EXHIBITION "KAUNAS GHETTO: REALITY AND MEMORY"

The exhibition “Kaunas Ghetto: Reality and Memory“, dedicated to the 80th anniversary of its annihilation.

For the first time in Lithuania, the exhibition presents a fragment of the entirety of the images of the ghetto and its inhabitants, and the most important artists who created them: the Kaunas resident Jacob Lipshits, the German of the Polish origin Peter Gadiel, the Palestinian Esther Lurie and the Prague resident Josef Schlesinger. Through documents, memories, diaries, and comparing the artworks and photographs created in the ghetto and the years after the war, visitors are presented with the narrative about the reality of the ghetto and its people, created by the prisoners.

The Vilijampolė ghetto, a wound of Kaunas and Lithuania, that still remains unhealed, was forcibly created and destroyed by fire. For three years, the ghetto prisoners have lived there in the face of murder, humiliation and backbreaking labour, exhausted by poor living conditions and losses. Documents, memories of the ghetto prisoners and images - photographs, works of art and design tell us about the ghetto's hard-to-imagine reality. Some of the exhibits were created in the ghetto, others – after the war, by those who had survived the Kaunas nightmare and who wished to bear witness to it.

Curators of the exhibition:
Giedrė Jankevičiūtė
Nerijus Šepetys

Architect of the exhibition
Ūla Žebrauskaitė-Malinauskė

Designer of the exhibition
Dominyka Gurskaitė

The research has been implemented at the History Department of Vilnius University

The research has been financed by Research Council of Lithuania (project P-LIP-22-108)

Partner
Lithuanian Central State Archives

The exhibit were kindly loaned by:
State Archives of the Czech Republic
Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington
Kaunas Regional State Archives
Lithuanian Central State Archives
Lithuanian National Martynas Mažvydas Library
Lithuanian National Museum
Lithuanian National Museum of Art
M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art
Vilnius Gaon Jewish History Museum

The event is open to the public and will be filmed and photographed. By attending the event you agree to be featured in photographs and videos of the event and are informed that these photographs and videos may be made public.