A man stands singing My Yiddishe Mama in a derelict square that was once part of Kaunas Ghetto where 29,000 Lithuanian Jews were imprisoned during the summer of 1941.
He is there at the invitation of the artist Paulina Pukyte, whose grandfather was born in Kaunas, a city where Jews made up one quarter of the population in 1939.
That same year it was home to some 40 synagogues, five daily newspapers published in Hebrew and Yiddish, a network of Jewish schools and one of the most important yeshivas in Europe.. Lithuania’s second city was also a big centre for the Zionist movement.
Eighty-three years later, Kaunas has been named the European Capital of Culture and Pukyte’s singer is part of the event.
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Visitors study Jenny Kagan’s installation Out of Darkness (www.holocaustlegacylithuania.com)
Last month Jewish artists and scholars from Israel, Poland, South Africa, the US and Britain were invited to the city where some of their forebears were born. They were there to host the Litvak Forum, a series of art exhibitions, concerts and lectures that both celebrate and mourn its rich cultural Jewish past.
It is not an easy ask. “My grandfather and 34,000 other Jews vanished from this city without trace,” says Pukyte, who was born in Lithuania’s capital Vilnius, but who has lived in the UK for the past 25 years. “There is nothing to remind us that they lived here, and were murdered. How do we remember what is not here?”
Some were murdered by their Lithuanian neighbours even before the Germans arrived in June 1941.
And a few days into the Nazi occupation, but before the Germans had set up their administration, what would become known as the Lietukis Garage Massacre took place in the courtyard of a garage in the centre of the city. One by one, several dozen Jewish men were beaten to death with iron bars, clubs and spades while locals looked on and applauded, often with their children on their shoulders.
Water flowed continuously from a hose, washing the men’s blood into a gulley. When the mound of dead and dying bodies reached 50, the Lithuanian national anthem was sung.
By the end of August that year, most Jews in rural Lithuania had been shot. By November, the Germans had also massacred most of the Jews concentrated in ghettos in cities such as Kaunas.
Huge local collaboration meant that more than 95 per cent of Lithuania’s 210,000 Jews were murdered during the Shoah, a higher percentage than in any other country.
When they first heard the Yiddish singing on the site of the former ghetto, some locals were hostile, says Pukyte.
“They knew nothing of the history. But later I saw those same locals making the sign of the cross in front of a memorial that has finally been erected in the city to mark what happened here.”
Among the artists who have contributed to the programme is British lighting designer Jenny Kagan, whose maternal grandfather was murdered in the Garage Massacre.
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Another installation (www.holocaustlegacylithuania.com)
Her mother and father, the late textile manufacturer Lord Kagan, met and married in Kaunas Ghetto and survived the war years by hiding in a shed inside a foundry just outside its walls.
Her artwork is the imagined recreation of their hiding place, on show in the city until 30 October. “I had to tell their story,” she says of the installation that takes visitors through several darkened rooms to the ghetto via a barbed-wire corridor.
London-based Jewish artist Jyll Bradley’s work Threshold was inspired by the mezuzah, once a common sight on the city’s buildings. Her small fluorescent sculptures emulate the mezuzah in shape, but feature a mirror instead of a scroll. And they now grace the doorways of homes and businesses across the city where Jews once lived and worked.
The idea came to the artist after a Jewish art collector in London asked her to design a mezuzah using her signature materials of fluorescent, light-reactive Plexiglass and wood. “I wondered if I could design a secular mezuzah for the buildings in Kaunas.”
Kaunas is the 2022 European Capital of Culture, but the CityTelling Festival, of which the Litvak Forum is this year’s centrepiece, was established four years ago. Its driving spirit is the non-Jewish curator Daiva Price, who has written a book about the pre-war Jewish community and overseen the painting of new murals honouring former residents. Back then, the city was home to 34,000 Jews. Today, the community numbers 300.
“I felt it was important to talk about the city’s complex and painful past. Not only the tragedy of the Holocaust but also about Jewish life before it,” she says. “At first, we collected testimonies from Holocaust survivors. Now artists are telling these stories through their works.”
Israeli photographer Michael Shubitz is the son of one of the few Jews who managed to escape Kaunas Ghetto. A photograph of his family taken in 1920 inspired his project entitled Back To Kaunas, giant portraits of 12 ghetto survivors who are now living in Israel.
They include Aharon Barak, the former president of Israel’s Supreme Court, and centenarian Dita Sperling, who lost most of her family before she was deported from the ghetto to the Stutthof concentration camp and then an extermination camp in Poland.
“They were children during the war and I wanted them to return to the city in 2022,” he says.
Find out more at www.holocaustlegacylithuania.com
