On July 30 organizers and guests of the “Road of Memory 1941-2021” project and local residents assembled at the Kupiškis Ethnographic Museum where museum historian Aušra Jonušytė moderated events.

United States embassy to Lithuania representative Wartenberg welcomed visitors in the name of US ambassador Robert Gilchrist and Lithuanian Foreign Ministry ambassador Marius Janukonis and veteran Conservative Party politician, former minister and MEP Rasa Juknevičienė as well as others participated and spoke at the event whose main organizer was Lithuania’s International Commission to Assess the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes, whose deputy director Ingrida Vilkienė also delivered an address to the audience. Kupiškis regional administration mayor Dainius Bardauskas also spoke.

A procession bearing banners and flags walked to the mass murder site at the Freethinkers’ Cemetery in Kupiškis with marchers bearing flowers, candles and stones inscribed with the names of the murdered. The commemoration included a reading of the names of the victims and descriptions of their lives and families.

Participants returned to the Kupiškis Ethnographic Museum following the ceremony and listened to a description of a new book by Arūnas Bubnys, the general director of the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania, called “The Holocaust in the Lithuanian Countryside in 1941.”

Kupiškis Ethnographic Museum director Jūra Sigutė Jūrėnienė then delivered a short address thanking participants.

Panevėžys Jewish Community chairman Gennady Kofman spoke for himself and in the name of Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky and thanked participants and organizers for this significant and important event in Lithuania. He said that it wasn’t just the Jewish people who lost their relatives, loved ones and friends, but that the Lithuanian people had lost its citizens, the large Jewish community which once lived here and throughout the country. He said we must remember and tell the young people about this, so that the tragedy is never repeated here and in other communities and nations.