On the eve of the Second World War,
some 40,000 Jews lived in Kaunas (Kovno),
the temporary capital of independent Lithuania;
they constituted about a quarter of the city's population.
Kovno was known at the time as a spiritual and cultural center
for Eastern European Jewry, and the local Jewish
community in the city thrived: Synagogues were established,
Jewish schools and a Jewish hospital were created,
and there were institutions for higher Jewish learning and yeshivas,
including the Slobodka Yeshiva.
In addition, Jewish newspapers in Yiddish and Hebrew
were published in the city, and Zionist organizations flourished in it.
On June 15th, 1940
the Soviet Union invaded and subsequently annexed Lithuania.
The Soviet authorities immediately seized all assets owned by Jews,
closed Jewish institutions
and shut down most of the cultural and social organizations.
Thousands of Lithuanians and hundreds of Jews
were deported to Siberia, where most of them perished.
On June 24th, 1941, two days after the German invasion of the Soviet Union
as part of Operation Barbarossa, the Germans occupied Kaunas.
Wehrmacht forces entered the city, and a few days later
they were joined by one of the SS mobile killing units, Einsatzgruppe A.
Many Lithuanians welcomed the Germans, whom they saw as liberators
from the oppressive Soviet regime, and hoped to regain their independence.
Hundreds of Jews fled inland to the Soviet Union,
sped on by the fact that even before the Germans entered the city,
anti-Soviet Lithuanian nationalist groups had begun to murder the local
Jews, whom they accused of collaboration with the Soviet authorities.
These murders continued after the German forces entered the city,
and were carried out under their direction.
Between June 22nd and July 6th, some 1,000 Jews were murdered
in the streets of Slobodka, a Kovno suburb where many Jews lived.
Six thousand Jews arrested in other parts of the city were transferred
to the Seventh Fort, part of the Kaunas Fortress, where they were murdered.
On July 11th. 1941, a decree was issued ordering all the Jews in the city
and its suburbs to move to a ghetto, established in Slobodka.
Some 30,000 Jews were crowded into an area
that had previously held only some 8,000 people.
On August 15th,
the ghetto was sealed and Lithuanian guards were set around its perimeter.
The ghetto, which had been divided into the Small Ghetto
and the Large Ghetto, was run down, and lacked infrastructure;
the buildings on site were small, derelict wooden shacks.
The Kovno Ghetto Judenrat - the Eltestenrat (council of elders) -
was responsible for the Jewish police
and essential services such as health, housing and religious life.
Some of the ghetto inhabitants were sent to forced labor and outlying sites,
and the Eltestenrat established workshops for those who could not leave the ghetto.
Later, they also supplied educational services,
and after these were banned, they continued them clandestinely.
In addition,
they organized concerts, lectures and literary soirees,
established an underground archive for the documentation of everyday life,
and even assisted members
of the underground who were active in the ghetto
and who had joined the partisans in the forests.
A series of roundups "aktionen"
began immediately after the Jews relocated to the ghetto.
During one of the roundups, the Small Ghetto was liquidated,
and most of its inhabitants, some 1,600 Jews, were murdered.
During another roundup,
called the "Great Aktion", which took place on October 28th, 1941,
more than 9,000 Jews were sent from the ghetto
to the Ninth Fort, in the Kaunas fortress, where they were murdered.
Around 17,000 Jews remained in the ghetto.
Adults were made to perform forced labor, primarily
in military facilities outside the ghetto.
In return for their work, they received extremely meager portions of food.
In order to supplement their daily needs, the ghetto residents sold their
remaining belongings, and smuggled food into the ghetto, risking their lives.
In February 1942, the Jews were ordered to hand over to the authorities
all their books, printed material and manuscripts;
the synagogues and schools were later forcibly closed down.
Hundreds of Jews were transferred
to the Riga Ghetto and to forced labor camps in Lithuania.
Beginning in summer 1943, most of the ghettos' inhabitants
were transferred to other camps, and in accordance
with Heinrich Himmler's orders, the ghetto became a concentration camp.
In March 1944 a large roundup,
known as the "Children's Aktion," took place, during which some 1,800
children and elderly people were murdered, as well as many members
of the Jewish Police, who were accused of aiding the ghetto underground.
At this point, the Jewish underground began
sending people into neighboring forests to join the partisan forces,
and some 300 children were smuggled out of the ghetto and hidden.
In July 1944, with the Red Army approaching,
some 10,000 Jews remained in the Kovno Ghetto.
The German authorities began transferring the remaining Jews
to the Dachau and Stutthof concentration camps in Germany.
Some of them hid in underground hiding places that had been prepared
in advance, and others died during the German attempts to round them up.
The Red Army liberated Kaunas on August 1st, 1944.
Of the 40,000 Jews living in the city on the eve of the war,
only some 3,000 survived.