Ghetto In Germany

It all started in warm June of 1940. The Soviet Union was occupying Lithuania, and it was not an admirable time, not for the Jews at least. In June of 1941, things took an even more grim turn when Germany decided it would invade the Soviet Union. From wearing special patches to being massacred in the streets, the Jews in Lithuania were treated the worst out of all the Jews in Nazi-occupied countries.

As a result of Germany’s victory against the Soviet Union, the once Soviet Lithuania capital, Vilnius, became Germany’s property. The Jews there were forced to follow harsh laws and wear special patches that symbolized they were Jewish. According to VilNews, Jews were also forbidden to walk along the main streets of Vilnius and had to buy foods

In one particular massacre that took place in Rainiai, several Jews were tortured barbarously and the mutilations were so bad only 27 of the 73 bodies could be identified (Žemaitis). After that, the Einsatzgruppen moved on to “purify” the ghettos. If any Jews were not killed in rural Lithuania or previously destroyed ghettos, they were concentrated in Vilna, Kovno, Siauliai, and Svencionys. The living conditions were practically intolerable; there were awful food shortages, outbreaks of disease, and of course overcrowding. The Einsatzgruppen did not fail and in 1943 they completely wiped the Vilna and Svencionys ghettos off the face of Lithuania and transformed the Kovno and Siauliai ghettos into concentration camps. As atrocious as the Einsatzgruppen may seem, the concentration camps were just as

Near Kovno, Jews were forced to work on an airbase for the German military. Seeing as the Germans needed someone to build their airbase and the Jews were getting the job done, the Germans kept that labor camp running. Unfortunately, the Kovno labor camp was later turned into the Kauen concentration camp by the Soviets when they gained control over the ghetto, and those workers met their awful, untimely fate. Those capable of work were sent to the Kauen concentration camp or camps in Estonia while the elderly and children were sent to Auschwitz, a camp in Poland. Most of the Jewish community documented their stories in diaries or drawings, however very few lived to tell the tale