The murders witnessed by our heroes are not a figment of the imagination. At the beginning of July 1944, when the Red Army, as part of Operation Bagration, was approaching Vilnius, the surviving Jews working at the Kailis, Heereskraftfahrpark 562 and several other places, were taken to Ponary and shot. Ponary (now a district of Vilnius) had previously been a place of execution, and the July murder is only a drop in the blood of around 80,000 people spilled there in 1941–44.
Vilnius itself is an example of the complex and difficult history of the area in the first half of the 20th century. After 1918, the city became a bone of contention between two countries emerging from a long period of non-existence, Poland and Lithuania. Over and over again, it passed into different hands, also during the Polish- Bolshevik war, to finally find itself within the borders of the Second Polish Republic. In September 1939, the Red Army took over the city after the invasion of Poland, to transfer Vilnius to Lithuania a month later. However, it was a sign of false friendship, because as early as 1940 all of Lithuania was annexed by the USSR. Then, in June 1941, the Germans attacked the Soviet Union... Germans, whom some Lithuanians initially welcomed as liberators from the Soviet occupation, during which they had already suffered a lot. Despite the fact that the Nazi authorities quickly cut Lithuanian dreams of regaining independence, many people collaborated with Germany. The security police (Saugumo policija) or special forces (Ypatingasis būrys) became tools in the hands of the SD and other organs of the Third Reich, used to eliminate suspects connected with the communists and the USSR, the Soviet partisans, but also Jews or the Polish Home Army (which we will present to you soon).
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