper spray. There was point when I wanted more than anything to leave, to simply go home to where I am not seen as a burden to society because of my nationality, but I am glad now that I waited it out. I have met so many good people in my time here, I don’t want to give up on the entire country because of a few fascist idiots who could as easily be from backwoods America as here in Lithuania.

Charissa Brammer is an American student that has been studying at Vilnius University since the fall. Read more of her writing here.

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Views expressed in the opinion section are never those of the Baltic Reports company or the website’s editorial team as a whole, but merely those of the individual writer.