The impact of the Nazi invasion and occupation in north-eastern Europe extends far further what many people realise, reaching beyond Auschwitz and up through the Baltics. Before the German invasion in 1941, Lithuania had an estimated Jewish population of 220,000. By the time Germany surrendered in 1945, only around 12,000 Lithuanian Jews had survived.

This monument honours the nearly 45,000 Jews who were murdered at the Ninth Fort site near Kaunas, Lithuania.

Shortly after the Nazi invasion, the Kovno Ghetto was established in the Kaunas suburb of Vilijampolė. This area, with no running water and small primitive houses, had been cleared of its mostly Jewish population by Nazi-organized Lithuanian volunteers in the Kaunas pogrom, which led to the death of around 4,000 people in just a few short days.

Over the following six months, the ghetto was cordoned off with barbed wire and guarded, the inhabitants were used for forced labour, and those who were deemed "unfit" were rounded up and killed. October 29, 1941, was said to be the deadliest day, with 9,200 Jews shot, mostly at the Ninth Fort.

From 1942 onwards, as an act of defiance against the closure of schools in the ghetto, lessons were conducted in secret. Everyday locations, such as stables, were transformed into hidden classrooms where teachers like Shmuel Rosenthal continued to educate the children living in the ghetto. However, this was only possible for the children who had not been smuggled out of the ghetto in potato sacks because since 1942 births were strictly prohibited in the ghetto and pregnant women faced execution if discovered.

Secret education and smuggling efforts continued until March 1944, when the Nazis carried out a "KinderAktion". During this operation, 1,600 children aged 12 or younger were rounded up and murdered, along with approximately 900 parents and elderly individuals who tried to protect them.

In July of 1944, the Germans deported most of the remaining Jews from the Kovno Ghetto—which had since been turned into the Kauen concentration camp—to other concentration camps like Dachau and Stutthof. As a final step to hiding the evidence of their crimes, the Germans used grenades and dynamite to flatten the ghetto, resulting in the deaths of 2,000 more people who were either shot or burnt alive while trying to escape.

Records of life and conditions in the Kovno Ghetto and Kauen concentration camp were captured by Lithuanian Jewish photographer George Kadish using a buttonhole camera of his own creation, hidden inside his coat. These photographs are one of the most significant photographic records of ghetto life during the Holocaust era and a stark reminder of a phase of history we should never repeat.