This week we mark the anniversary of the liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto (September 23, 1943). Irena Veisaite survived the Holocaust in Lithuania and is now an influential human rights activist. These words come from a speech she delivered at a Holocaust memorial ceremony in Vilnius.
“Straight after the end of the war I instinctively shrank from reminiscing. It would have been unbearable. I lost my mother who was only 35 years old; I lost my grandparents and the whole of my parents’ generation, an infinite number of friends and acquaintances. Their death is impossible to explain and even harder to justify. Where did so much cruelty suddenly come from? I could not comprehend why I, as a Jew, became a marked person, humiliated and hunted. I also could not comprehend why this horrific crime – not only against the Jews but a crime against all humanity – was being hushed up or distorted in the years following the end of the war.”