In contrast to the body of literature in English on the Holocaust in Poland, there are far fewer general studies on the Holocaust in Lithuania. This is in large part to due to the size of its Jewish population, numbering approximately 160,000 in 1938. In contrast, Poland contained Europe’s largest Jewish community, numbering 3.35 million at the end of 1938. Warsaw alone, for example, had a larger Jewish community before World War II than the whole of Lithuania. Yet by the end of 1939, Poland ceased to exist and sovereign Lithuania included Vilna (Vilnius), one of the world’s most distinguished Jewish communities and the home of the Yivo Institute.
Saulius Sužiedėlis’s new study is the first English-language scholarly monograph on the Holocaust in Lithuania that makes extensive use of archival sources in Lithuania that had been closed to scholars during the Soviet period (1945–91). Based on research conducted over a 30-year period, Crisis, War, and the Holocaust in Lithuania builds upon the emerging secondary and primary works that have been published in post-Soviet Lithuania. Sužiedėlis, whose Lithuanian parents immigrated to the United States in 1948 when Sužiedėlis was three years old, received his PhD from the University of Kansas in 1977, establishing himself as an expert on Lithuanian history. After Lithuanian independence in 1991, Sužiedėlis worked tirelessly to advance research into the Holocaust in Lithuania. In 2012, he was granted an honorary doctorate from Kaunas University for his role in spreading knowledge about the Holocaust in Lithuania.
One of the most striking aspects of Crisis, War and the Holocaust in Lithuania is the author’s painstaking, arduous research. The 35-page bibliography includes a list of nine archives—five of them in Lithuania—and a lengthy list of individual documents collected by the author. Fluency in Lithuanian is demonstrated in the use of no less than twenty-five wartime Lithuanian periodicals plus over fifty Soviet Lithuanian reports and published sources, not to mention over seventy-five diaries, memoirs, and testimonies.
Sužiedėlis reminds readers of an astounding fact: that the majority of Lithuania’s Jews were murdered already during the summer and fall of 1941 (157). These mass murder actions, the author shows, took place in the immediate aftermath of the German invasion of Soviet Russia on June 22, 1941, accompanied by local Lithuanian pogroms incited by German officials. The most notorious of these actions in these first weeks of the German occupation took place on June 27, 1941, when approximately sixty Jewish men were tortured and murdered in broad daylight in Kaunas, the event proudly photographed by a German soldier (185). The German occupying administration issued its first racial law in July 1941, defining a Jew as anyone with three Jewish grandparents. The law also stipulated that “Jews are forbidden to greet persons of non-Jewish nationality” (195).
According to Sužiedėlis, extensive massacres of Jewish men during June-July 1941 in Lithuania took place around the provincial capital of Telsiai, where about 1,500 of the town’s 1,600 Jews were fatally shot by members of the Lithuanian auxiliary police commanded by several German officers (228–29). Sužiedėlis argues that “it is essential to … document the sharp rise in antisemitic rhetoric and communal violence within Lithuanian society, phenomena which reached levels as yet unparalleled in Lithuanian history” (237).
Sužiedėlis demonstrates the astonishing efficiency of the anti-Jewish mass murder campaign in Lithuania. Whereas on August 1, 1941, 90% of Lithuanian Jews were still alive, four fifths had been murdered by December 1, 1941. This shocking scale of mass murder effectively annihilated Lithuania’s historic shtetls (238). Meanwhile, the remaining 10% of Jews in Lithuania were herded primarily into ghettos in the three areas of Vilna, Kaunas, and Siauliai. The Kaunas Ghetto was mandated on July 10, 1941, with no mass killings of native Lithuanian Jews taking place between December 1941 and March 1944. There were, however, murders of transports of German and Austrian Jews to the Kaunas Ghetto that took place (306). In Vilna, a small ghetto (Ghetto 2) and a large ghetto (Ghetto 1) were established in September 1941, yet the small ghetto was liquidated by the end of October 1941, with the large ghetto remaining intact until its liquidation in September 1943 (312).
While the summer and fall of 1941 marked the near total destruction of Lithuanian Jewry, Sužiedėlis points out that this was the first of two phases in the process of destruction. The second was the mass murder that accompanied the dissolution of large ghettos between August 1943 and July 1944. Sužiedėlis rightly maintains that Lithuania’s ghettos also gave rise to organized Jewish armed resistance, a subject that the author devotes more space to (Ch. 5 [81 pages]) than to any other chapter. Suziedelis also discusses cultural life in the Lithuanian ghettos. In 1944, for example, he reprints a striking photograph from the Kaunas Ghetto of a Jewish orchestra performance (377). No less striking are photographs of Jewish partisans, young, robust, and healthy looking (378, 391).
For students and teachers of the Holocaust, Saulius Sužiedėlis’s Crisis, War, and the Holocaust in Lithuania—published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum—is a hugely welcome addition. The thoroughness and meticulousness of the research, the balanced views of the author based solely on the documents examined, makes it essential reading for anyone interested in the tragic fate of Lithuanian Jewry during the Holocaust. Puzzling only is the near absence of references to one of the most important Vilna ghetto diaries to survive: Zelig Kalmanovich’s Hope is Stronger than Life: Vilna Ghetto Diary, published in English translation for the first time in 2021, for which Sužiedėlis is listed as a consultant.
