Before the Second World War, more than 30 thousand Jews lived in Kaunas. The mass extermination of Jews, which began before the establishment of the ghetto on 15 August 1941, continued there. In July 1944, as the front line approached, the Kaunas Ghetto was liquidated – some of the surviving ghetto inhabitants were deported to concentration camps, while others were shot or killed. A handful survived the liquidation of the ghetto.
Greta Ščeliokaitė, museologist at Kaunas Ninth Fort Museum, tells more about the Kaunas Ghetto as the 80th anniversary of its liquidation approaches.
‘However, there was no force that could keep me from returning to the ghetto, where I spent the three worst years of my life. I hoped for the impossible, I hoped to meet someone dear to me. I made it to Slobodkė, but I did not recognise it. I did not understand what was happening to me. Maybe I was lost? How could I have gotten so confused? The closer I got to the ghetto, the more terrified I became. From a distance, I saw the familiar house of a Lithuanian woman at the ghetto fence, and the church dome, but there was no ghetto itself! All the houses were burnt down, only their chimneys were left,’ wrote Jochanan Fain, who had been saved from a cruel fate, in his memoirs about July 1944.
On June 22, 1941, at the outbreak of the war between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the red occupiers were replaced by the brown ones. That summer marked the beginning of the tragedy of the Jewish people, when the majority of the community was destroyed in approximately three years. There was probably not a single Jewish family that was not affected by the loss of loved ones, separation and the horror of wondering whether tomorrow would come.
‘Soon, we Jews were severely restricted, forbidden to walk on the pavements. Then we were forced to wear yellow patches, and some time later, food cards were introduced, and we were only allowed to buy food in certain places,’ recalls Rachel Bumental, who was still a pupil at the beginning of the war.
In July, a Jewish ghetto was established in Kaunas. For this purpose, Vilijampolė district, or Slobodkė, as it was called at the time, was chosen. At that time, Vilijampolė looked poor. There was no sewerage, and most of the houses were wooden and without amenities. Even before the establishment of the ghetto, Vilijampolė was heavily populated by Jews. Lithuanians and other nationalities who lived there exchanged their rooms for apartments with Jews living in the rest of the city.
‘In Kaunas, we lived luxuriously: servants, a 1935 Ford, holidays at the seaside and in various rural areas. The future looked promising, but it all fell apart against the nightmares that followed. <…>
Together with other Jews, we were taken to Kaunas Ghetto. We took some property with us. I remember that my mother, not knowing what we might need, took a huge ficus tree. <…>
We had a table and a ficus, which quickly withered in the cold of the ghetto. That winter was one of the coldest in many years, and there was no heating. As far as I remember, the water in the glass froze before I could drink it, and the potatoes that my mom was peeling looked frozen,’ Rozian Bagrianskytė-Zerner recalled her first winter in the ghetto, writing about a large number of her rescuers.
In the memories of Kaunas Ghetto prisoners, similar fragments often emerge: the constant feeling of hunger, adults working long hours and the uncertainty of the future. Often, when recalling the first winter in the ghetto, contemporaries testified that it was so cold that all the fences and even outdoor toilets in the ghetto were burnt. However, the killing campaigns in the ghetto were most memorable. One of them, the most massive, took place on October 28-29, 1941. Early in the morning of the 28th, the ghetto inhabitants were assembled in Demokratų Square for a selection process: it was decided who could live and who should die. For the rest of their lives, many people remembered Helmut Rauca, who pushed people’s fates left and right. On October 29, 9,200 of those sent to the right were shot in Kaunas Ninth Fort. In the eyes of the occupiers, the ghetto had been “cleansed of unnecessary elements,” and for a while people followed their routine. Of course, this did not mean that living conditions in the ghetto had improved, but the prisoners were able to settle into their daily routine: eventually they began to organise secret schools and celebrate religious festivals. At the same time, some of them were devising plans about how to escape from the ghetto, or at least how to get their children out of it.
In her memoirs, the well-known Jewish rescuer Elena Holcmanienė writes: ‘It was not uncommon for Jews themselves to fear leaving the ghetto, where they had been living from the end of the 1940s onwards – with the exception of transfers to Estonia – in what appeared to be relatively safe, albeit inhuman conditions. However, on the other side of the ghetto wall, there was a great danger of death, not only for them but also for the people who sheltered them. This made it difficult for many to make up their minds, because they realised that they were also responsible for them.’
However, in the autumn of 1943, it was decided to reorganise Kaunas Ghetto into a concentration camp and place it under the authority of the SS. The inhabitants of the ghetto hastily set up hiding places, known as “malinas.” Shalom Peres, a Holocaust survivor, recalls one such hiding place: ‘People started digging underground malinas with all kinds of secret entrances. In our house, the entrance to the hiding place was in the kitchen floor, in front of the stove, under a protective metal cover. Although my parents had dug a hiding place, they didn’t rely on it too much and looked for opportunities to hide outside the ghetto.’
“Malinas” were useful on March 27, 1944, when a particularly cruel “children’s action” was carried out in Kaunas Ghetto. According to the Nazi plan, only working people were to remain in the concentration camp; therefore, all elderly people and children under 12 who were unable to work were torn from their mothers’ arms and thrown into a truck. Few managed to hide. Around 1,700 children and old people were arrested in those days. Some of them were killed in Kaunas Ninth Fort, while others probably ended up in Auschwitz or Maidanek concentration camps. After the “children’s action”, it was a mortal danger for children to appear in the ghetto. Many years after the war, Dvora Tkač told her daughter: ‘I was afraid not only of the Nazis, but also of my neighbours, whose children had been taken away from them. When someone asked me where my daughter was, I answered: ‘The same place where your children are.’
The inhabitants of Kaunas Ghetto knew about the liquidation of Vilnius Ghetto. Each family tried to manage in its own way. Some took care of their “malinas,” others sought refuge behind the ghetto fence, and the third ones tried to accept their fate as God had sent it. Elena Holcmanienė was particularly sorry for the latter: ‘The Jews themselves could not make up their minds to leave their relatives at the last moment, or, after years of moral destruction, they had become so apathetic that they did not dare to take a single step towards illegal freedom.’
The deportation of the ghetto inhabitants further away from Kaunas began because of the approaching front. Many Lithuanian Jews were deported to Dachau and Stutthof concentration camps. Some survived the death marches and managed to see the end of the war. However, most of those who chose to hide in the ghetto ended their days there. On July 15, Kaunas Jewish Ghetto was liquidated. The wooden houses were engulfed in flames, and Jews trying to escape from the “malinas” were shot on the spot. All that was left of the ghetto were the smouldering chimneys.
Today, an exceptional building is located in Vilijampolė, Linkuvos Street 2. In front of it, there is a monument marking the location of the main gate of Kaunas Ghetto. The gate through which the slaves of the twentieth century were forced to go to work every day. The gate through which not everyone was destined to leave.
