Most traces of Jewish presence in Lithuania were obliterated long ago. But there are signs of renewal
Jews of Seduva are dead. The lucky ones who died ordinary peacetime deaths lie beneath simple gravestones in a windswept cemetery outside this unremarkable village. The unlucky ones were dragged out of town, forced into a ghetto in the next village, and then, in August 1941, marched into the woods and shot to death in their hundreds by their Lithuanian neighbours, overseen by the invading Germans. Their corpses were dumped in pits.
It comes as a surprise to find signs of renewal in this remote town. The country is itself a cemetery for Jews: out of some 250,000 Jews living in Lithuania before the second world war, some 90% were killed—one of the worst rates in Europe, due to the thoroughness of the Germans and the widespread collaboration of Lithuanians, who rounded up and murdered Jews.
The memorials in Seduva are not the work of the government , but of a small private foundation, the Seduva Jewish Memorial Fund, which seeks to remember Jewish life in one typical shtetl. “All you can find is fragments,” says Sergey Kanovich, a Lithuanian-born writer who emigrated to Israel and is a founder of the organisation.
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