The annual 'Road of Memory' march will take place in Vilnius on Friday to honour Holocaust victims in Lithuania.
Participants will walk from the city centre to the Vilnius railway station, travel by train to Paneriai – on the outskirts of the capital where tens of thousands of Jews were murdered during the Second World War – and continue on foot to the Paneriai Memorial for a remembrance ceremony.
Organisers describe the annual march as an invitation for all people of goodwill, particularly teachers and pupils, to remember Lithuania’s once-flourishing Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust, retracing the paths along which Jews were forced to their deaths. The country has more than 200 such sites.
Around 500 students and teachers from dozens of schools, together with international guests and local residents, are expected to join Friday’s commemoration. Marchers are encouraged to bring stones inscribed with the names of Holocaust victims.
The event is organised in cooperation with the International March of the Living.
Commemorations are also being held nationwide, with some 150 schools staging their own 'Road of Memory' events.
Meanwhile, President Gitanas Nausėda will posthumously award the Life Saving Cross to 36 people who rescued Jews during the Nazi occupation, often at great personal risk to themselves and their families.
Lithuania observes its National Memorial Day for the Genocide of Lithuanian Jews on September 23, marking the liquidation of the Vilnius Ghetto in 1943. Around 195,000 Jews were killed in Lithuania during the war, out of a pre-war Jewish population of some 208,000.
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