There is a period in the history of the town of Balbieriškis (Balbirishok) when more than 50 percent of the population was Jewish. It is important for us to know what happened to the Jewish people in occupied Lithuania and Europe during World War II. It’s important we understand the Holocaust was the mass murder of the Jews, not just Ponar, the Ninth Fort in Kaunas or another Jewish mass murder site. The Holocaust is a tragedy, it is the loss of Jews who lived in Lithuania, Lithuanian citizens who lived in Lithuania and built our nation, while maintaining their own traditions and culture.
To mark the 75th anniversary of this tragedy, on September 23 Balbieriškis primary school principal Stasys Valančius gave a civics lesson to students in grades 5 through 10 to remember the Jewish victims of genocide of the town of Balbieriškis. After lighting symbolic candles and after a hush enveloped the auditorium, the names of Jews who lived here and were brutally murdered were read out loud: Sarah, Yitzhak, Chaim, Dora, Tsila, Riva, Gita, Keyla, Jaakov, Aaron…
Students in the art group aided by the teacher Ona Žvirblienė held an exhibit of drawings, using art to help make the pain and the tragic history more understandable. Representatives from grades 5 through 8, each carrying a stone in hand, traveled to Marijampolė and Prienai to join the citizens’ initiative “Memory Road.” The International Commission for Assessing the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes in Lithuania has been marking this day for 12 years now. Symbolically, in our thoughts, we went down the same road along which the Jews of Balbieriškis were sent to their deaths. The stones of memory, warmed by young hands, were placed at the mass murder site.
We hope that by remembering the innocents who were murdered, by revisiting this tragic page of history, we will become more tolerant to one another, that we will not fan the flames of hatred, and that we will come to understand there is no such thing as someone else’s pain.
Reda Valančienė, teacher