Photos for which the death penalty was threatened: Kaunas ghetto photographer G. Kadušinas | Multimedia storytelling

The multimedia was prepared by 15min in cooperation with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, implementing the series of publications “Photographers’ Lithuania: Stories in Pictures”.

in 1944 July 8 the liquidation of the Kaunas ghetto, which at that time had the status of a concentration camp, was started. In a few days, regarding 7 thousand were taken to Germany. remaining residents of the ghetto, and regarding a thousand of them were killed during the liquidation itself. Some people tried to hide in the basements of houses, but when the Nazis set fire to the buildings of the ghetto, they died of suffocation in the smoke or from bullets, trying to escape from this hell. The Kaunas ghetto burned until July 29. After everything, according to witnesses, only ruins with chimneys, charred corpses and the “smell of death and decay” permeating everything remained.

In the history of the Holocaust, only a few photographers are known to have left detailed accounts of the images of European ghettos, which capture not only the daily life of Jews, forced labor, the struggle for existence, leisure, but also pogroms, massacres, and, finally, all that remains following these territories liquidation or release.

Kaunas ghetto photographer Giršas Kadushin (Zvi Hirsh Kadushin, 1910-1997) risked his own life and that of his loved ones, and spent three years carefully recording what he saw with his own eyes and what thousands of Jews in the Kaunas community experienced. It is believed that during this period the photographer was able to take from several hundred to a thousand photos, which became a unique documentary chronicle of the Kaunas ghetto, testifying to life and death, humanity and meanness.