Customer Reviews

Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto: A Project of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council

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An excellent work on one town's experience in the Holocaust. It contains an excellent array of documents from the time, hidden at great risk by the inhabitants. This book should dissuade any reader of the notion that the Jews of Europe did not fight back.

This over-sized 255 page volume is based a November 1991 through October 1999 U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum exhibit on the experiences of Kovno Ghetto residents during World War II, as they secretly photographed and artistically recorded them.

In addition, the volume contains many images of Ghetto work documents and other Nazi-issued papers, and even the luggage tags of Jews transported from Germany and Austria for murder at "Fort IX," a fortification built near Kovno specifically to murder Jews, which executions began on June 24, 25, and 27, 1941, following the Nazi invasion of Lithuania.

On October 28, 1941, the Germans separated 30,000 Jews from the square in Kovno, those to the left survived at least temporarily, and those to the right, were immediately marked for brutalization and ultimate death. for the time being, 20,000 remained. Everyone left lost a family member, and mourning set upon the community.

Needless to say, their lot was not easy, and most ultimately succumbed.

This is a valuable testament to horrors suffered in the Holocaust by one community, horrors that were repeated in every other ghetto across Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Poland and so on.

Heartbreaking.

--Alyssa A. Lappen