This article contains eyewitness testimony describing the murder of Jewish children in Lithuania in 1941. It is written to make you feel what happened. If you are not prepared to stand, in your mind, beside a death pit and watch Lithuanian neighbors murder Jewish mothers and their children—stop reading now.

On April 7, 2026, Lithuania’s government approved the establishment of a defence attaché post at its embassy in Israel. Lithuania wants Israeli weapons. Israeli military technology. Israeli expertise in total defence, crisis management, mobilization, and societal resilience. Lithuania is allocating €350,000 a year to send an officer to Tel Aviv to ask the Jewish state for help protecting Lithuania from Russia.

Before Lithuania asks the descendants of Lithuanian Jews for protection, it should understand what it destroyed.

I am going to ask you to do something you will not want to do.

I am going to ask you to stand beside a pit in a Lithuanian forest in August 1941 and watch.

Not from a distance. Not through a history book. I want you close enough to hear it. Close enough to smell the freshly dug earth. Close enough to see the faces of the women holding their children—and the faces of the men with the guns.

You know the men. They are Lithuanian. They are the neighbors, the clerks, the farmers, the local police. Some went to university. Yesterday they borrowed sugar from the woman they will rape and murder today.

Now look at the children.

Now imagine you are the parent standing beside them.

You are starving. You have been beaten. You are terrified beyond any terror you thought possible. A few days ago, these people were your neighbors. This was your country—the country you paid taxes to, the country you served in the army for, the country your family helped build. You spoke their language. Your children played with their children. And now they are stripping you naked and marching your child to a pit.

You cannot protect your child. You cannot run. You cannot reason with them. You can only hold your child and wait.

Everything in this article comes from The Lithuanian Slaughter of its Jews, testimony collected by Leyb Koniuchowsky from Holocaust survivors in the Displaced Persons camps between 1946 and 1948. One hundred and twenty-one signed accounts. Five hundred and sixty-nine pages. Town by town, pit by pit, child by child. The foreword states the pattern plainly: the perpetrators were “most of them Lithuanians.”

One fact must be stated. The Wannsee Conference—at which Nazi officials coordinated the administrative machinery of the Final Solution—took place on January 20, 1942. Every event in this article occurred before that date. Lithuanians were not implementing German policy. They were ahead of it. They were murdering Jewish children before Berlin had even decided to murder Jewish children.

Imagine the compound where the Jews are held. Now imagine educated Lithuanians—the “intelligentsia”—arriving to inspect them. They demand valuables. Shoes. Umbrellas. And they take the baby carriages.

You are the mother. You are watching a man—a man you may have greeted on the street last week—walk to your baby’s carriage and take it. He throws your child onto the ground. He does not need the carriage. He wants it. Your child is Jewish. Your child does not count.

You pick your wailing baby up........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)