02 September 2021
Time to read: 2 mins
In just a few months of summer and autumn of 1941, Lithuanian Jewish communities were almost completely destroyed by the Nazis and their local collaborators.
This year, the national project “The Road of Memory 1941-2021” will be organized from June to December, following the calendar of the destruction of Jewish communities in 36 individual towns and cities. Participants gather in the central parts of cities and towns formerly inhabited by Jews and then march to mass murder sites, retracking the path of the victims killed during the Holocaust.
This year’s commemorative events bring together Lithuanian Jewish communities, government officials, foreign diplomats, local government representatives, schoolchildren and their teachers, civil society organizations and local communities. The opening event in Gargzdai on 23 June was attended by Ingrida Šimonytė, Prime Minister of Lithuania.
There are more than 200 mass murder sites of the Holocaust in Lithuania. The aim is of this year’s events is to increase focus on the maintenance of known mass graves of the victims of the Holocaust victims, and that information can be found at each site about the local Jewish communities and their tragic fate during the Nazi occupation. “The Road of Memory 1941-2021” is organized by The International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania, together with the Tolerance Education Centers and other partners.
On their trip to Lithuania, the IHRA Safeguarding Sites team learned more about how sites deal with the silences and taboos surrounding difficult history matters and used this experience to inform their forthcoming heritage charter.
A new project, co-funded by the IHRA, will now be conducting research to permanently preserve the memory of the Topovske Šupe concentration camp and its victims.
During World War II, antisemitic propaganda made clever use of stereotyping and conspiracy thinking. The exhibition #FakeImages, a 2020 IHRA Grant project, exposes how this kind of imaging works.
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