The Holocaust in Lithuania

Today we reached Kaunas. Atlas Obscura alerted me to a Holocaust Memorial in the city. According to its writeup, the Jewish population in Lithuania before World War II was 220,000. It is currently 3,200.

“More than 95% of Lithuania’s Jewish population was massacred over the three-year German occupation—a more complete destruction than befell any other country affected by the Holocaust,” according to a Wikipedia article.

Before World War II, Lithuania’s capital city of Vilnius had a Jewish community of nearly 100,000, about 45% of the city’s population. Over 2/3 of this community was killed within months of Nazi Germany’s occupation of the city, per an article in Wikipedia.

From Atlas Obscura, “Kaunas had a flowering Jewish community. 1/3 of the 75,000 people in the town were Jews and the town was considered a cultural and learning capitol of the Jewish world.” Between 35,000 and 50,000 Jews were executed by the Germans next to Fort IX in Kaunas. We emerged from a tunnel under a major highway to a hill out of which jutted a jarring monument about 100 feet high that commemorates the Jews murdered there.

Information about the Kaunas Holocaust Memorial retrieved 7/18/22 here.

Closer to the Old Town of Kaunas, a particularly egregious massacre occurred near the Lietūkis Garage on June 27, 1941. A German soldier took photographs as a man nicknamed the Death Dealer bludgeoned several dozen Jewish men to death with a metal bar in front of a crowd. There is a small monument near the site.

Photo credit: Niv S on Google Maps

As it says in front of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, “Never stop asking why.”

© 2022 Lynnea C Salvo