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As Nazi Germany's army swept through the Baltic States on its march to Leningrad in the summer of 1941, its troops and accompanying Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads) sought out and murdered tens of thousands of Lithuania's Jews. Some 225,000 Jews lived in Lithuania in June 1941. By December, the Germans and their collaborators had murdered more than 136,000 Jewish men, women and children. The 29,000 Jews of the city of Kovno (Kaunas) who survived the initial onslaught were forced to fence themselves into a ghetto within the confines of the poor suburb of Vilijampole (known to Jewish residents as Slobodka). For three nightmarish years, the Kovno Ghetto Jews served as forced labor for the German war effort and watched their numbers shrink through mass murders and deportations. Jews had lived in Kovno for more than 500 years. Prior to the war, Kovno, a modern European city, was home to more than 30,000 Jews -- almost one-quarter of the city's total population. They comprised much of its commercial, artisan and professional classes. Kovno enjoyed a flourishing Jewish culture, was a center of Zionist activity and home of the Slobodka Yeshiva, one of Europe's most prestigious institutions of Jewish learning. The Jewish population supported 98 Jewish political, social welfare and cultural organizations; 40 synagogues; four Hebrew high schools, many Yiddish schools, and a Jewish hospital. With the German onslaught, Slobodka's synagogues and schools, once visited by scholars from all over the world, were now in ruins, religious materials confiscated and learning forbidden. Although the Germans ordered that all religious books be turned over, the ghetto's religious leaders established secret Talmudic schools. They concealed a number of religious books and used these hidden materials in secret study sessions. The Nazis believed they could destroy Kovno's Jews and erase the evidence of what occurred in the Kovno Ghetto. But the Germans had not taken into account the spirit of the Jews imprisoned there. They strove to maintain their cultural traditions, all the while documenting their persecution in secret archives they hoped would ultimately bring their story to light. The ghetto's inhabitants struggled to ensure that future generations would know about what happened to them and their efforts to survive. Both on their own initiative and on the instruction of the Ghetto's Jewish Council, Kovno's Jews used all the means available to document their tragedy, producing photographs, paintings and drawings, and diaries that were concealed from their oppressors. Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto brings those remarkable images and words out of hiding, revealing the ordeal of survival and loss. The exhibition will contain more than 530 objects and nearly 300 graphic images gathered from Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, Germany, Israel, Canada and the United States. There will be audio visual theaters and video display monitors, some containing original film footage. A companion book of the same title, published jointly with Bulfinch Press (Boston) will be illustrated with many of the exhibition's objects and photographs and will include scholarly essays that provide the historical background. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has researched the exhibition over the past four years, relying on scholars and survivors from all over the world. The development of special exhibitions such as this is one of the important ways in which the Museum works to strengthen the field of Holocaust scholarship. In focusing significant resources on a specific aspect of Holocaust history, exhibition research generates new material for the Museum's archival collections, including documents, film and photographs; oral testimonies; and additions to the Museum's collection of artifacts. Together they form a trove of resources for scholars exploring new dimensions and developing a greater understanding of Holocaust history. The items within the exhibition offer an extraordinary testament. They include secret diaries such as Avraham Tory's writings; artwork by Jacob Lifschitz and Esther Lurie; items associated with the workshops Ghetto leaders created to show the usefulness of Jewish labor; Jewish Council leader Dr. Elkhanan Elkes' final letter to his children, and, most importantly, the remarkable photographs of daily Ghetto life by George Kadish. The works of Tory and Kadish are but two examples of the rich materials visitors will encounter. Avraham Tory, a young attorney and Zionist activist before the war, served as the Jewish Council's chief administrator. He wrote a diary from the first days of the German invasion through his last day in the Ghetto. Working with other members of the Council and with artists, he collected reports, armbands, artwork and German orders, burying them along with his diary in five wooden crates. After the war, Tory retrieved three of these crates. His diary has since served as key evidence in the prosecution of German and Lithuanian war criminals. Tory wrote, "With awe and reverence, I am hiding in this crate what I have written, noted and collected, with thrill and anxiety, so that it may serve as material evidence -- "corpus delicti" -- accusing testimony when the Day of Judgment comes, and with it the day of revenge and the day of reckoning, the calling to account." Before the war an engineer and avid amateur photographer, George Kadish was determined to provide a visual record of the Ghetto experience. Photographing life in the Kovno Ghetto was an extremely risky venture. The Nazis strictly prohibited it, and acquiring and developing film within the Ghetto was as dangerous as actually taking the photographs. Undaunted, George Kadish took every opportunity to document daily life in the Ghetto and, after his escape in 1944, the Ghetto's final days. The results constitute one of the most significant photographic records of Ghetto life during the Holocaust. Kadish's photographic portraits capture the reality of the Ghetto's daily life. In June 1941, witnessing the brutality of the early pogroms, he photographed the Yiddish word nekoma (revenge) found scrawled on the apartment door of a murdered Jew -- a last act of defiance by a dying man in his own blood. Sometimes photographing through a buttonhole in his overcoat, Kadish recorded Jews humiliated and tormented by German and Lithuanian guards searching for smuggled food, Jews dragging their belongings from one place to another on sleds or carts, and forced work brigades. Even as he depicted such severe conditions of Ghetto life, he did not neglect personal portraits of the Ghetto inmates. His profiles of children at work or play are especially poignant. In 1944, after escaping from the Ghetto, he photographed its liquidation. He returned again, after the Germans fled, to photograph the Ghetto's ruins and small groups who had survived its final days in hiding. After the German surrender on May 8, 1945, Kadish left Lithuania with his extraordinary documentation for Germany where, in the American Zone, he mounted exhibitions of his photographs for survivors residing in displaced persons camps. Living today in Florida, Kadish has donated a substantial portion of his collection to the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora (Beth Hatefusoh) in Tel Aviv. Tory and Kadish were two of the Ghetto's survivors; most perished. In the Fall of 1943, the Ghetto's inmates learned that it was to be turned into a concentration camp known as "Concentration Camp Kauen." Many of them were sent to satellite labor camps and some to Estonia. Young people began escaping to partisan groups in the forests, and parents who had been reluctant to separate themselves from their children sought shelter for them in Lithuanian homes. In July 1944, with the Soviet Army only two weeks away, the Germans liquidated the Ghetto and sent its inhabitants to concentration camps. Of the more than 30,000 Jews living in Kovno before the Holocaust, only some 3,000 survived -- a handful in underground hideouts, about 500 in forests or with Lithuanian rescuers, and some 2,500 in concentration camps in Germany. So that as many visitors as possible will have the opportunity to
share in Kovno's story, the exhibition will be open through
November 1999. Admission will be free; no passes will be
necessary. |