Photo: Artist Jenny Kagan’s immersive exhibition “Out of Darkness” in Kaunas, Lithuania, July, 2022 (photographer Gražvydas Jovaiša).

Near the site of one of the genocide’s most heavily photographed atrocities, lighting designer Jenny Kagan brings the city’s wartime past “Out of Darkness”

by Matt Lebovic, Times of Israel, October 1, 2022

The 1941 Lietūkis garage massacre in Kaunas, Lithuania, was among the Holocaust’s most heavily photographed aktions against Jews, but many of the city’s current inhabitants have never heard of the atrocity.

On June 27, 1941, a group of pro-German Lithuanian nationalists tortured and murdered at least 50 Jews at the city’s Lietūkis garage. During the massacre, a German soldier took photos of dozens of Lithuanians, including children, cheering while a man called “the death dealer” beat Jews to death with a crowbar.

Among the Jewish men murdered that day was British artist Jenny Kagan’s grandfather, Jurgis Stromas, who owned the Pasaka (Fairytale) cinema in town. At one point during the public slaughter, the “death dealer” climbed atop a mound of corpses and performed the Lithuanian national anthem with an accordion.

by Michael Kretzmer

For the last three years my life has been entirely absorbed in the making of a documentary film that attempts to tell the truth about the Lithuanian Holocaust. This has been a terrible task, an entirely unwanted one, and one that has exacted a significant personal price. Many times I have bitterly regretted taking it on, but once started there could be no turning back: the injustice of what happened to our people, and even more importantly, what is happening today in Lithuania, cannot be ignored.

The most painful task was the journalistic duty to forensically research and report the depraved cruelty of our persecution. Nothing can prepare you for the incomprehensible, sordid detail: the celebratory murder of children in front of parents; the delicate physics of smashing babies’ skulls against trees (thousands of them); the horror carnival of small, terrified girls being loaded onto trucks for deadly rape parties by Lithuanian gangs; the imprisonment of thousands of Jews in their own synagogues and their slow murder either by fire or by starvation and thirst amidst human filth and the stench of their loved ones’ rotting bodies; the beheadings, the immolations, the thousands of deadly humiliations; the destruction of this dazzling 600-year-old civilization–220,000 Jews slaughtered, the highest murder rate in all of Holocaust Europe; and above all, the thought of our depraved Lithuanian tormentors laughing at our pain and humiliation. And the knowledge that the Lithuanian government is still, politely, laughing at us today.

I am a journalist and film-maker by profession but for months I struggled to find the narrative voice that could tell this terrible story. And one day I found that voice. It was obvious, the only voice that matters. The voice of the murdered. This is why I have called my film J’Accuse! It is their cry for justice from the killing pits of Lithuania.

Photo: Arūnas Bubnys, director Lithuania’s Orwellian-named Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania, speaks at a right-wing rally on June 23, 2020, against a backdrop of Lithuanian Nazis Jonas Noreika and Kazys Škirpa. Photo courtesy Dovid Katz.

by Alan Zeitlin

In one scene from the powerful and horrific documentary Baltic Truth, Riga ghetto survivor Marger Vesterman plays the piano to the tune of a song created in the ghetto. He then recalls what the words were: “If you survive, no one has to remind you that you have responsibilities.”

The chilling documentary reminds us that it was not only Nazis who massacred Jews. In this case, Latvians and Lithuanians were all too eager to quench their thirst for Jewish blood, even if it meant shooting neighbors with whom they’d previously celebrated birthdays.

The searing documentary is narrated and hosted by Israeli singer Dudu Fisher. Fisher explains that his mother Miriam was born in Riga in 1932, and that if much of his family hadn’t moved to Mandatory Palestine, he would have been “among the millions of unborn Jewish children.”

An international conference called “Reworking Trauma: Roma and Jewish History Research in the Baltic States and the USA” will be held at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library in Vilnius from 10:00 A.M. to around 5:00 P.M. on Tuesday, September 13. The goal of the conference is to take a closer look at the social, cultural and political mechanisms used by the Jewish and Roma communities to work through trauma experienced during the Holocaust and what significance these mechanisms hold now in the Baltic states and the United States. The national history narrative often lacks space for “small histories,” the memories and stories of marginalized and voiceless minority communities who suffered so gravely from the tragic events of the 20th century. The main goals are to educate the public on the history of the Roma and Jewish communities in our region, to support academic research in this field and to stimulate international academic cooperation in minority, memory and Holocaust studies.

Anthropologist and US Holocaust Museum researcher Krista Hegburg is one of the main speakers and honored guest. She will also speak at panel discussion at the Vilnius Museum at 6:30 P.M. on September 15.

Other speakers include Volha Bartash from Regensburg University, Dovilė Budrytė from Georgia Gwinnett College, Neringa Latvytė from the Vilna Gaon Jewish History Museum and Vilnius Univeristy, Sholem Aleichem ORT Gymnasium principal and psychologist Ruth Reches, Agnieška Avin from Vyautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Anna Pilarczyk-Palaitis from Vytautas Magnus and Eva-Liisa Roht-Yilmaz from Tartu University.

Program: