The Second World War and The Holocaust
For more details on this topic, see Holocaust in Lithuania.The Lithuanian Republic was occupied by Soviet Union in June 1940, and one year later, in June 1941, occupied by the Germans. During World War II, 91% of Lithuanian Jews were killed – almost all the Jews who had not managed to leave Lithuania and its environs. This was one of the highest casualty rates in the Holocaust.
The only European yeshiva to survive the Holocaust was the Mir yeshiva. With help of the Japanese consul in Kaunas, Chiune Sugihara, its leaders and students managed to escape to the Shanghai ghetto.
See also: Vilna Ghetto, Kaunas Ghetto, Paneriai massacre, and Jewish partisansRead more about this topic: Judaism In Lithuania
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or war:
“The whole world of thought lay unexplored before me,—a world of which I had already caught large and tempting glimpses, and I did not like to feel the horizon shutting me in, even to so pleasant a corner as this.”
—Lucy Larcom (1824–1893)
“The funny part of it all is that relatively few people seem to go crazy, relatively few even a little crazy or even a little weird, relatively few, and those few because they have nothing to do that is to say they have nothing to do or they do not do anything that has anything to do with the war only with food and cold and little things like that.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)