Vilna and Kovno

Kovno is the second largest city in Lithuania and as such was home to the second largest Jewish community in the country. Both Vilna and Kovno had Jewish neighborhoods and then during WWII, had ghettos where the Nazis held Jews they rounded up from surrounding areas before sending them to labor or concentration camps. There were two ghettos, the small ghetto for the elderly and weak who were taken away quickly and the large ghetto where more able bodied people were kept and dispersed more slowly. Most people did not survive.

This week the students in Art Appreciation will be learning about sculpture and one of your discussions will be on the subject of Confederate monuments, how they should be treated in a historical context and that they elicit strong emotions. Both the Vilna and Kovno ghettos have monuments that are not controversial and still elicit strong emotions.

We find the stumbling stones again in Vilna in front of a restaurant that had been a kosher vegetarian restaurant. Fania wrote a cookbook of Jewish Vegetarian Lithuanian food.

These relief panels indicate the outlines of the small and large ghettos of Vilna and explain what happened there. It says that from July to October 1941 11,000 people were taken from the small ghetto and killed.

In Kovno the entrance gate to the ghetto is marked with a stele that indicates the dates of the ghetto's existence. Once again you can see the flowers people have left as well as the stones, all an acknowledgment of what happened here and that we remember.

The building behind the Kovno monument was so dilapidated that a group of artists created a mosaic and painted the walls to "spruce" it up.

In Kovno as in Vilna the ghetto outlines began with what had been a Jewish neighborhood already. Many buildings are left from that era along with Soviet era block apartment buildings. It was always a lower class neighborhood and still is.

First street of the Shlabotka neighborhood, where the ghetto had been. Most of the ghetto was left standing and occupied by others after the Jews were removed.

As harsh as conditions were in the Vilna ghetto people still helped each other as much as they could. This relief plaque tells of one man who helped people who were ill or needed assistance get help as much as they could. The sign is located in an alleyway along the fashionable boulevard.

This bronze plaque and the one in the next image indicate that the building had been the Shlabotka Yeshiva in Kovno, one famous throughout Europe. Notice that the plaque was installed in 1991, the time that Lithuania became independent from the Soviet Union.

The building of the Shlabotka Yeshiva in Kovno, now abandoned but the Yeshiva revived in Israel after the war.

This small stele is a commemoration of what occurred in Vilna and the flowers you see were left by Pope Francis who was here a few days before us. Where you see stones is the traditional Jewish practice rather than flowers, so as to acknowledge your presence by not beautifying death.

This bronze sculpture of Dr. Tzemach Shabad shows a child in the ghetto who brought her cat to the doctor because it was sick. After his help many other children brought their pets to him. He was a social and political activist as well as a medical doctor in Vilna. He died in 1935 before the ghetto was established.

Acknowledgement stone near the sculpture

An unassuming building houses the Jewish Cultural and Information Center. Inside you can see photographs and a mock up of a melina, an underground hiding place that some people were able to hold out in during the war.

Not a great photograph but you get the idea.

Close to the street in Kovno where my mother as a child spent a few years with her mother and siblings before they were taken to concentration camps.

The house where they lived with at least 5 other families.

My mother visited Kovno in the early 1990s and while the house looked very much the same it was in much better condition. When she came the house had not changed from the way she remembered it

It's unclear if anyone is living there now. There is one new window.