The Destruction of Jewish Kovno (Kaunas Lithuania)

<p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The ghetto in Kovno has its own tragic place in history because of the cruelty of conditions there and the revolt of Jews towards the end of its days. The dire circumstances of the ghetto became more widely known after World War II with </span><span style=color: rgba(51 51 51 1); background-color: rgba(247 247 247 1)>the discovery of secret archives diaries drawings and photographs that had been buried in the ground when the ghetto was destroyed. These told the story of Jewish community's defiance oppression resistance and death.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(247 247 247 1); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>Between 1920 and 1939 Kovno located in central Lithuania was the country's capital and largest city. </span><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>From a small provincial city it grew into a modern city and became heir to the best traditions of the historically famous Lithuanian Jewry with traditions from the nucleus of Jewishness culture learning modern social-political movements and people of Israel. </span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(247 247 247 1); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>Kovno had a Jewish population of approximately 32000 about one-fourth of the city's total population before the Germans and their Lithuanian auxiliaries began their systematic massacres in 1941. </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>This book was written in the years just after the war and drew on interviews with Kovno survivors after their liberation many of them in Displaced Persons camps. The Preface says that This is the first book laying out a detailed account of what happened in the Ghetto.</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(32 33 34 1)>At its peak the ghetto held an estimated 29000 people most of whom were later sent to concentration and extermination camps or were shot after being rounded up and crowded into the notorious 9</span><sup style=color: rgba(32 33 34 1)>th</sup><span style=color: rgba(32 33 34 1)> Fort one of several that </span><span style=color: rgba(51 51 51 1); background-color: rgba(247 247 247 1)>had been constructed under the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth century for the defense of the city. The book describes the fort as </span><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>one of the most horrible Nazi mass annihilation sites in Lithuania. </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Kovno was liberated by the Red Army on August 1 1944. A few days later little by little the few miraculously surviving Jews started to return to the city. Everyone's first job was to run and see what the destruction of the Ghetto looked like.</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The images that they saw on the site of the former Ghetto were horrific. In the Ghetto not a single house was left intact. All the wooden houses were completely burned. The large massive walls of the walled block of houses were lying in ruins like after an earthquake. Throughout entire areas of the Ghetto the monstrous skeletons of dead and burned Jews were seen.</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>One of the last chapters in the book ends this way:</span></p><p><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>On the seventh day of mourning we bow our heads in great awe to the scattered holy ashes of our murdered and burned men and women from elderly to babies we whisper the ancient Jewish prayer: That their souls should be wrapped in bundles of life.</em></p>