Lithuania, March of the Living to march in memory of Holocaust

• Published date: 23 September 2021
• Author: AARON REICH
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

The ceremony will see the participants march from the Rudninku Square in Vilnius, which was the site of the Jewish ghetto during the Holocaust and concluded at Ponar, the site of a mass grave.

The march comes following the 78th anniversary of the liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto, further decimating Lithuanian Jewry. It also serves to mark 80 years since the beginning of the Holocaust in the Baltic state and the rest of Eastern Europe, which only began following the Nazi takeover after the launch of Operation Barbarossa in 1941.

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"What happened is not a tragedy of the Jewish people, it is a tragedy of all the peoples who lived and live in Lithuania and the whole state, of course, and the tragedy of the whole world, because the world has lost its unique colors, the world has lost its great potential, the world has lost perhaps discoveries and solutions," Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė said in a statement. "However, such catastrophes can happen again – outbreaks of violence, incitement to hatred have not gone away."

Lithuanian MP Emanuelis Zingeris, who is a member of the Jewish community, initiated the "Memory Road 1941-2021" project with March of the Living to commemorate the decimation of Lithuanian Jewry.

"There are more than 200 Holocaust mass murder sites and we organized commemorative marches in most of those places that begin in the central parts of cities where Jews used to live and end at the sites of mass murder," Zingeris said. "And on the 23rd of September, the commemorating day of the liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto, which is the Lithuanian National Holocaust Remembrance Day, we...