Preserved Memories, Shattered Communities: Postwar Testimony and the Final Solution in Lithuania (2011)

Undergraduate: Thomas Valone

Faculty Advisor: Christopher Browning
Department: History

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When the Germans violated the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, there were perhaps as many as 265,000 Jewish people living in Lithuania. By December of that same year a full eighty percent of the prewar Jewish community was dead, having been shot over mass burial pits not far from the communities they had called "home." Although the record of mass killing in Lithuania's major urban centers has been well-documented by historians, there has yet to be a systematic case study of what transpired in rural Lithuania during the final six months of 1941. Utilizing hundreds of pages of postwar survivor testimonies collected during the period 1945-1948, my research has sought to close this historiographical gap by examining the unique perspective of the victims themselves. This methodological focus is particularly crucial since, until very recently, most historical studies concentrated on evidence left behind by the perpetrators. However, sorely lacking in the perpetrator documents are the interstices of human agency and interaction: the raw numbers supplied by German killing reports, for instance, only tell us so much. I have concluded that, at least in three rural Lithuanian counties, all too often Jewish victims knew their killers well: to a dimension heretofore unknown by historians, Lithuanian Gentiles--and not German soldiers--bore the brunt of the systematic killings in rural Lithuania.