For four days in mid-June, about 150 soldiers from the German Bundeswehr’s 45th Panzer Brigade joined members of the Maceva Jewish cemetery preservation group to clean up the old Jewish cemetery and Holocaust monument in Merkinė, in southeast Lithuania. The brigade (also called the Lithuanian Brigade) has been stationed in Lithuania since April 1, and the initiative is believed to have been the first time that German soldiers have taken care of Jewish heritage in such a way
“The Jews buried in Merkinė don’t have families to tend their graves because their families were exterminated,” Faynia Kukliansky, the chair of the Lithuanian Jewish community, said at the action’s concluding ceremony.
“It is symbolic that soldiers from the German brigade are taking care of their graves today. While the current generation of Germans are not responsible for the horrors of World War II, nonetheless they feel a moral imperative to make amends for the oppression by Nazi Germany. I thank the soldiers and [German] Ambassador Cornelius Zimmermann in the name of the Lithuanian Jewish Community for their preservation of the only thing that remains when a person dies, memory.”
In a new Have Your Say personal essay — Brothers and Sisters in Arms, of Memory — Sergey Kanovich, the founder of Maceva, describes the initiative and reflects on the experience and its meaning — “perhaps first and foremost,” he writes, “because the German soldiers have turned the phrases ‘never again’ and ‘we remember’ into deeds. “
1 comment on “New Have Your Say by Sergey Kanovich: “Brothers and Sisters in Arms, of Memory. ” German soldiers help clean-up a Jewish cemetery in Lithuania”
I would like to receive the list of names you recovered in the cemetery of Merkine (Meretch).
I know that several of my relatives were buried there: My great grandfather Moshe Romanov, My 9 years old aunt Masha Romanov, and other members of the Romanov family.
I’ll be happy to pay for it. I’ll need some instructions how to do it.
I am a native Hebrew reader. If you need help with that, I’ll be happy to help. However, I have never done it, so I’ll need insructions.