2024 06 20 – 2024 09 01 Kaunas Ghetto: Reality and Memory

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 K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art Vilnius Gaon Jewish History Museum