VILNIUS, September 26, BNS – Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė on Monday signed a decree to award Life Saving Crosses to 46 people who rescued Jews from the Holocaust during World War II.

Most of them were honored posthumously.

The president honors Jewish rescuers every year on the occasion of the National Memorial Day for the Genocide of Lithuanian Jews, which is marked on September 23 to commemorate the liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto on that day in 1943.

The Nazis assisted by Lithuanian collaborators murdered more than 90 percent of the Lithuanian pre-war Jewish population of around 208,000 during World War II.

Around 3,500 Jews currently reside in Lithuania.