When Kaunas’s Jews Learned Whom to Fear

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 Tory recorded in his diary that the Jews had been left behind as fair game. The Jewish ghetto policemen who wrote their clandestine history described the new status of Kaunas’s Jews in a single word from Jewish law, hefker, abandoned property: any non-Jew, they wrote, could now do with them as he pleased.

The killing was licensed by a lie. On June 23 a provisional government proclaimed itself in Kaunas under the Lithuanian Activist Front, and armed men identifiable by white armbands moved through the streets. Their pretext was the Judeo-Bolshevik libel, the claim that Jews were agents of the Soviet order that had just crushed Lithuania. Margaret Kagan’s family, sheltering in a cellar, heard a radio announcement that for every German soldier harmed, one hundred Jews would be shot. She remembered her father’s face at that moment. It was a revelation. The charge did not have to be true to be lethal. Anna Gure’s grandfather, a man who had fled the Communists, was killed, in her words, “not as a Jew but as a Jew and a communist, a man who was running from the communists was killed as one.”

The first German soldiers entered Kaunas on the evening of June 24. Early the next morning, Franz Walter Stahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A, arrived, contacted local partisan leaders, and encouraged the violence to continue. In a report later read at Nuremberg, he boasted that the pogroms had been made to appear spontaneous, without visible German direction. The claim was self-serving, but the sequence was real. That night, Slobodka became the scene of the most intense killing. The clandestine history recorded it without euphemism: Lithuanians “stabbed and slaughtered in the most brutal ways, men and women, old people and small children, without distinction,” striking heads with hatchets. Konrad Kwiet, reconstructing these days from the perpetrators’ trial records, wrote that the fervor of the Kaunas crowds rivaled anything known about the possibilities of human cruelty.

One of the most photographed atrocities came on June 27, at the garage of the Lietūkis agricultural cooperative. Margaret Kagan’s father left home to return a set of office keys and never came back. She learned afterward that he was murdered there. About sixty Jewish men were beaten to death in public with iron bars and wooden clubs while a crowd pressed forward to watch. Witnesses recalled women lifting children onto their shoulders for a better view. German soldiers stood by, and some took photographs. After the killings, a man played a Lithuanian song on an accordion; some witnesses identified it as the national anthem. The pavement was rinsed with hoses. One surviving image, of a young man standing with an iron bar over the bodies at his feet, has become one of the defining photographs of the Holocaust.

Staying indoors was no guarantee of safety. Morris Rich’s brother found the neighborhood bakers lying in a pool of blood, their throats cut. Anna Gure’s home was raided three times. Once the family was stood against a wall while armed men paced with rifles, and she was certain they would be shot. She called it an orgy of torture and said the sadism was unreal. Tory described a pack of bloodthirsty dogs prowling courtyards for hidden Jews. To be on the street, Brauns said, was almost a death sentence for a Jewish man. Partisans lined him against a wall to be shot, but the sound of approaching German motorcycles sent them running. He survived by an accident of timing.

On June 28 the Germans disarmed the partisan bands and reorganized the willing among them into an auxiliary battalion under German command. Street killing gave way to something colder. Beginning June 29, Jews arrested during the previous week were taken to the Seventh Fort, one of the czarist forts ringing the city, which German and Lithuanian officials now called a Jewish concentration camp. The murder of the men began on June 30. About five thousand Jews were killed there, roughly half on July 6 alone. Tory wrote that they were slaughtered by the Lithuanian “freedom fighters.” Women and children were held in filth and terror. Nechama Shneorson, imprisoned there for a week, remembered guards taking young women away at night. As her family was released, she smelled something she could not place and asked her mother whether someone was burning a chicken. She was smelling the bodies of the murdered men.

The sharpest measure of what Kaunas’s Jews had learned was a terrible inversion. From the narrow field of what they could see, some began to regard German order as shelter from Lithuanian disorder. “The Germans know law and order,” Margaret Kagan said, “the Lithuanians don’t.” Rich drew the same line: not one German, he insisted, took part in the pogrom itself, while the Lithuanians “like butchers, they slaughter us.” When the Germans ordered the Jews into a ghetto on July 10, many felt relief. Ginsburg admitted they were willing to be locked behind wire to be saved from the excesses of the Lithuanian fascists.

That perception was true to what the witnesses saw, and it was also a trap. They had distinguished between two stages of the same destruction. The apparent spontaneity of the street violence had been welcomed from above. On June 24 the German Army High Command instructed the Eighteenth Army not to hinder Lithuanian participation in “cleansing operations.” German order did not mean Jewish safety. It meant the transfer of murder from the mob to the machine, from the hatchet in Slobodka to the ledger of Karl Jäger. Of roughly 220,000 Jews in Lithuania when the Germans crossed the border, about 8,000 survived. Lithuania recorded the highest rate of murder of any Jewish community in Europe.

What was destroyed in Kaunas in those fourteen days was not only life and property, but the assumption that made a shared city possible: that a neighbor was a neighbor. The witnesses described no anonymous enemy. They described the man next door, the acquaintance in the street, the crowd that watched and applauded. That is why the record of who did what, where, and to whom still matters, and why keeping it accurate against those who would blur it is the necessary sequel to the events themselves.

Kaunas does not teach that catastrophe is always imminent. It teaches that ordinary social restraint can conceal hatred without curing it. Its Jews watched the army on the horizon and did not see that the first killers would come from their own streets. By the time the danger became unmistakable, most avenues of escape had closed. Jack Brauns survived those days and later lived in Los Angeles, where I knew him.

The teenager whom Lithuanian partisans had lined against a wall to shoot became a surgeon specializing in hernia repair, co-founded the National Ambulatory Hernia Institute in California, lectured internationally, and co-authored research on the Moran repair—a polypropylene-mesh technique used in 1,282 operations with a reported recurrence rate of 0.4 percent. That was one future the killers tried to murder. What other medical cures did Lithuanian killers murder with children who might have discovered them? No one can calculate the physicians, scientists, teachers, artists, entrepreneurs, discoveries, and cures lost with Jewish children who never reached adulthood. Imagine the Lithuania that might exist today had people like Brauns been allowed to live, heal, and build there.

The contrast with the country’s later choices is difficult to escape. Independent Lithuania conferred one of its highest state decorations on Jonas Noreika, whose administration ordered the confinement of Jews and seizure of their property. It bestowed the same order on Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis, head of the Provisional Government that adopted anti-Jewish measures as Lithuanian Jewry’s destruction began, and later financed the ceremonial return and reburial of his remains. Lithuania cannot know what it lost when it permitted the murder of people like Brauns. It can know whom it chose to honor instead. A nation that elevates Noreika and Brazaitis while the futures of their Jewish victims remain largely unimagined has not merely distorted its past. It has chosen the wrong models for its present.

Accurate memory is the beginning of vigilance, because a society that blurs who acted, who watched, and who enabled the killing removes the warning from its own history.

The institutions that later worked to soften this record, and the men who carried Lithuanian complicity across an ocean, are the subject of a companion account, The Lithuanian Ratline to Los Angeles. This is where that story begins: on the streets of Kaunas, in the last days of June 1941, when a community learned whom it had truly needed to fear.