As part of the international project Face of Dialogue, Holocaust survivor Sulamita Lev spoke to 7th and 8th graders at the Pope John Paul II Pre-Gymnasium in Vilnius on January 24. She was accompanied by Lithuanian Jewish Community Executive Secretariat and Protocol Officer Monika Antanaitytė. The event began with a presentation by students of Lithuanian Jewish history, the performance of several songs and dancing to Hava Nagila.

Full story in Polish on the school website here.

Full story in Lithuanian on the school website here.

The Lithuanian Jewish Community is publishing a series of articles by the historian Algimantas Kasparavičius, a senior researcher at the Lithuanian History Institute.

Part 4

By their June 25, 1941, meeting, the Provisional Government resolved to “move towards the organization of police in Kaunas, and expand partisan activities in the countryside where gangs of Bolsheviks, Communists and Jews still remain.” [1] On June 26 the PG sent a request to just-arrived Wehrmacht commandant von Pohl, asking: “1) to step-up even more the cleansing operation, 2) to allow our partisan units to operate more widely.” [2] At the same meeting that day acting prime minister professor Juozas Ambrazevičius stated “the partisans of Lithuanian work in contact with the Lithuanian Activist Front and the Provisional Government,” and where military action had already subsided “the operation of the partisans becomes police functions and as sharp-shooters.” [3] These weren’t empty words. The mechanism which had been wound up began to spin. For instance, the Alytus TDA platoon noted in their operations report for the beginning of July that “according to reports from citizens 36 Communists, 9 Red Army soldiers and a larger number of Jews had been apprehended and are in detention.” [4] It’s characteristic the Lithuanian official accurately listed the number of Communists and Red Army soldiers arrested without bothering to count the Jews arrested. If anyone knows at least a little bit about the propaganda content of the calls to action issued by the LAF and has an understanding of the internal logic and semantics of the Lithuanian language, I believe that person has a clear understanding of what that signifies and why the situation was described in this manner and not a different manner in the report by the Lithuanian official.

On July 17, 1941, Alytus district administrator Antanas Audronis reported to Provisional Government interior minister colonel Jonas Šlepetis: “The are carrying out arrests and conducting searches, and fulfilling quotas for Communists, robbers and rumor-mongers. The quotas are turned over to the local German military command. By German order 82 Communists have been shot in the district. There are 389 under arrest and approximately 345 more Communists need to be arrested.” [5] If this document isn’t a typical example of Nazi collaboration, then what does collaboration even mean?

On July 16, 1941, Alytus district police chief and aviation captain Stasys Stasys Krasnickas–Krosniūnas gave a speech to his subordinates: “Jewry, as an inbred people who under the red banner as a cover want to enslave all of humanity through the means of the highest kind of sadism and turn us into animals, has been very quickly dealt with through the radical measures of the führer of the German people. We must consider that this problem has already been solved, but there still appears one or another Lithuanian, even a police officer, who attempts to solve this problem in their own way. I tell you there can not be two different opinions on this problem. There is and should be only one opinion, it must be executed 100%, and it is clearly set out in Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf.” [6]

On November 1, 2005, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution and called upon the world to mark January 27 every year as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On that day in 1945 as World War II was still going on the prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp were liberated. This was the largest Nazi death camp where about 1.5 million people including the elderly and children were murdered, of whom about 1 million were Jews.

Lithuanian is a member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance which actively participates in international programs to combat anti-Semitism. In 1941 Nazi Germany occupied Lithuania and over a few months the majority of the Lithuanian Jewish community had been murdered. Some Lithuanian Jews were sent as labor to ghettos set up in the cities. The Panevėžys ghetto was liquidated on August 17, 1941. About 13,500 Jews were shot. Studies by the International Commission show 200,000 Jews were exterminated. There are more than 200 mass murder sites in Lithuania, and about the same number of old Jewish cemeteries.

The date was marked on January 26 at the Sad Mother statue in Memory Square in the Jewish cemetery in Panevėžys. Participating were Panevėžys mayor Rytis Mykolas Račkauskas, Panevėžys city council member Alfonsas Petrauskas, teachers and students from the Margarita Rimkevičaitė Services and Business School and the J. Miltinis Gymnasium, members of the Panevėžys Jewish Community and city residents. Mayor Račkauskas spoke and laid a wreath, and city council member Petrauskas also spoke. Panevėžys Jewish Community chairman Gennady Kofman recalled the horrible facts of Jewish extermination, Lithuanian-Jewish cooperation and mutual aid, and thanked Lithuanians who rescued Jews. He laid a wreath before the memorial. Jewish calendars from the LJC and stars of David paid for by Panevėžys Jewish Community member Jurij Grafman were passed out to participants. Wreathes and flowers were also laid at the Ghetto Gates monument. A documentary film about the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was screened at the Panevėžys Jewish Community, a conference was held and there was discussion on the facts in the cases of heroic rescuers of Jews.