Lithuanian president Gitanas Nausėda Thursday attended a procession and ceremony to commemorate the victims of the Grosse Aktion, the 24-hour period during which almost 10,000 people taken from the Kaunas ghetto were murdered. The commemoration included a “Road of Memory” march which the Lithuanian president said symbolically linked hundreds of locations all over Lithuania.

He and other marchers walked in silence along the route by which almost 10,000 victims were marched from the Kaunas ghetto to their deaths at the Ninth Fort exactly 80 years ago.

“Standing here, we understand better the catastrophe whose true dimensions we will never fathom, and which wiped out Jewish lives in many towns and cities in Lithuania and other countries,” Nausėda said at the Ninth Fort Memorial Complex.

The president said we should remember those who did not err in that darkest hour and chose courage and dignity, and those who survived the horrors and yet were able to spend the rest of their lives spreading love.

He named Stefanija Ladigienė as one of those bright souls, a woman who gave safe haven to one of the survivors of the Grosse Aktion, Irena Veisaitė. The late professor Veisaitė spent her life talking about and teaching about what was saved from the Holocaust and how much was lost.

“Irena Veisaitė has said that if you want to murder a thousand people, you only need two soldiers with machine guns, but if you want to save one person, that requires the extraordinary courage and sacrifice of many individuals. I wish you to be that many, for those single individuals. Let humaneness and empathy always lead us, and let the Catastrophe never happen again,” the Lithuanian head of state said in his speech.

Photos by R. Dačkus courtesy Lithuanian President’s Office

LRT.lt