Members of the Palanga Jewish Community, representatives of the municipality and local high school students marked the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust Tuesday by visiting a marker commemorating victims at a cemetery there.

“The Holocaust isn’t a past tragedy, it’s a warning of what happens when apathy becomes the norm and hate becomes acceptable. Our duty is not just to remember the victims, but also to protect the truth, which is uncomfortable to some. Remembering isn’t a ceremony, it’s a daily choice,” Palanga Jewish Community chairman Vilius Gutmanas remarked on the occasion.

The seaside resort town has several Holocaust memorial sites with commemorative markers and plaques. The local cemetery has a stele marking where 106 Jews and 5 Lithuanians murdered in 1941 were reburied. Jewish sites including the Great and Lesser Synagogues and a site connected with Dr. Lazar Gutman are also marked now, as are two pre-Holocaust Jewish cemeteries.

Nazi Germany invaded Palanga on June 22, 1941. on June 26 over the course of two hours they arrested the entire Jewish community. Men were separated from the women and children on June 27 and taken to Birutė’s Park. In the southern part of the park they murdered 106 Jews and 5 Lithuanians accused of collaborating with the Soviet Union. The remaining 300 or so women, children and elderly were murdered on the night of October 11 and morning of October 12 in the Kunigiškiai Forest.

The first mass murder site was exhumed by Soviet authorities in 1958 and the remains were reinterred at the Palanga municipal cemetery. A single headstone there marks the mass grave.

January 27 is the anniversary of the Soviet Red Army’s liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1945. UNESCO proposed it as a commemorative day in 2005.