Lithuania investigated a July 7 game. The strongest eyewitness account points to July 6.

In Lithuania, the word carries more than sport.

This week Lithuania begins the second round of the 2027 FIBA Basketball World Cup European Qualifiers. It plays Türkiye in Istanbul on August 28 and Bosnia and Herzegovina in Vilnius on August 31.

Another Lithuanian basketball team belongs to a different record.

Its game cannot presently be proved.

The date of that game cannot even be kept still.

In 2023, Grant Gochin wrote about Joseph Gar’s 1948 account of a basketball game in occupied Kaunas.

Gar’s documentary history of the destruction of Jewish Kovno described a German team playing a Lithuanian team. Lithuania had been European champion. The Lithuanians supposedly won.

Then came the detail that made the story unforgettable.

The winners were supposedly allowed to shoot Jews at the Seventh Fort.

But even the transmitted details do not remain stable.

The English rendering used in Gochin’s 2023 article says each player was allowed to shoot a dozen Jews. Alex Faitelson’s 2006 reproduction of Gar says ten. The version of Gar that reached Lithuanian prosecutors in 2004 also says ten.

And then the date moves.

The submission received by Lithuania’s Prosecutor General on March 10, 2004 attributed a July 7 game to Gar’s book. An ESPN report broadcast in April put the alleged game on July 6. But the Gar passage Faitelson actually prints carries no date. Even what Gar is said to contain changes in transmission.

That is not proof that nothing happened.

It is proof that the legend cannot be used as evidence without disassembling it first.

Itzhak Nemenchik survived the Seventh Fort.

His account is different. Faitelson traces it to the Central Historical Commission operating under the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the U.S. Zone and to Fun letstn khurbn, no. 7, p. 67, published in Munich in 1948. Faitelson reproduces the account on pp. 54-55.

Nemenchik did not describe a basketball prize.

He described basketball players.

According to the account, on the evening of July 6, 1941, a Lithuanian basketball team famous throughout the Baltic states arrived at the Seventh Fort carrying rifles. Nemenchik said the players beat prisoners, selected thirty men from the crowd and led them toward the embankment.

A few minutes later, he heard rifle fire.

He said the players then left the fort singing.

That account may be wrong.

But it is not a July 7 basketball-game allegation.

It is a July 6 eyewitness allegation about armed basketball players at the fort.

The Jäger Report was dated December 1, 1941. Its first two execution entries are introduced with a specific attribution: Lithuanian partisans carried them out on Jäger’s instructions and orders.

July 4, Kaunas, Seventh Fort: 416 Jewish men and 47 Jewish women. Total: 463.

July 6, Kaunas, Seventh........

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