Soldiers from the German Bubdeswehr’s 45th armored brrigade and members of the Maceva Jewish cemetery preservation group spent four days last week cleaning up the old Jewish cemetery and Holocaust monument in Merkinė in southeast Lithuania.

Merkinė is the site of early if not the earliest Jewish settlement in Lithuania.

Brigade commander Christoph Huber, German ambassador to Lithuania Cornelius Zimmermann and Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky visited the cemetery to see the soldiers’ work at a special ceremony for concluding the upkeep mission.

About 130 soldienrs working with people from Lithuania’s Maceva Jewish cemeteries initiative removed moss, polished headstones and cleared brush from the site. Members of Maceva photographed the markers and cemetery as well.

One German soldier stationed in Lithuania since April said: “It’s not an obvious thing to me that I as a German soldier can contribute to the meaningful work by Maceva at Jewish cemeteries. This was an especially moving experience for me, to look at our complicated page of history in Lithuania.”

Speaking at the closing ceremony, Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky said: “The Jews burined in Merkinė don’t have families to tend their graves because their families were exterminated. It is symbolic that soldiers from the German brigade are taking care of their graves today. While the current generation of Germans are not responsible for the horrors of World War II, nonetheless they feel a moral imperative to make amends for the oppression by Nazi Germany. I thank the soldiers and ambassador Cornelius Zimmermann in the name of the Lithuanian Jewish Community for their preservation of the only thing that remains when a person dies, memory.”