The French prisoner's inscription
'We are three thousand Frenchmen', cut in 1944.
U.S. Army National Guard photo by Spc. Andres Nunez — Public domain · U.S. Army National Guard photo by Spc. Andres Nunez — Public domain · U.S. Army National Guard photo by Spc. Andres Nunez — Public domain · Staff Sgt. Keith Anderson — Public domain
Vilnius was called the Jerusalem of the North and held Eastern Europe's greatest centres of Jewish learning; about 95% of Lithuania's Jews were killed in the war — the highest proportion in any European country, which is why this site weighs as it does.
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A tsarist fort that became a massacre site and then a museum: the Ninth Fort was built in the early twentieth century as part of a Russian ring of fortifications around Kaunas, then used by the Soviets as a prison for deportation to Siberia — and between 1941 and 1944 it became a site of mass execution where the Nazis and their collaborators killed some fifty thousand people, most of them Lithuanian Jews along with Jews brought from France, Austria and Germany. Inside the fort the cells, corridors and yard are visited as they were left, and on one wall an inscription a French prisoner cut in 1944 reads "We are three thousand Frenchmen" — among the place's most famous witnesses. The exhibition documents both the Soviet and Nazi occupations, the deportations and the resistance. In the field beside it a vast concrete monument thirty-two metres high (1984) stands over mass graves, visible from the motorway. The place is harsh and silent and needs time — it is Lithuania's most important site of memory.
'We are three thousand Frenchmen', cut in 1944.
Thirty-two metres above the mass graves.
Žemaičių plentas 73, Kaunas