Lithuania,, Then and Now: Reaction to Jews

Nadene Goldfoot

Grant Arthur Gochin                                                       

Lithuania was historically home to a large and influential Jewish community that either fled the country or were murdered during the Holocaust in Lithuania. Before World War II, the Lithuanian Jewish population was some 160,000, about 7% of the total population. Vilnius had a Jewish community of nearly 100,000, about 45% of the city's total population. There were over 110 synagogues and 10 yeshivas in Vilnius alone. About 2,000 Jews were counted in Lithuania during the 2005 census. 

You can say that the story of Lithuania and Jews started in 1922.  "citizenship and legal status affected every aspect of Jewish life in the "old country of Lithuania. Lithuania's history involves the past 100 years of how the Lithuanian government abused national laws, causing multiple Jewish deaths in 1922, and how the same government still continued that behavior 4 generations later.  (1)

"The Kaunas pogrom was a massacre of Jews living in Kaunas, Lithuania, that took place on June 25–29, 1941 – the first days of the Operation Barbarossa and of Nazi occupation of Lithuania. The most infamous incident occurred at the garage of NKVD Kaunas section, a nationalized garage of Lietūkis, where several dozen Jewish men, allegedly associates of NKVD, were publicly tortured and executed on June 27 in front of a crowd of Lithuanian men, women and children. The incident was documented by a German soldier who photographed the event as a man, nicknamed the "Death Dealer" beat each man to death with a metal bar. After June, systematic executions took place at various forts of the Kaunas Fortress, especially the Seventh and Ninth Fort.

"It is 80 years since this mass murder took place in Kaunas, Lithuania.

As the photographs reflect, the murders were open, public, with mass participation. People brought their children to view the spectacle, and so children were taught to be bloodthirsty murderers of Jews. It was taught as a public "good", with no social prohibitions against.

After these mass murder events, Lithuanians would usually hold public town parties to celebrate."(1)

"Again - it is 80 years ago today. Lithuania did not punish a single murderer of a Jew, not a single one. Rather, they made the murderers into their CURRENT national heroes." (1)                                                     

"The year was 1936.  In Lithuania, in an attempt to establish restrictions on the percent of Jewish students, not a single Jewish medical student was given a place in the medical faculty of Kovno University.  March 15, 1939,, German forces occupied the Bohemian and Moravian provinces of Czechoslovakia.  Eight days later, German forces occupied the autonomous city of Memel, on the Baltic coast, and 9,000 more Jews came within the Nazi orbit.  Most of them were able to flee, to neighboring Lithuania." 

Operation Barbarossa was the German invasion of the Soviet Union that started on June 22, 1941.  From the 1st hours of it, throughout what had once been eastern Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, as well as in the Ukraine, White Russia and the western regions of the Russian Republic, a new policy was carried out, the systematic destruction of entire Jewish communities.  This was the  entire Pale of Settlement where Russia had "allowed" the Jews to live.  The German invaders, the SS leaders had prepared special killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen, which set about finding and organizing local collaborators, Lithuanians and Ukrainians, in murder gangs, and were confident that the anti-Jewish hatreds which existed in the East could be turned easily to mass murder.  In this they were right."

                                                                       
This clandestine photograph taken by George Kadish captures a scene during the deportation of Jews from the Kovno ghetto in German-occupied Lithuania in 1942.

"The Jews of Kovno were driven to a special ghetto area in the Slobodka suburb, house of a famous Talmudic academy.  The rumor was that the Germans would send all the Jews to Madagascr.  Helped by Lithuanian, Latvian and Ukrainian policemen and auxiliaries,, the Einsatzgruppen moved rapidly forward behind the advancing German forces.  Jews were placed alive in anti-tank trenches about 2 km long and killed by machine guns.  Lime was thereupon sprayed upon them and a 2nd row of Jews was made to lie down.  They were similarly shot.  six more times, a new line of Jews were driven into the trench.  Only the children were not shot.  They were caught by the legs, their heads hit against stones and they were thereupon buried alive."                      

   Lithuanian militiamen in Kovno round up Jewish women. Kovno, Lithuania, June-July, 1941.

"August 9, 1941 German reports were that Jews continued to display hostile behavior.  They sabotaged German orders, especially where they are strong in numbers.   Their report listed 510 Jews killed most recently in Brest-Litovak and 296 in Bialystok.  On August 15th, Hinrich Lohse, the Reich Commissar for the newly designated Eastern Territories of the Ostland region, covering what had earlier been Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and White Russia, issued a directive ordering all Jews to be registered, to wear 2 yellow badges, one on the chest, one on the back, not to walk on the pavements, not to use public transport, not to visit parks, playgrounds,, theatres, cinemas, libraries or museums, not to own cars or radio sets.  All Jewish property outside the designated ghetto area was to be confiscated.  the ghetto was to be cut off physically from the rest of the town, its food supplies to be restricted to food that was "surplus" to local needs.  All able-bodied Jews were to be subject to forced labor."

On August 15, the day of Lohse's directive, the 26,000 surviving Jew of Kovno had been forcibly removed from their homes throughout the city, to a small suburb, Viliampole, in which, henceforth, they were to be confined.  Each person was allowed only 3 sq. feet of living space.  

By December 1st, the chief of Einsatzkommando 3, SS Colonel Krl Jaaeger, reported to Berlin that only 15% of Lithuanian Jewry remained alive.  All of them, he explained, were Arbeitsjuden, working Jews.  Today, Jaeger added, I can confirm that Einsatzkommando 3 has reached the goal of solving the Jewish problem in Lithuania.  The only remaining Jews were laborers and their families:  about 4,500 in Siauliai, 15,000 in Kovno and 15,000 in Vilna.                                                             

     Lithuanian collaborators guard Jews before their execution. Ponary, Lithuania, June–July, 1941.

The decision to free each district of Jews necessitated thorough preparation of each action as well as acquisition of information about local conditions.  the Jews had to be collected in one or more towns and a ditch had to be dug at the right site for the right number.  The marching distance from collecting points to the ditches averaged about 3 miles.  The Jews were brought in groups of 500, separated by at least 1.2 miles, to the place of execution.  The sort of difficulties and nerve-scraping work involved in all this is shown by an arbitrarily chosen example.  In Kovno, trained Lithuanians were available in sufficient number.  As a result, the city was, as he expressed it, "comparatively speaking a shooting paradise".  Jaeger added that in his view, "the male work-Jews should be sterilized immediately to prevent any procreation".  A Jewess who, "nevertheless", was pregnant" is to be liquidated.  

In Lithuania, Einsatskommando 3 had succeeded, as Jaeger phrased it in his report of December 1st, in "solving the Jewish problem."  

By 1942, the Germans were still slaughtering Jews.  There were still 330,000 Jews in as yet unconquered Britain they hadn't touched.  All the Jews in the neutral countries of Europe were also listed to be slaughtered.  The figured presented by Heydrich included 34,000 for Lithuania.  The other 200,000  Jews of pre-war Lithuania had, though he did not say so, been murdered between July and November 1941 by Einsatzgruppe A, their numbers meticulously listed town by town and village by village in Colonel Jaeger's report of December 1, 1941.                                 

Jewish self-help were considerable.  The heroic girls, Chaijke Grossman and Frumke Plotnicka, traveled back and forth through the cities and towns of Poland, in mortal danger every day. They were couriers.   They relied on their Aryan faces and peasant kerchiefs that covered their heads and carried out the most dangerous missions.  If there were comrades who needed to be rescued from Vilna, Lublin or another city, they undertook the mission.  They were 1st to bring back the tidings about the tragedy of Vilna.  Chaijka Grossman survived the war.                                                                          

Frumka Plotnicka, a leader of the Hehalutz youth movement who was one of the most traveled couriers, was nicknamed “Die Mameh”, Yiddish for “the mama”. When she arrived in a community:  Frumke, hiding in a cellar in Bedzin, was discovered in August 1943 and died fighting in the cellar, armed only with a hand gun.  Her sister, Chana, had been caught by the Germans while trying to escape from the Warsaw ghetto in April 1943, and was beaten to death.  

None of the ghettos and camps in which at least some Jews had been kept alive for their labor, whether in Riga, Latvia, Vilna, Lithuania, Siauliai, Lithuania  or Lodz, Poland, was able to avert the final deportation, on the eve of their potential liberation.  

Sam Goldsmith, a Jew from Lithuania who had come to Britain before the war, and who had earlier seen the horrors of Belsen, wrote about what he saw in Dachau:  "There were 2,539 Jews among the 33,000 survivors, almost all of them Lithuanian Jews, the remnants of the ghetto Slobodka.  I found some old friends, among them,, people who went to school with me and others who used to be fellow members of Maccabi.  And there was my doctor and friend of the Kovno days.  He solemnly shook hands with me and enquired about my health."

Reference:

(1) Grant Arthur Gochin, Descendant of Lithuanian survivors; author of Malice, Murder, and Manipulation-One man's quest for truth

The Holocaust, a history of the Jews of Europe During the 2nd World War by Martin Gilbert

https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/general/couriers.html- my two couriers/spies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaunas_pogrom