A plaque commemorating Samuel Kukliansky, attorney and professor of law, was unveiled on the outside of the house in which he lived until the Holocaust in the village of Veisiejai in the Lazdijau region of Lithuania last week.
His daughter and Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman and attorney Faina Kukliansky attended the unveiling ceremony with other members of the family, as well as the person who initiated the plaque, Zenonas Sabaliauskas, and a large contingent of local residents.
“Veisiejai is a special place for me. My grandfather Saulius Kuakliansky, a chemist and pharmacaist, lived here. Here stands the home to which my grandmother, doctor Zisle Kukliansky,, never returned. That made today, when a plaque is being unveiled commemorating my father, law professor and attorney Samuel Kukliansky, one of excitement as well as mixed feelings. I want to thank my children and grandchildren for being there for me on this day of difficult memories and experiences, and for holding dear our family history and dor, I hope, passing it on to their children. I am very grateful also to alderman Zenonas Sabaliauskas for the beautiful idea of commemorating the footsteps left by the Kukliansky family in Veisiejai, and I am grateful to the many people who gathered here for this. Seeing them, the hope returns that those dark times perhaps will not return again,” Faina Kukliansky said.
Following the ceremony, attendees travelled to the Kuktiškės Jewish cemetery about 20 kilometers outside Veisiejai to visit the mass grave there. In November of 1941 Germans and Lithuanians murdered 1,535 Jews there.
