ABSTRACT

On June 15, 1940, the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania. A year later, on June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany broke its pact with the Soviets and invaded Lithuania. The Red Army fled. A killing rampage against Jews took place in over two hundred villages. In my journeys there over nineteen years, I have yet to visit a village that has no massacre pit, although some are hidden in deep forest. The Jews of Kaunas, some 30,000, were ordered to move into the Kovno Ghetto in August 1941, an area that contained approximately 7,000 people in what is called Slobodka or Vilijampole, across the river from Kaunas. It was here, in August 1941, that my cousin Leiser Wolpe, then a teenager, moved with his pregnant mother into a stable used to feed pigs. His father had been killed earlier by Lithuanians in the cellar of their apartment house in Kaunas.