by Julius Norwilla
This year much of the world commemorates the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945. The day of its liberation, January 27th, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. To mark the day this year, on the 26th of January, the Jewish Community of Lithuania organized three events, as reported in Defending History.
The final event of the day was the book launch for The Šiauliai Ghetto featuring as sole announced speaker its author, Dr. Arūnas Bubnys, director of the Genocide and Resistance Research Department of the Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania; for a critical view of the Genocide Center, as it is known for short, see Defending History’s page and news section on the institution.
There were about eighty people in the community’s elegant Yasha Heifetz Hall, mostly people from today’s Vilnius Jewish community. Among them were a number who have a very personal relationship towards the Šiauliai Ghetto: their family roots are in this city and its region, known in Yiddish and Jewish culture as Shavl. Many have lost most of their families in the Holocaust.