A zoo is a place families go on a Sunday afternoon. Parents hold their children’s hands. They point at the animals. The children laugh. It is wholesome. It is educational. It is entertainment. Everyone goes home happy.

In Lithuania in 1941, Lithuanians went to the zoo. They brought their children. They dressed for the occasion. They pointed. And behind those bars were Jewish women and Jewish children, penned for extermination.

That is not a metaphor imposed after the fact. That is the word Lithuanians themselves chose at the time. They called it the zoo.

In Laukuva, Jewish women and children were locked into the study house. The wailing of the children and the women could be heard throughout the town. On market day, peasants came to look at them, “just like people go to see animals in a circus or a zoo.” Some threw pieces of bread inside “as if to animals in a cage.” Market day. The day families come to town. The day mothers bring their children to shop, to socialize, to see what there is to see. And what there was to see, in Laukuva, were Jewish mothers and Jewish children locked in a building, waiting to be murdered. The Lithuanian peasants treated this as one of the attractions.

At the Seventh Fort in Kaunas, local Lithuanian residents gathered on a hill overlooking the killing site. The testimony records that they were “cheerful and dressed up for the occasion.” Couples embraced each other while watching what the witness calls the “performance.” They called the killing enclosure the zoo. From that same crowd came the cry to shoot a bleeding Jew “down like a dog.”........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)