The Jews of Veisiejai and Lazdijai were shot in Kaktiškės

Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky lost twenty-nine relatives during the mass murders, and only her grandfather and his children survived because of help by rescuers. There are several members of the LJC who are descendants of Jews from Veisiejai, Lithuania, who survived the Holocaust, including: F. Kukliansky, A. Levinsonas, I. Bereznickis, Junona Bereznicky , V. Sideraitė and the sisters R. and L. Ofčinskaitė.

Monument to Holocaust victims in Kaktiškės

Saulius Kuklianskis. the pharmacist in Veisiejai, his wife the doctor Zinaida and their three children Moshe, Ana and Samuelis were living in Alytus when the war began in Lithuania. After the Nazis occupied the country, the family soon lost the young, cared, loving and beloved mother of three Zinaida Kuklianskienė, but the pharmacist and his children survived. The dramatic path to rescue for the family included fleeing occupied Lithuania, living in the Grodno ghetto for a year and a half, flight from Grodno and return to Lithuania, a road filled with danger and the continual fight for survival. After they returned to Lithuania in February, 1943, Saulius, Moshe, Ana and Samuelis hid for a year and half in the forests around Druskininai with the help of residents of the villages of Sventijanskas, Gerdašiai, Vainiūnai, Macevičiai and Bugieda.

Leading tours of Jurbarkas, Nijolė Paulikienė tells tourists about Jews as well, because it is impossible to leave out the story of people who lived here for centuries. The guide gets her information from books and from Jurbarkas old-timers.

The large Jewish community who lived in Jurbarkas are now only commemorated on Kauno street, formerly called Didžioji and Vilniaus streets, where there are signs about genocide locations and graves. When Israeli ambassador Amir Maimon visited our town in June, Jurbarkas residents began to recall the legacy of the Jewish community more intently. At the end of October Israel Day events will be held at the public library, and there are plans for sites in the town to commemorate the memory of the Jews.

Guide and teacher Nijolė Paulikienė has much she can say about the Jews of Jurbarkas. She even dreams of setting up a Jewish museum there and is actively charting the vision for that museum. Individual old-timer residents of Jurbarkas still have memories of the Jews in the card-catalogs of their memories, as do the streets covered over in asphalt and the repainted façades of the Old Town. Before World War II Jews accounted for 42% of the population of Jurbarkas, but after the war only 76 were still alive.

Full story in Lithuanian here.

by Jūratė Juškaitė
manoteises.lt

Historians reckon about 17,000 people were deported from Lithuania during the first Soviet occupation. Cattle cars were sent deep into Russia from June 14 to June 18, 1941, and many of the deportees didn’t survive the first winter. Most people in Lithuania know these facts well, but June of 1941, often called the tragedy of the Lithuanian people, isn’t all that Lithuanian.

Research recently performed by cultural historian Violeta Davoliūtė soon to appear in the book “Population Displacement in Lithuania in the Twentieth Century” (Brill, 2016) attempts to bring the experiences of deported Lithuanian Jews back into collective memory regarding those days in June. The researcher says the narrative of deportations formed during the push for Lithuanian independence in the late 80s and early 90s contained ethnocentric elements and was often too “Catholicized.” Although the official politics of memory seem complicated if only for the widespread “Jewish Communist” stereotype, Davoliūtė says these and similar stereotypes have failed to divide this group of deportees, which is a tight-knit community based on shared experience.

In a recent discussion historian Dr. Arvydas Anušauskas was the first to call the 1941 deportations multiethnic. Why are they called this?