The Kaunas Jewish Community and the Ninth Fort Museum held a Holocaust commemoration on the morning of September 23. Kaunas students and cultural workers also participated in the civic initiative called “Way of Memory.”

Georgian musician Davit Kldiashvili performed and attendees viewed a Ninth Fort exhibit on the Holocaust.

After the event a group of Kaunas Jewish Community members attended the Holocaust commemoration held in Balbieriškis which also commemorated the vitality of Jewish life in the Lithuanian shtetlakh and Volfas Kaganas, Lithuanian military volunteer and twice recipient of the Order of the Cross of Vytis.

The Vilnius, Jerusalem of Lithuania Jewish Community invites you to the launch of the Russian translation of Aurimas Švedas’s book of interviews with Irena Veisaitė, “Gyvenimas turėtų būti skaidrus” [Life Should Be Transparent], at 3:00 P.M. on September 26 on third floor of the Lithuanian Jewish Community. Both Veisaitė and Švedas’ will be there and discuss the book with the audience, with Olga Ugriumova and Daumantas Todesas moderating. The event will take place in Russian.

by Gediminas Kirkilas

September 23 is the Day of Remembrance of Lithuanian Jewish Genocide. On this day in 1943 the Vilnius Jewish ghetto was liquidated [sic, the ghetto was liquidated over several weeks–trans.]. Behind this fact hides the unusually complex and tragic history of the Jews of Lithuania (Litvaks), the unimaginably painful and tragic personal fates of Jews and their families. Of about 208,000 Jews resident in Lithuania, about 195,000-196,000 were murdered. Every year as we mark dates important to Litvaks, each time, let’s think hard about what hides behind these numbers.

We must continue to learn and teach and learn and teach more about the history of the Litvaks and the Holocaust, to increase our consciousness and sharpen our critical thinking, and to nip in the bud all kinds of right-wing extremism, so that there would be no place for xenophobia, racial and ethnic hatred and everyday domestic anti-Semitism in Lithuanian.

Full text in Lithuanian here.

Memory cannot survive from one commemoration to another. Members of the Commission of Historical Memory are laid here and in pits in another hundred small Lithuanian towns and villages. To them it’s completely clear: no one defended them then. However strange it might seem, they have to be defended today, too. At that point in time one group chose to save people, while the other chose the path of Satan. They told my people in 1941 they would be safe in the ghetto. They lied. Today, eight decades later, as then, again they are telling us persistently that the ghettos were good, and those who helped set them up were heroes, or almost saints. Is there anyone today who will speak up and say clearly and without ambivalence that this is immoral? Who, where, when did they say this?

“History can never be left to the politicians, whether they be democratic or autocratic. History is not the property of a certain political doctrine or regime. History, when it is understood truly, is the symbol of our daily moral choices.” And I would add to these words of the late professor Leonidas Donskis: our attitude towards this tragedy, towards its victims, the rescuers, the desk murderers, its direct perpetrators and their unlimited worship–these reflect the state of our ability to remember. And today there are clear signs there is an attempt to make our memory and our moral choices sick. There is only one way to heal our memory: to tell the truth finally. If we want THEM to not just rest in peace, but in honor and dignity.

I wrote this poem 30 years ago:

by Paulius Jevsejevas

Šiaurės Atėnai (No. 17, 2019)

Antanas Sutkus has photographed a wide variety of people over his career, from famous figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jonas Mekas and Marija Gimbutienė to deaf and blind children living on the margins of society.

Even so, the photography in Pro Memoria disturbed me and wouldn’t allow me to build on earlier experience. Not because of some characteristic of the people portrayed, not because of the artistic choices the photographer made, and not because of my own attitudes as viewer. I am disturbed probably because I don’t have any definite words at hand to describe the general photographic situation I found myself in standing in from of these portraits. As I stood looking at those faces at least two different inner voices appeared and engaged in an unnerving inner dialogue.

On one side, we all now know that the people portrayed in this photographs along with hundreds of thousands of others for several long, seemingly endless years were placed beyond the bounds of society, intentionally separated and finally condemned to death. So these people, unlike other Lithuanian people photographed by Sutkus, these people didn’t have any social status at all. The people in the portraits survived, but I cannot forget all those who were murdered, even if I can’t see them: Every face, hand, glance in the series of portraits stands before me like a living body and at the same like a text which contains a story of the dead.

Full text in Lithuanian here.