This week 80 years ago, the liquidation of the Vilnius Ghetto marked one of the darkest episodes of the Holocaust in Lithuania.
Victims of the genocide of Lithuanian Jews will be honoured at a parliamentary session on Thursday.
The anniversary of the liquidation of the Vilnius Ghetto will also be commemorated with a march to the Paneriai Memorial, built on the site of the biggest massacre of Jews in Lithuania.
The event will start at Rūdininkų Square in Vilnius. From there, participants will walk to Vilnius railway station, where they will continue their journey to Paneriai by train. Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė, among other participants, will deliver a speech at the Paneriai Memorial.
According to the International Commission on the Crimes Committed by the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania, the traditional civic initiative The Path of Remembrance, which has been running for more than a decade, is an invitation to all people, but above all to teachers and students, to recall the destruction of the numerous Jewish communities in Lithuania during the Holocaust, and to walk together to the sites of the mass killings along the routes used by the Jewish people on the way to the final destination.
“The aim of such events is to raise public awareness that the Holocaust is not only a Jewish tragedy, but also the loss of Lithuania as a whole – the loss of our country’s intellectual, cultural, political and economic potential,” says Ronaldas Račinskas, the head of the Commission.
On Friday, a commemoration event for the Holocaust victims will be held at Kaunas Ninth Fort.
According to the International Commission’s research, of the approximately 220,000 Jews who lived in Lithuania before the war, around 200,000 perished in the Holocaust.
A Jewish ghetto was established in central Vilnius on September 6, 1941. During the entire period of the ghetto’s existence, almost 40,000 people were imprisoned there. The ghetto was liquidated on September 23, 1943. This day has been designated to commemorate the victims of the genocide of Lithuanian Jews.
At the end of the Second World War, approximately 2,000 Jews remained alive in Vilnius.
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