For centuries Lithuania was an important spiritual and cultural centre of Jewish life. The biggest Jewish communities were in Vilnius (‘Jerusalem of the North’) and Kaunas, the second biggest city in Lithuania. Before the Nazi invasion in June 1941, around 240,000 Jews lived in Lithuania; only several thousand – around 5% – survived the Holocaust.

In the interwar period Kaunas, a temporary capital of Lithuania, had a flourishing, vibrant and dynamic Jewish community. At one point a third of the inhabitants of Kaunas – 33,000 people – were Jewish. The city had around 40 synagogues and prayer houses, including the Slobodka yeshiva, one of the largest and best known yeshivas in Europe.

Gerardas Bagdonavičius, The Old Synagogue in the Old Town, 1930. Reproduced in Aliza Cohen-Mushlin, Synagogues in Lithuania: a catalogue (Vilnius, 2010). YD.2011.b.2062

The Jewish educational network consisted of numerous Yiddish and Hebrew schools. There was a flourishing artistic and music scene. The city had a Yiddish and a Hebrew theatre, several daily Jewish newspapers, sports clubs and youth organisations. Jewish political organisations were thriving. Social welfare organisations and charitable societies took care of those less fortunate; the Kaunas Jewish Hospital cared for both Jewish and non-Jewish patients. In 1920 the Central Jewish bank was established in Kaunas, leading a network of 85 Jewish banks.

Posters advertising cultural events in Lithuanian and Yiddish, image from Hidden history of the Kovno Ghetto, general editor Dennis B. Klein (Boston, 1997). LB.31.c.9499

Football match in the Kaunas Maccabi Stadium between the Kovas Club of Šančiai and the Maccabi Sports Club, April 25, 1926, image from Žydųgyvenimas Kaune iki holokausto (Vilnius, 2021). YF.2023.a.2399

Central Jewish Bank. Image from Wikimedia Commons

During the Nazi occupation the Kaunas Jewish community was almost completely destroyed. How to commemorate those who perished in such tragic circumstances?

The 11th Kaunas Biennial, which took place in 2017, explored the theme of monuments. What is a monument? Is our understanding of monuments changing? Is there a need for different kinds of commemoration? During the biennial the participating artists created, among others, a number of site-specific performances and installations referencing Kaunas’ Jewish past.

The artist Jenny Kagan, whose parents survived the Kaunas Ghetto, in her installation Murmuration, using a video projection and LED lighting, evoked the memory of the lost Jewish community. A brightly lit up building of a former Hasidic synagogue (the lights followed the rhythm of street lighting) on closer inspection turned out to be empty and derelict. The emptiness of the building is reminiscent of an empty sky from which starlings, known for their murmurations, quickly disappear, their numbers drastically declining.

Murmuration, from Yra ir nėra = There and not there: (im)possibility of a monument (Kaunas, 2018) [awaiting shelfmark]

Paulina Pukytė curated several performances and installations for the 11th Kaunas Biennial. One of them was At Noon in Democrats’ Square. Every day at noon, from 15 October to 30 November 2017, in the Vilijampolė district of Kaunas, a singer stood facing the empty space which once was Demokratų Square. The singer sang two songs in Yiddish: Yankele and My Yiddishe Mame. The performance lasted 7 minutes.

At Noon in Democrats’ Square, from Yra ir nėra

Vilijampolė, also known as Slobodka, on the right bank of the Neris River, was the site of the Kaunas Ghetto where thousands of Jews perished during the Holocaust. On 29 October, 1941, the day of the so called ‘Great Action’, around 27,000 Jews were forced to assemble on Demokratų Square. Men, women and children stood there for hours while a selection took place. Those deemed strong enough to work were temporarily saved; the rest, 9,200 of them, were executed the next day in Fort IX, part of the city‘s fortifications turned into a temporary prison.

At Noon at Democrats Square was a commemoration of those who perished as a result of the ‘Great Action’.

Paulina Pukytė, the chief curator of the 11th Kaunas Biennial, is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, curator and critic, and lecturer at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. She will talk about the (im)possibility of monuments at the Holocaust Memorial Day event, held at the British Library on 27th of January.

Ela Kucharska-Beard, Curator Slavonic and East European Collections

References and further reading:

Paulina Pukytė, Kas yra = Something is (Vilnius, 2021) [awaiting shelfmark] 

 Arūnas Bubnys, Kaunas ghetto 1941-1944 (Vilnius, 2014). YD.2016.a.992 

 Martin Winstone, The Holocaust Sites of Europe : an Historical Guide (London, 2015). YC.2016.a.6368 

 Nick Sayers, The Jews of Lithuania: a Journey Through the Long Twentieth Century (London, 2024)

Monument to children murdered in Babi Yar, Ukraine (image from Wikipedia)

‘Field of Burial’ where the ashes of murdered and cremated prisoners were scattered, Maly Trostenets, Belarus (image from Wikipedia)

In 1961, a young Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko visited the Babi Yar ravine in Kyiv. He was taken there by a fellow writer Anatolii Kuznetsov. A native of Kyiv, Kuznetsov experienced Nazi occupation as a child and knew about the tragedy in Babi Yar firsthand. Both authors were shocked to see that there was no sign in memory of 33,771 Jews who had been murdered by the Nazis just in two days in September 1941. Possibly over 100,000 more people, among them prisoners of war, Soviet partisans, Ukrainian nationalists and Roma people, were killed there in the following months. However, the Soviet authorities were reluctant to collect and disclose records of those crimes. On the same day, Yevtushenko wrote a poem:

No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A drop sheer as a crude gravestone.
I am afraid.
Today I am as old in years
as all the Jewish people.

Cover of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, The collected poems 1952-1990  (Edinburgh, 1991) YC.1991.b.6558

The poem was published in the influential Moscow newspaper Literaturnaia gazeta (‘The Literary Newspaper’) but was severely criticised by the authorities and Communist Party officials for presenting Jews as the main victims of the fascist Germany.

Immediately after the end of the Second World War, Stalin designed his own antisemitic campaigns such as the prosecution of members of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee and the Night of the Murdered Poets, the campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitans’and the so-called ‘doctors’ plot’. Although the campaigns stopped with the death of Stalin, antisemitism in the Soviet Union was strong, and the official party line was not to accept the Holocaust as a concept. Instead, all victims of genocide and atrocities were put together under the ideologically loaded term ‘peaceful Soviet civilians’.

However, in the time of the Khrushchev Thaw artists were hopeful that their voices would be heard in the new political climate. In 1962, Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his Symphony No 13 for bass soloist, bass chorus, and large orchestra with lyrics by Yevtushenko. Although the symphony does not have an official title, it is known as ‘Babi Yar’. Anatolii Kuznetsov tried to publish his autobiographical book also under the title of Babi Yar. The book was seriously cut by censors but was eventually published in 1967. After defecting to the West, Kuznetsov managed to publish the book in full in 1970.

Anatolii Kuznetsov, Babii Iar: roman-dokument (Frankfurt am Main, 1970) X.900/6037

However, neither Yevtushenko, nor Kuznetsov were the first to write about Babi Yar. Probably the first poem (lost and rediscovered only in 1991) about the murder in Babi Yar was written by a Jewish-Ukrainian poet Liudmila Titova in 1941:

The order was supported by the threat of execution,
They obeyed but were shot.
Not a single candle was lit that night,
Those who could, left and hid in the basement.
The stars and the Sun hid in the clouds
From our world that is too cruel.

Liudmila Titova (image from Wikipedia)

In 1943, another Ukrainian poet and at that time a Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers (Commissars) of the Ukrainian SSR, Mykola Bazhan,wrote his response:

The grave wind blew from those ravines —
The smoke of mortal fires, the smoking of burning bodies.
Kyiv watched, angry Kyiv,
As Babi Yar was thrown into flames.
There can be no atonement for this flame.
There is no measure of revenge for this burning.
Cursed be the one who dares to forget.
Cursed be the one who tells us: “forgive me...”

Only in 1991 was a Ukrainian Jewish poet, Yurii Kaplan, able to compile a small anthology – Ekho Bab’ego IAra (‘The Echo of Babi Yar’) where he managed to include other pieces of contemporary poetry.

Page from Literatura ta Zhittia, N 2, zhovten’, 2007.

Cover of Ekho Bab'ego Iara : poeticheskaia antologiia (Kyiv, 1991) YA.1996.a.9243

In 1946, Ilya Ehrenburg, a prominent Soviet writer, published a poem under the title of ‘Babi Yar’ about the genocide of his people:

My child! My blush! 
My countless relatives! 
I hear how you call me  
from every hole.

Together with another Jewish Soviet writer Leonid Grossman, Ehrenburg compiled and tried to publish a volume of eyewitness accounts documenting the atrocities during the Holocaust on the Soviet territories occupied by the Nazis.

During the war, frontline soldiers sent Ilya Ehrenburg a huge number of documents found in the territories liberated from the occupiers and told in their letters what they had seen or heard. Ehrenburg decided to collect the diaries, suicide letters, and testimonies related to the Nazis’ extermination of Jews and to publish the ‘Black Book’. A couple of extracts from the book were published in a magazine in 1944. However, after the end of the war, the publication was delayed several times. In November 1948, when the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was closed, the set of the ‘Black Book’ was scattered, the galleys (printer’s proof) and the manuscript were taken away. Ehrenburg’s daughter later gave the manuscript and other documents to the Yad Vashem archives and the book was published in Russian in 1980. However, that was not the full text. The first full Russian edition appeared only in 1991.

The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry : [prepared by] Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, translated and edited by David Patterson ; with a foreword by Irving Louis Horowitz and an introduction by Helen Segall. (London, 2002) YC.2002.b.953

The book documents atrocities that were committed on all occupied Soviets territories, such sites as Fort IX in Kovno (Kaunas), the Rumbula and Bikernieki Forests in Riga and Maly Trostenets near Minsk and Zmiyovskaya Balka near Rostov-on-Don.

Analysing the policy of ‘forgetting the specificity of Jewish suffering’, Izabella Tabarovsky of the Kennan Institute, points out that “by 2006, Yad Vashem, the world’s leading Holocaust Museum and research institution, found it had barely 10-15% of the names of the 1.5 million Jews who had died in Ukraine (in contrast to 90% of European Jews whose names were known)”.

At the Holocaust Memorial Day Fragments of the Past: Holocaust Legacies and Commemoration, Professor Jeremy Hicks will give a talk on ‘ Representations of the Holocaust in Soviet Cinema’, which will examine further the creation of silences and gaps in memories of Holocaust.

Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead Curator, East European Collections

References/Further reading:

Maxim D. Shrayer (2010). ‘Poets Bearing Witness to the Shoah’ in Studies in Slavic Languages and Literature (ICCEES Congress Stockholm 2010 Papers and Contributions), edited by Stefano Garzonio. PECOB: Portal on Central Eastern and Balkan Europe. University of Bologna. Pp. 59-119.

Ekho Bab’ego IAra: poeticheskaia antologiia, [sostavlenie i vstupitelʹnaia statʹiia IU.G. Kaplana]. (Kyiv, 1991). YA.1996.a.9243

A. Anatoli (Kuznetsov), Babi Yar: a Document in the Form of a Novel, translated by David Floyd. (London, 1970) W67/8178

Izabella Tabarovsky. Don’t Learn from Russians about the Holocaust. Published: February 2, 2017 

The Holocaust stands as one of the most tragic chapters in human history. Yet, through the voices of children who lived through its horrors, we are offered a glimpse into the quiet courage that endured even in the darkest of times.

The diaries of youth, written in ghettos and concentration camps, are personal testaments to the strength of the human spirit. The young writers found ways to express their creativity, and hope, leaving behind a legacy that preserves their voices.

The stories entrusted to paper carried immense emotional weight for the survivors or their families. Many of these diaries remained unpublished for decades, with some only reaching readers in the 21st century. The British Library holds examples of these works, including memoirs and writings of young people from the Terezín ghetto in German-occupied Czechoslovakia.

In the Living Quarters - a drawing by Bedrich Fritta of the Terezin (Theresienstadt) ghetto, source: Wikipedia, public domain

Terezín, the ‘Model’ Ghetto

Terezín, called by the Germans Theresienstadt, a Nazi ‘camp-ghetto’ in operation from 1941 to 1945, was portrayed by the occupier’s propaganda as a ‘spa town’ for elderly Jews. In reality, it served as a transit hub for deportations to extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka.

It was a chilling symbol of Nazi deception, serving as a stage for efforts to obscure the true nature of their genocidal actions, including a 1944 Red Cross visit carefully orchestrated to portray the ghetto as humane.

The truth, however, lay in its devastating death toll and its role as a waypoint on the road to extermination.

Despite these dire circumstances, Terezín became a centre of remarkable cultural activity. In the face of oppression, artists, musicians and writers produced works of art, music and literature, while children found ways to express hope and imagination through secret schooling, painting and poetry.

The boy who loved Jules Verne

Petr Ginz, born in Prague in 1928, was a talented young writer, artist and editor. By the time he was a teenager, he had written multiple short stories and novels inspired by his favourite author, Jules Verne. His adventure novel Návštěva z Pravěku (‘A Visit from Prehistory’) where engineer Gérard Guiness and his son Petr confront the mysterious creature Ka-du, reflects his belief in courage and ingenuity. Illustrated by Ginz himself, it is the only surviving novel out of several that he wrote.

Illustration from Petr Ginz, Návštěva z Pravěku: roman, (Prague, 2007) YF.2008.a.22831

In Terezín, Ginz became the editor of Vedem, a clandestine magazine created by boys in the ghetto. Writing under the pen name ‘Akademie’, he contributed essays, stories and illustrations. The Diary of Petr Ginz 1928-1944, written between 1941 and 1942, provides an account of life under Nazi oppression. It was later published by his sister Chava Pressburger ensuring his voice would not be forgotten.

Cover of The Diary of Petr Ginz 1928-1944 (London, 2007) YF.2008.a.14648

Ginz was a prolific illustrator. His linocut, Moon Landscape, created around 1942, depicts an imagined view of Earth from the Moon, reflecting his fascination with exploration and the cosmos. In a tribute, Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon carried a copy of this drawing aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003, symbolically fulfilling Ginz’s dream of reaching the stars. Tragically, both Ginz and Ramon lost their lives prematurely – Ginz perished in Auschwitz at 16, and Ramon died when Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry – but their stories highlight the importance of preserving history and art.

Petr Ginz, Moon Landscape, source: Wikipedia, public domain

The writings and art of Terezín’s children

In 1995, the Jewish Museum in Prague published the anthology Je mojí vlastí hradba ghett? (‘Is the Wall of Ghettos My Homeland?) which features writings and artwork created by children in Terezín. The collection includes texts from Vedem and other works, offering insight into the emotional and psychological worlds of young people living in extreme conditions.

Cover of Je mojí vlastí hradba ghett? Básně, próza a kresby terezínských dětí, edited by Marie Rút Křížková, Kurt Jiří Kotouč and Zdeněk Ornest (Prague, 1995) YA.2000.b.2154

The testimony of Hana Bořkovcová

Hana Bořkovcová, a renowned Czech author, also left behind a powerful diary, Píšu a sešit mi leží na kolenou: deníky 1940 - 1946 (‘I Write, and the Notebook Lies on My Lap: Diaries 1940–1946’ (Prague, 2011) YF.2012.a.13806.

Published posthumously in 2011, her writings chronicle her family’s experiences, from their life in Prague’s Jewish community to their deportation to Terezín when she was 16 years old, Auschwitz, and a labour camp in Kurzbach. Her diary concludes with her post-war life, including the birth of her son.

Bořkovcová’s account is striking for its sensitivity and strength. Her observations about life in the Jewish school and among young Zionists offer a rich cultural and social context, making her diary a valuable resource for readers and historians alike.

Documenting the unimaginable

In 2012, Michal Kraus published his diary, originally written in Czech, which was later translated into English and published in 2016 under the title Drawing the Holocaust. His entries are marked by stark realism and are accompanied by detailed drawings. Kraus’s meticulous documentation provides an unflinching account of the brutality of the Holocaust and its impact on those who survived. The diary also reflects Kraus’s struggle to return to a ‘normal’ life after the war.

Michal Kraus, Drawing the Holocaust: A Teenager’s Memory of Terezin, Birkenau, and Mauthausen (Cincinnati, 2016) YKL.2016.a.8040

A story saved in the walls

Helga Weissová’s diary is another remarkable testament. Starting at age nine, she documented her life during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Like Petr Ginz, Helga was sent to Terezín before being deported to Auschwitz and other concentration camps. Her diary is accompanied by her drawings, which vividly depict her experiences. Before her deportation, Weissová entrusted her diary to her uncle, who hid it within the walls of Terezín. After the war, she recovered and expanded it to include her harrowing memories from the camps. Published decades later, her work offers a powerful narrative.

Cover of Helga’s Diary: a Young Girl’s Account of Life in a Concentration Camp (London, 2013) YC.2013.a.16374

The importance of remembrance

As we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 2025, it is imperative to reflect on the significance of these personal narratives. Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp, where over a million people perished. Just like Petr Ginz, many of those who lost their lives in Auschwitz were first imprisoned in Terezín before being transported to their deaths. The diaries of these individuals are not merely archival records; they are powerful reminders of the human capacity for resilience and creativity in the face of adversity. Their writings challenge us to remember the past and to educate future generations about the dangers of hatred and intolerance. By reading and sharing these stories, we preserve their voices and the lessons they left behind for a better, more compassionate world.

Olga Topol, Curator Slavonic and East European Collections