by Julius Norwilla
To mark the 74th anniversary of one of the iconic events of the Lithuanian Holocaust, the infamous Lietūkis Garage Massacre of 27 June 1941, the Kaunas Jewish Community organized the annual memorial event on the site, last Friday 26 June 2015. The massacre, carried out by local Lithuanian “patriots” wearing the white armbands of the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) butchered dozens of Jewish passers-by at a garage on Kaunas’s Vytautas Avenue, using a variety of execution methods, including clubbing to death with crowbars, and particularly, forcing water from high-pressure hoses into bodily orifices of the victims until they burst. A growing crowd, including women holding up their young children to get the best views, cheered them on.
The memorial event was held in the courtyard between streets entered by Miško Street 1 in Kaunas at 4:30 P.M. on Friday, June 26, 2015. The ambassador and staff of the recently established Embassy of the State of Israel came from Vilnius for the event.