September 23 - Holocaust Memorial day in Lithuania

In order to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust in Lithuania, students of Jieznas gymnasium went to the Fort VII  of Kaunas fortress. Kaunas is my native town that had more than 30 000 Jews before the WWII and only 634 of them managed to survive in 1944.

The history of Kaunas fortress goes back to the days of Russian Empire. Then it was one of the four most important Russian fortresses on its western border intended to protect strategically important land and water roads. The fortress consisted of nine forts, several of which were seriously damaged during the WWI. Fort VII was far from the front line and remained untouched. It housed the Lithuanian state archive till 1940.

The sad fact is that in 1941, when the Nazi occupation began, the remote and well planned Fort VII appeared to be a perfect place for the massacre. In June, 1941 a temporal concentration camp was established in the Fort and thousands of Kaunas Jews, captured in the streets, work places and simply at home, were taken there. In the first days of July about 3000 Jews were shot and their bodies were buried in the trenches of the Fort.

These tragic events were left to be forgotten for long years and the place of mass graves gradually became a city dump. Only in 2009 war heritage specialists started to re-create the historic truth. Now the Fort VII  is included into the European Holocaust route.

You can watch a trailer of the film "Fort VII: The Lithuanian Nightmare" on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqGGdpzV6go