This summer marks eighty-five years since the destruction of Jewish Kaunas (Kovno to its Jews) began. The anniversary arrives amid a renewed rupture of Jewish trust. Since October 7, 2023, many Jews have discovered that people and institutions they assumed would recognize antisemitism instead excused, redirected, or denied it. The comparison is not between events or scale, but between moments of recognition: the instant when danger emerges from inside the familiar. Kaunas is where that shape can be seen in its clearest and most terrible form.

When the Ginsburg family gathered in Kaunas on June 22, 1941, fourteen of them spent the day arguing over a single question. Should they flee east behind the retreating Soviets, or stay? They weighed the Germans. Some recalled the German occupation of the First World War and reasoned that the Germans were not so bad, that life would be harder but better than under the Communists. They decided to stay. Of the fourteen who sat together that day, Waldemar Ginsburg alone survived the war. Years later he explained what they had failed to anticipate. They had expected trouble from the Germans, “but the trouble came from a direction which we did not expect.”

That sentence contains the history of the two weeks that followed. Between June 22 and July 6, 1941, the Jews of Kaunas learned that the most immediate threat to their lives was not the invading army. It was the people among whom they had lived. Neighbors. Tradesmen. Men from their own streets.

Before that summer, Kaunas was home. One survivor, Sonia Stern, put the rupture plainly: life “wasn’t bad,” and then “the whole country went crazy.” There were antisemites in the city, and Jews knew who they were. There had been no history of mass anti-Jewish violence there, and ordinary friendships across the two communities were common. That is why the pogroms arrived as what the survivors’ testimony would later be gathered under: an entirely new and utterly horrifying reality.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union caught the city by surprise. Families had to decide within hours whether to run. Most who tried did not get far. The Shneorson family reached perhaps eighty kilometers before the German advance overran the roads and forced them back. Returning Jews were often seized and imprisoned. Jack Brauns’s father, a respected physician, was offered a car by the departing Soviets and turned it down. He would not abandon his patients, so the family stayed.

Then came the direction no one expected. Lithuanians began attacking Jews before the first German soldier reached the city. “Before the Germans came in,” Abraham Resnick remembered, “the Lithuanians became like beasts.” Anna Gure described how the local population “bloomed” the moment the Soviets withdrew. Morris Rich called Kaunas a “free city,” free of Soviet control and free to act on long-held hatreds. Avraham........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)