Lithuanian Antisemitism and Collaboration in the Kovno Ghetto
The relationship between Jews and Lithuanians began in 1388, when Vytautas the Great, Grand Duke of Lithuania, granted privileges to Jews living in certain towns (Liekis and Polonsky 8). Under these agreements, the Jewish community in Lithuania flourished. By the twentieth century, Lithuania was home to one of the most vibrant Jewish communities in Europe, known for its intellectualism, and uniquely rationalist approach to Jewish observance. As the community grew, however, tensions developed with their Lithuanian neighbors. In addition to the standard religious antisemitism, Lithuanian antisemitism had an economic dimension. The Lithuanian Jews worked mainly as traders, which led to resentment from the local population, who were peasant farmers. As one Lithuanian described: “the honorable job is a productive job. But not the occupation of pauper, exploiter, middleman. He [The Jew] manages to live by not working, eats good food and is dressed in clean clothes.” (qtd in Liekis and Polonsky 14). Thus, even before the Soviet Union invaded Lithuania in 1940, the relationship between the Jews and Lithuanians was already one of “mutual disdain” (Liekis and Polonsky 13).
Once the Soviet Union invaded, however, the sentiment towards the Jews shifted from disdain to outright hatred. The Soviet occupation had drastically different meanings for the Jews and the Lithuanians: for the Lithuanians, it meant the tragic end of short-lived Lithuanian independence, but for the Jews, it was viewed positively, since Soviet rule was seen as preferable to Nazi rule. Indeed, Jewish resident Harry Gordon describes how “[the Jews] began throwing bouquets of flowers at the approaching army. At any moment, the Germans could have swallowed us up, but here, suddenly, there was a miracle. The Red Army was marching into Lithuania.” (Gordon 10). The Lithuanians, on the other hand, were mourning the loss of their independence, so the Jewish celebrations “antagonized the whole Lithuanian population.” (Gordon 11).
Lithuanian antisemitism was further fueled by the public presence of Jews working for the Soviet Union. As the Soviet Union nationalized Lithuanian businesses, they hired Jews to serve administrative roles in these companies, which inflamed the economic tensions that had existed for centuries (Suziedelis 312). Jews were even hired by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police (Gordon 12). Thus, Lithuanians began to blame the Jews for the occupation, and many of the ideas that Hitler was spreading in Germany — that Jews betrayed the fatherland, and Communism was a Jewish conspiracy — became widespread in Lithuania. During this period, right-wing groups were founded, such as the Front of Lithuanian Activists, with favorable views of Nazism and a German invasion. (Suziedelis 328). Even though the Jewish role in the Soviet occupation was not nearly as big as it was perceived to be, it was enough to transform Lithuanian antisemitism into a bomb that was ready to explode.
On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, and the resentment that had been brewing for a year finally boiled over. As soon as news of the invasion reached Kovno, Lithuanians began brutally slaughtering their Jewish neighbors. Fani Aronow, a Jewish teenager living in Kovno at the time, describes how “the Lithuanian partisans, they start to knock, door by door, and take out Jewish people and start killing them before the German Army came in.” (Fani Aronow, VHA Interview). This pogrom was not a Nazi directive; the Lithuanians launched the massacre entirely of their own volition as revenge for the Soviet occupation. Once the Nazis did arrive, the Lithuanians eagerly helped them carry out the Final Solution in Kovno, murdering thousands of Jews within days. Another survivor of the ghetto, Nechama Shneorson, describes how she was struck by the extent of the cooperation, saying that the “Lithuanian police, where they and Germans-- that they were already like brothers and sisters and helped each other right away what to do.” (Nechama Shneorson, VHA Interview). The extent of the Lithuanian collaboration in Kovno is detailed by Dr. Elkhanan Elkes, chairman of the Jewish Council of Elders, in a letter to his children written in the Fall of 1943:
“The soil of Lithuania is soaked with our blood, killed at the hands of the Lithuanians themselves; Lithuanians with whom we have lived for thousands of years, and whom, with all our strength, we helped to achieve their own national independence. Seven thousand of our brothers and sisters were killed by Lithuanians in terrible and barbarous ways during the last days of June 1941. They themselves, and no others, executed whole congregations, following German orders. They searched - with special pleasure - cellars and wells, fields and forests, for those in hiding, and turned them over to the 'authorities.' Never have anything to do with them; they and their children are accursed forever” (Elkes, qtd in Seidler 91).
Overall, the atrocities committed by Lithuanians in Kovno during their collaboration with the Nazis were the result of a unique combination of historical circumstances. Hundreds of years of religious and economic hatred led to a strong, pervasive disdain of Jews among the Lithuanian population. After a year of Soviet occupation, a newfound hatred developed that, together with the traditional antisemitism, led to eager participation in the Holocaust by Lithuanians. As a result of this strong collaboration, only 2,000 of Kovno’s nearly 40,000 Jews survived the war, and Lithuania had one of the highest percentages of Jews die during the Holocaust out of any country in Europe.