Press release, 23 September 2014
At the plenary sitting, the Seimas commemorated the 70th anniversary of liquidation of the Kaunas and Šiauliai ghettos. In her opening address, Loreta Graužinienė, Speaker of the Seimas, reminded that the 23rd of September had been marked as a remembrance day. 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, said Loreta Graužinienė. 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, stated the Speaker and invited to observe a minute of silence in memory of those killed.
According to Loreta Graužinienė, we do not only remember and pay tribute to the victims today; we 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, underlined the Leader of the Seimas.
Later, in his address to the audience, Dr Arūnas Bubnys, Director of the Genocide and Resistance Research Department, Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, touched upon the history of the Kaunas and Šiauliai ghettos, which were set up in July 1941 and abolished just after four years in 1944. According to Arūnas Bubnys, in terms of quantity and importance in Lithuania, the Kaunas Jewish community was surpassed only by the Vilnius Jewish community. At first, the Jews were killed by Nazi occupiers and local collaborators in the Seventh Fort, later in the Fourth and Ninth Forts, stated Mr Bubnys. He said that in autumn 1943 the Kaunas ghetto experienced major changes: the ghetto was transformed into a concentration camp. The control over the Jews was tightened even more, maintained the Director. Further on, Arūnas Bubnys reminded of extremely cruel campaigns of child deprivation in both Kaunas and Šiauliai ghettos. This was done in the pretext that the concentration camps were to house only able-bodied men, while children and old people had to be killed. The SS soldiers and Vlasov men, who broke into the ghettos, entered the houses to take away children under 12 and to throw them on buses and trucks, said Arūnas Bubnys. He also added that Šiauliai had one of the most numerous Jewish communities in Lithuania before World War II.
Then, Tobijas Jafetas, Chairman of the Lithuanian Union of Former Prisoners of Ghettos and Concentration Camps and a former prisoner of the Kaunas ghetto, shared the memories of Holocaust survived in Lithuania. Finally, the guests of the event had an opportunity to hear the narration of Polina Zingerienė, former prisoner of the Kaunas ghetto and Stutthof concentration camp.
Rimas Rudaitis, Public Relations Unit, Communications Department, Office of the Seimas,
tel. +370 5 239 6132, e-mail: [email protected]
