The Jews of Lithuania were not ‘lost’ |
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 from the dirt. You have no power. You have no recourse. You have no country anymore. The country you helped build has decided your baby is worthless garbage.
Thousands of Jewish women and children are crowded into filthy barns under Lithuanian guard. The children are sick. Spotted typhus. Scarlet fever. They are starving. Dozens die before anyone fires a shot.
You are a mother. Your child is burning with fever. Someone tells you children are being taken to the hospital. You let them take your child. You believe a doctor will help. You believe this because you have spent your entire life in a society where doctors help sick children.
The Lithuanian doctors do not help your child. The testimony says they “assured their death.” That is not a euphemism for neglect. A doctor who “assures the death” of a child is a doctor who looks at a sick toddler, a child crying for its mother, and makes a decision: this child will not receive treatment. This child will die, and I will make certain of it. The children are described as “superfluous creatures” taking up space.
Your child was handed to a Lithuanian murderer in a white doctor’s coat. You never see your child again. No one tells you what was done. No one tells you where your baby’s body is. There is no closure. There is only confusion. Terror. Pain. And the knowledge that your remaining innocent Jewish children are next—next on the rapists’ target list, next on the butcher’s block.
August 30, 1941. Stand at the edge.
Lithuanian murderers separate the women. Younger women are pulled aside—they have utility. They can be raped or used for slave labor, or both. Mothers with children remain. You remain. Your child is in your arms.
They strip you naked. In front of men you have known your entire life. You hold your child against your bare skin because it is the last thing you can do.
You are taken to the pit in groups. Shot from behind.
Can you hear it? The witnesses could. Some women begged to be shot sooner so they would not have to watch the next group of mothers and children be slaughtered. A woman standing in line, naked, holding her child, watching the woman ahead of her, perhaps her own mother, fall into the pit, and begging to be next—not because she wants to die, but because she cannot bear one more second of watching.
The Lithuanian murderers did not always waste bullets on small children. Children were seized by the feet and had their heads bashed against rocks. Other children were thrown alive into the pit. Some mothers were forced to carry their children to the edge, where both were shot together. The cries of women and children only made the murderers work faster.
And then there is the testimony no reader will forget.
A woman went into labor at the pit. She was thrown in alive. Her half-born child was dragged into the pit with her. The Lithuanian murderers laughed.
You are standing at the pit. You see it. Feel it. Hear it. Smell it. And you hear the Lithuanians laughing and enjoying themselves as they murder her, her family, and her community. Jews. “Lietuva-Lietuviams”—“Lithuania for Lithuanians.”
Even among those temporarily left alive, children kept dying. In the Telzh ghetto, newborns died one after another—hunger, cold, terror.
When the next mass murder—“liquidation”—came in December 1941, the women knew what awaited them. Some escaped. Lithuanian peasants dragged them back, bound hand and foot. Some mothers strangled their own children so that Lithuanian murderers would not do worse. Only 0.04% of Lithuanians were rescuers. The rest were not.
Imagine being that mother. Imagine what you had already seen that made killing your own child the act of mercy. Imagine the confusion and fear of the Jewish child not understanding that its mother was being merciful by killing it first. Imagine the mental anguish of the mother, of the grandparents, of the entire community. Set this next to the joy and fervor of the Lithuanian murderers who were taking delight in every moment.
Afterward, the murderers prepared for Christmas. Liquor. Cake. Music. Celebration. Family togetherness time in love and peace. For the Jew they prayed to, over the Jews they were murdering.
All of this happened before the Wannsee Conference. Before the Final Solution was formalized. Lithuanian hands did this on Lithuanian initiative, on Lithuanian soil, to Jewish children whose only offense was being born Jewish in Lithuania.
Jascha Heifetz was born in Vilnius. He became the greatest violinist of the twentieth century. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda was born in the Vilna Governorate. He revived the Hebrew language from the dead and gave an entire nation its voice. Boris Schatz was born in Varniai. He founded the Bezalel Academy and gave Israel its art. Leah Goldberg grew up in Kaunas. She became one of Israel’s most beloved poets.
They survived because they left.
Now think about the children who did not leave.
Among the children seized by their feet and smashed against rocks—how many would have become physicians? Among the toddlers thrown alive into pits—how many would have become scientists, engineers, poets, soldiers? Among the infants starved to death in Lithuanian barns—how many would have composed music the world has never heard, written books the world will never read, developed medicines that would have saved lives we will never count?
Lithuanian partisans did not just murder children. They murdered futures. They murdered the architects, the surgeons, the rabbis, the teachers, the mothers and fathers those children would have become. Every child smashed against a rock was a Heifetz who never played, a Ben-Yehuda who never spoke, a Goldberg who never wrote.
We do not know what was taken from us. That is the point. We will never know. Lithuania’s partisans made certain of that.
And now Lithuania wants it back.
Lithuania’s defence attaché will arrive in Tel Aviv and request access to the military technology, the crisis management systems, the mobilization doctrine, the total defence architecture built by a nation of survivors—survivors of precisely the kind of slaughter Lithuanian hands carried out. The weapons Lithuania wants were designed by the descendants of Jews Lithuania did not manage to murder. The soldiers whose expertise Lithuania seeks are the grandchildren of Jews who fled Lithuanian pits. Lithuania destroyed its own Jewish future and now needs someone else’s.
The Word Lithuania Uses
Lithuania calls the men who did this partisans. Lithuania calls them heroes.
And when Lithuanian diplomats speak of these murdered Jewish children, they do not say they were murdered.
They say they were “lost.”
That word is not imprecision. It is not a translation problem. It is a deliberate act of linguistic manipulation designed to sever the connection between perpetrator and victim.
When a Lithuanian diplomat says Jewish children were “lost” during the war, that diplomat is performing erasure in real time. The word “lost” has no perpetrator. It has no weapon. It has no pit. It has no rock against which a child’s head was smashed. It floats in grammatical space, unattached to human agency, as if Jewish children innocently wandered into a forest and never came back.
This is how language works when a state decides to protect itself from its own history.
A child seized by the feet and smashed against a rock was not “lost.” A child thrown alive into a pit was not “lost.” A half-born child dragged into a mass grave while murderers laughed was not “lost.” A child strangled by its own mother because the alternative was worse was not “lost.” A future Heifetz, a future Goldberg, a future Ben-Yehuda was not “lost.”
These children were murdered. By Lithuanians. Before the Wannsee Conference. On Lithuanian initiative, with Lithuanian hands, watched by Lithuanian neighbors, and followed by Lithuanian celebrations.
Every time a Lithuanian official says “lost,” that official is asking the world to participate in a fiction—that these deaths were ambient, part of the general catastrophe of war, rather than the direct, documented product of Lithuanian action. The word “lost” is an invitation to forget who held the gun, who swung the child, who laughed at the pit, and who went home to celebrate Christmas.
96.4% of Lithuanian Jews were murdered—the highest murder rate in Europe. 0.04% of the Lithuanian population has been recognized as Righteous Among the Nations. Those numbers are the verdict. The word “lost” is not a failure of language. It is a strategy—aimed at the Jews who survived, the Jews Lithuania can no longer reach with bullets and pits. When a Lithuanian diplomat stands before an audience and speaks of Jews who were “lost,” that diplomat is continuing the work of erasure with the only tools still available. The murders have stopped. The manipulation has not.
Lithuania builds its entire Holocaust narrative around the 0.04%. It elevates rescuers into national symbols and presents them to Western audiences as evidence of Lithuanian values. What it never says is that 99.96% were not rescuers. But Lithuania does build museums to the 99.96%—it just calls them partisans and heroes. It names streets after them. It constructs an entire institutional memory around their valor and erases what they did to Jewish children. Then it calls what the Soviets did to those same partisans a “genocide”—while erasing the genocide those partisans perpetrated. Lithuania has two memorials: one for the 0.04% it shows to Western diplomats, and one for the 99.96% it shows to itself. The first is a performance. The second is the truth it decorates.
Lithuania’s new defence attaché will arrive in Tel Aviv this July. He will ask the Jewish state for weapons and protection. He will not mention the children in the pits. He will say the Jews of Lithuania were “lost.” He will say that Russia wants to commit genocide against Lithuania. He will talk about Lithuanian “values.” He will put on a masterful performance of virtue.
We know the truth. We see through the performance.