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.” These were not soldiers. These were not men under orders. These were Lithuanian civilians who put on their good clothes, walked to a hilltop, held each other, and watched Jews being murdered. They gave it a name. They made it a social event. They went home afterward. It was their happy family day at “The Zoo.”

At the Geruliai camp, where Jewish women and children were held in conditions of terror, rape, hunger, and helplessness, Lithuanian boys and girls from town came to see the “zoo.” Children. Brought by their parents or arriving on their own, they listened with interest to the boasts of the partisans about what they had “invented” in the torment of Jewish women and children. This was the Lithuanian version of a teaching moment. The next generation was being shown what could be done to Jews, and how entertaining it was to do it.

These testimonies come from The Lithuanian Slaughter of its Jews, the collection of 121 survivor accounts gathered by Leyb Koniuchowsky in Displaced Persons’ camps between 1946 and 1948. Each testimony was recorded when memory was still close to the events, when names were still sharp, and when the destroyed social world remained visible in the minds of those who survived it. I have documented what these testimonies contain in detail. The pattern they describe was not aberrant behavior in a few locations. It was the national pattern. Self-described partisans seized control of towns as the Soviets withdrew and terrorized Jews before German authority had even arrived. They looted Jewish property, extorted money and valuables, and beat, humiliated, raped, and murdered Jews in public view. Neighbors took over Jewish houses and goods. The slaughter was not hidden. It was performed. It was attended. And in the places where Lithuanians named what they were watching, they reached for the word that best described their experience: a day at the zoo.

Nine hundred and twenty-four Lithuanians have been recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. Out of approximately 2,500,000 Lithuanian citizens, that was 0.04% of the population. Those 924 people risked their lives to hide Jews. Consider what that means. Consider who they were hiding Jews from.

They were not hiding Jews from German soldiers garrisoned in distant command posts. Germans were a relatively small occupying force, concentrated in major centers. The 924 were hiding Jews from their own neighbors. From the peasants who came to market day in Laukuva and threw bread at caged Jewish children. From the couples who dressed up and walked to the hilltop at the Seventh Fort. From the parents who brought their children to the Geruliai camp to see the “zoo.” From the people next door, down the road, across the field—Lithuanians who knew every face in every village and who would have reported, seized, or murdered any Jew they found.

A rescuer could hide a Jew from a German patrol. A German did not know who lived in which farmhouse or which cellar had been dug beneath which barn. But a Lithuanian neighbor knew. A Lithuanian neighbor knew every family, every building, every movement. That is who the 924 were defying. Not a foreign army. Their own people. The same people who went to the zoo.

That is why 99.96% is not a statistical abstraction. It is a description of the environment in which rescue had to take place. The rescuers were not operating against an occupation. They were operating against their own society—a society that had turned the murder of Jews into a public outing, a spectacle, a family entertainment activity. The 924 hid Jews from a nation that would have handed them over with enthusiasm, because that nation had already demonstrated, at the zoo, exactly what it thought of Jewish life.

That is why this matters now. Lithuania still asks the world to treat its national memory as credible while it honors figures drawn from that same landscape. It prosecutes Artur Fridman, a Jewish Lithuanian citizen, for Facebook posts about Holocaust history under Case No. 02-2-00512-24. A state that cannot face the fact that its own citizens called the detention and torment of Jews the zoo has no standing to complain about the speech of a Jew who names what happened. The issue is not the words of the accused. It is the vocabulary of the accusers—and the fact that their institutional heirs still defend the national story built on that world.

A society reveals itself by the names it gives its crimes. In these testimonies, Lithuanians did not merely watch Jews suffer. They turned detention into exhibition, torment into performance, and annihilation into a family outing. They brought their children. They dressed up. They named it. And then, for eighty years, their institutions worked to make the world forget what the witnesses remembered.

The witnesses remembered. The word is in the record. The word is ZOO.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)