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If you were to list your top 10 travel experiences, chances are that a museum dedicated to genocide wouldn’t rate a mention. Yet every year, thousands of travellers visit the likes of Hitler’s concentration camps or Nelson Mandela’s former prison cell and here, in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, the Museum of Genocide Victims (aka the ‘KGB museum’) is high on the local tourism board’s ‘must-see’ list.

Set in Vilnius’s legal district, just off the city’s most chic street, Geodarmius, the entrance to this genteel 19th-century building is low-key. Just a plaque and an open door. There’s no sense of what’s inside, and certainly nothing of the violent, life-destroying decisions made in its rooms.

You should visit Lithuania’s fairytale castles, soaring cathedrals and medieval streets, but not all tourism is glamorous and relaxing. The museum, its walls lined with granite blocks with the names of massacred resistance fighters, makes no apology for its content – but don’t we travel to learn?

The day I visited was warm, but even today, the foyer was chill and damp, its thick stone walls cold and dead to the touch. I stepped inside and straight away, the museum’s message was clear and blunt: “This exhibition…shows how Moscow, with the help of local collaborators, destroyed gradually the sovereignty of the state, ruined the system of state power and administration, implemented communist ideology and deported and imprisoned people”.

Life in 20th-century Lithuania reads like a recurring nightmare: after a century under imperialistic Russia and brief German occupation in WW1, the little Baltic state, which borders on Poland, Belarus and Latvia, was invaded by the Soviet Union in 1940 and the deeply committed Catholic country was declared a Soviet Socialist Republic. Up to 11,000 people were arrested in one year, many dying of hunger and insanity.

It then became the front line in the war between the Soviets and Hitler’s Germany. Independence was declared in 1941, but then, after barely a breath of freedom, Germany abolished the provisional government and incorporated Lithuania into the Third Reich. But still, there was no hope: as Hitler’s grip loosened, the Soviets reentered Lithuania in 1944, dragging it into a nine-year Partisan War, during which 22,000 partisans, or freedom fighters, were killed: more than a thousand were murdered in the bleak execution chamber in this building’s basement.

At time, the classical whitewashed building served as the office of the KGB and the head of the invading government, with administration offices from street level up. From street level below, the basement is still divided into rows of cells that housed the victims of these wars. Incredibly, the last prisoners were released in 1987, most protestors of the Russification of Lithuania, the country finally declaring an uneasy independence in March 1990, though Russian troops didn’t leave for another three years.

Snapshots of the disappeared are pinned to walls on the courtyard outside the museum, their black-and-white faces identified by their names, printed below.

The walls are also lined with photographs of freedom fighters in their winter camouflage clothes – soiled white overalls that blended in with the harsh, snowy landscape and photographs and poems from unknown fighters. One is inscribed to his love: “For a lasting memory, Adelyté. You will recall me some day, when I am not in this world. Vytantas.”

The average lifespan of a freedom fighter was two to three years.

This late afternoon, there were perhaps a dozen people in the museum – a young Asian traveller, a silent couple, a quartet of unnaturally cheerful Germans calling out to each other as they moved between the displays of guns, letters, rusty knives and grainy, telling photographs.

By far the most shocking of the photographs was the collage of faces of dead patriots, blown up larger than life so you could see their tortured faces as their bodies were laid out, lined up on display – eyes burnt out, every mouth open, clothes torn off, often their guns laid across their chest. Heads were caved in, their faces bruised and blackened. The faces of death stare down from the wall.

“The sight of the dead bodies of partisans dumped in town squares remains in the memories of the postwar generation,” reads the inscription.

There was no justice: those who refused to eat were force-fed. Those who went hungry were starved to death. Prisoners were either crammed in cement cells in the dark with the windows painted out, or with a bright, bare bulb that was never switched off.

Incredibly, two partisans escaped to the West in 1947, seeking help for the guerilla war with information about Soviet activities and a letter to their spiritual father, the Catholic Pope Pius XII. They returned to continue the fight, but were captured. Their death masks reported their fates: “Arrested by the MGB (Ministry for State Security), he became an agent.” It is difficult to imagine what violence was done to the men to make them change.

The museum trades on our love of the macabre: the padded cell, the water torture chamber, the solitary confinement room.

The water torture room is a concrete cell with a concave floor and a small pedestal, just large enough for a person to stand on. The prisoner would stand on the plate for hours until they lost their balance and fell into the icy water around them.

Suddenly, as I was looking at these grim cells, I realised that it had been many minutes since I heard the jolly Germans. I stopped, and listened. There was not another sound. I checked my watch. The museum had been closed for the past 15 minutes. Could it be I was locked into a prison?

I felt my heart thud loudly and I started to walk purposefully back up the corridor. Past the water torture cell. Past the solitary confinement cell. Past the padded cell, with the fraying, graying straightjacket pinned to the wall. At the sight of that binding suit with its long arms, I started to walk faster. Panic ovetook me and I started to jog, then faster, and a thousand ghosts rushed up behind me and breathed down my neck.

My skin prickled and together we ran down the empty corridor, my shoes thudding on the concrete till I reached the peeling staircase which I leapt up, two stairs at a time, to come face-to-face with a small, moustached man with a briefcase, who stared at me a moment, then walked to the front door.

I needed to talk to someone, to touch someone living, but he looked back at my banal question in English, shook his head and continued, wordlessly, out the door and into the warm evening. I followed, leaving the ghosts behind. They are still there.

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