Rescued from Oblivion: The Leyb Koniuchowsky Papers and the Holocaust in Provincial Lithuania

Abstract

Much of our knowledge of the Holocaust in Lithuania is based on experiences in or near Vilnius and Kaunas. In the smaller towns, where tens of thousands of Jews lived before the war, so few survived that first-hand accounts are rare; all the less do official German sources offer a window onto events, recording little more than overall numbers. The present contribution draws attention to a lesser-known collection of survivor testimonies gathered after the war by Leyb Koniuchowsky, primarily in Germany's Feldafing displaced persons camp. Case studies of ritual humiliation of Jews by their small-town and village neighbors, experiences in a minor camp complex, and the pursuit of vengeance by one survivor who gained temporary employment in the postwar Soviet security services, point toward the place of oral testimony in elucidating events in hard-to-document places. They raise questions about whether events in better-known localities were “typical” or not.

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