The Lithuanian government, the Jewish community and the World March of the Living organization are holding a memorial parade and ceremony on Thursday, which will leave the Jewish ghetto area of Vilna and end at the large mass grave in Ponary, where a memorial ceremony will be held for the 70,<> Jews murdered in the Lithuanian capital by the Nazi Germans and their local collaborators.
After a two-year hiatus: March of the Living held in Poland (archive) // Jerusalem media group
The march, which marks the 80th anniversary of the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto, will be led for the second year by Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Šimontina, who said last year that "the Holocaust is not only a Jewish tragedy, but a tragedy for all Lithuanians," and that such a tragedy "can repeat itself: outbreaks of violence, incitement and hatred have not passed away."
Alongside the parade, events will be held in the parliament and in the Jewish community as part of National Holocaust Remembrance Day in Lithuania. The March of the Living in Lithuania is expected to be attended by thousands of people, including many teenagers.
The massacre in Ponary was one of the cruelest known to the Holocaust
The director of the March of the Living in Europe, Michel Gur Ari, will lead the march alongside the Lithuanian Prime Minister. "The World March of the Living holds parades throughout the year throughout Europe, on national days when Holocaust Remembrance Day is marked, usually on the day of the deportation of Jews to the extermination camps or on days of terrible massacre."
"The massacre in Ponary was one of the cruelest the Holocaust has known, and our parade every year to the grave of others where more than 70,000 Jews were buried is a memorial to the Jews who lived here and whose lives were brutally cut short," he added. "It is also a reminder to you that anti-Semitism and hatred are still bubbling up and we must say clearly, never again."
The Lithuanian murderers next to the bodies of the victims // Photo: Wikipedia,
Lithuanian Jewry numbered about 200,000 Jews before the Holocaust, 70,000 of them in the capital city of Vilna, where the central ghetto was established. Members of the community played a central role in all aspects of Lithuanian life, and were prominent in the Zionist movement. Lithuanian Jewry was almost entirely annihilated by the Nazis in the summer and autumn of 1941 through the so-called "Holocaust by bullets," the murder of Eastern European Jews by the Nazis by shooting and their burial in mass graves.
In Lithuania alone, 200 Jewish communities were liquidated, with one of the most prominent symbols of the Holocaust of Eastern European Jewry in general being the massacre at Ponary – located on the outskirts of Vilna – in which 70,000 Jews were murdered. One of the best-known Holocaust poems written about the massacre in Ponary was written as a lullaby for a child whose father perished in the Holocaust:
"... Quiet, quiet, my son snorted! Here grow graves, those who hate them have planted passages here. To Ponary roads will lead, through you there is no return, without again went Father and with him the light... ״
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