23 September 201
Members of the Seimas,
Signatories to the Act of Independence,
Members of the Jewish Community in Lithuania,
Ladies and gentlemen,
For many years now, the 23rd of September has been marked as a remembrance day in Lithuanian calendars. This day is to commemorate the Genocide of Lithuanian Jews, during which the majority of the large pre-war Jewish community in Lithuania was exterminated.
The survivors are filled with inexpressible grief when recalling their mothers, fathers, children, relatives, friends, and neighbours, visualising them as they were about to meet their death.
Jews from Vilnius were shot in Paneriai; Jews from Kaunas were shot down in the Ninth Fort, and Jews from Šiauliai were killed in the vicinity of Kužiai. This year we are commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liquidation of the Kaunas and Šiauliai Ghettos. These liquidations were almost the finale of the great tragedy of Lithuanian Jews that had commenced in 1941.
In summer 1944, there remained less than a thousand out of the 30 000 pre-war Kaunas Jewish population, and approximately 500 out of over 6 500 Jewish residents of Šiauliai.
The number of Jews exterminated in Lithuania totalled to 200 thousand, which accounts for 90 per cent of all the then Jewish population in Lithuania.
May I now invite you to observe a minute of silence in memory of those killed.
We do not only remember and pay tribute to the victims today. What have drawn a lesson and know the Holocaust must never be forgotten; it must never repeat itself.
We have to look to the future with hope, to get rid of stereotypes and prejudices and to break down the wall of intolerance. We have to know and understand the history of the Jewish community and the history of Lithuania.
Many books depicting the life of Jewish communities of Kaunas, Šiauliai and Vilnius in 19411944 have been published both in Lithuania and abroad. Recently, a wartime book on the history of the Kaunas Ghetto police has been published in the US. Yesterday, Dr Arūnas Bubnys, Director of the Genocide and Resistance Department of the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, presented to the Jewish Community in Lithuania his new publication titled Kauno geto istorija (En. History of the Kaunas Ghetto).
There currently are 37 people in Lithuania, who experienced the taste of life in the Kaunas Ghetto and who survived in the life or death situation of 28 October 1941. Several dozens of Ghetto survivors have settled in Israel, Canada, the USA and Australia. It is nice to see some of them taking part in our todays sitting, with Tobijas Jafetas, Chairman of the Lithuanian Union of Former Prisoners of Ghettos and Concentration Camps, among them.
The majority of Holocaust survivors are of respectable age now. They are in their eighties, nineties, or even older than that. It is therefore understandable that not everyone can participate in todays commemoration for health or other reasons. Nevertheless, the attitudes of the many survivors, who had endured the horrors of the Holocaust, may well set an example of optimism and vitality.
