The exhibits in 2022's European Capital of Culture celebrate and mourn its rich cultural Jewish past - with a focus on those who perished there during the Holocaust
October 20, 2022 13:49
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.
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.
Another installation (www.holocaustlegacylithuania.com)
