Welcome to the website www.josephlevinson.com!

This website was created with the purpose to save the work of my father, Joseph Levinson, in preserving the memory of the Lithuanian Jews who perished during the Holocaust.

It also serves as an information source of what my father did in discovering and marking mass graves of Lithuanian Jewry as well as in inspecting, inventorizing and putting in order the old Jewish cemeteries of Lithuania.

At the moment the webpage enables the readers to see initial information about Joseph Levinson and his accomplishments. One can also buy Joseph Levinson‘s books, The Book of Sorrow and The Shoah (Holocaust) in Lithuania, through Amazon or from the website directly. In addition to the hardcover options today we can already also offer the abovementioned books in some electronic formats: The Shoah (Holocaust) in Lithuania in PDF format, and The Book of Sorrow in ePUB and MOBI formats.

In the future the website will be developed by loading more information, pictures and other materials related to the work of Joseph Levinson.

We‘ll do our best to respond to all your inquiries which could be sent from the Contact section of the website.

We would also appreciate your comments and suggestion on how to improve the web page and would place valuable material received from you on the website.

With best wishes,

Alex Levinson

„Within half a year of the beginning of the Nazi occupation, the Jewish inhabitants of Lithuania were annihilated. About 35 thousand remained in the ghettos of Vilnius, Kaunas and Šiauliai, where they were used as slave labour. Their fate is well-known. Out of nearly a quarter of a million Jews in Lithuania, only 6 to 8 percent survived – either those who were out of reach of the Nazi executioners and their local collaborators, or those whom time favoured.

The Lithuanian Jewish community became irrevocably extinct, even though it had developed for centuries, had come to identify with Lithuania, had contributed to Lithuania’s economic and cultural life, and had taken an active part in its fight for independence and reestablishment of statehood.
A variegated, active community had disappeared, along with its remarkable faith to their national culture and traditions, highly developed system of education and publishing (based on two national languages, Yiddish and Hebrew), and its zealous and dynamic youth, which was widely involved in a broad range of international movements which sought a way out of our centuries-long history of persecution. The outstanding Jewish Institute of Research (YIVO) and centres of religious thought and education functioned here: the Telšiai and Slabada (Kaunas) yeshivot (Talmudic Schools) were famous all over the Jewish world. The Gaon of Vilna, the mathematician H. Minkovski, the world- famous violinist and musician J. Heifetz, Esperanto creator L. Zamenhof, the sculptors M. Antokolski and Z. Lipshitz, the artist I. Levitan, the creator of the modern Hebrew novel A. Mapu, and many others came from here and started their creative and professional careers here. Because of this, the Lithuanian Jews, who were called “Litvaks”, occupied a special place in the Jewish world and constituted a respected branch of the Jewish world community. All that is now in the past and will never be regained.“
(Page 13)

***

“There were nearly 200 massacre sites in Nazi-occupied Lithuania, where deep ditches were often dug in Jewish cemeteries to serve as mass graves for thousands of innocent Jews, including children, women and elderly people. The Jewish genocide did not end with their mass graves. During the following years of Soviet occupation, the Holocaust victims were doomed to spiritual annihilation through oblivion. The monuments at their mass graves indicated that these sites were the burial place of “Soviet people” or “civilians”. No mention was made of what really happened there and who the victims of the “Final Solution” were (see p. 21).
With the emergence of the Lithuanian National Revival movement in 1988, the Jewish community immediately began tending the mass- murder sites in an effort to perpetuate the memory of those who were exterminated there. In response to a proposal by the Lithuanian Jewish Culture Society and the State Jewish Museum, the Supreme Council of Lithuania passed a resolution “On tending to the graves and cemeteries of the victims of the Jewish genocide and preserving the Jewish heritage”. Local municipalities and conservation services, together with Lithuanian Jewish organizations, cleaned up the extermination sites and erected monuments to the Holocaust victims. Some of the Lithuanian Jewish emigres provided funds to complete this work. All the monuments bear inscriptions in Lithuanian and Yiddish about the tragedy that struck the Jewish population during World War II.
The book includes pictures of nearly all of the Jewish extermination sites in Nazi-occupied Lithuania. Some data from the State Jewish Museum is used in this book.”
(Page 15)

***

„Dear reader, you have opened the book of SORROW
What can it tell you about the humiliation the Jews of Lithuania were subject to and which before their deaths they were forced to wear as a yellow star on their chests and backs? Perhaps this was an attempt first to kill the spirit, to trample upon the dignity of man and nation, to bend its wise head, to break faith and hope.
But condemnation and scorn befell the victimizers, and it was their victims who were extolled. From beyond graves and monuments – both large and small – they issue a warning and reminder: give way to the man, stop the beast.
This book can tell you the story, dear reader, about the road that broke off, that was cut short, about a road more than 600 years long travelled by the Jews of Lithuania.
Here lies its end. Here is the burial site of more than two hundred thousand defenseless men, women and children who were exterminated.
Here, too, rest those who were still to be born.
Perhaps they are happier because they did not see what their mothers saw: they did not see the barrel of the gun aimed at them. They did not hear their mothers’ wailing before they died as their hands hastened to shield their wombs.
The world, too, was deaf.
It was still very much like an unborn babe.
The truth of the world and its love
proved to be weak, powerless, and confused.
This is where the road of Lithuanian Jewry broke off,
this is where it passed into the shining dark.
Yet where is its beginning?
It is not reflected in this book.
But perhaps its beginning goes back to the letter Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas signed on May 26, 1323, and addressed to the people of Lubeck, Rostock, Zund, Greifswald, Stettin and Gotland, wherein guarantees for safety, care and assistance were given “…to artisans of any status
they may come together with their children, wives and cattle,
they may arrive and take leave in accordance with their wishes
without the slightest hindrance;
thus with this letter we guarantee and promise
that they will be safe and immune from the unlawful claims of my subjects”.
One can rightly assume that this invitation extended by the Grand Duke of Lithuania did not go Unheard by the Jews in the cities of Europe, mentioned and unmentioned, in this letter. Traces of their deft and hard working hands lie imprinted in Lithuania’s towns and townships. They were gifted artisans, merchants and traders, people of learning and culture. The privilege granted by another Lithuanian Grand Duke in 1388 – Vytautas the Great – elevated the Jews who had come to Lithuania to the status of the gentry, thus declaring them free people.
The history of the Jews can thus be traced back to Lithuania’s distant past, breaking off at the grave dug for them in the middle of the 20th century.
It was not Lithuania that dug this grave, for it no longer exercised control over its own land, yet how we live with the pain and shame that a handful of Lithuanians grunned down their fellow citizens – the Jews – and plundered their property. Is it not them that the Psalm of David refers to:
“Let them be blotted out of the book of the living and not be written with the righteous.” /Psalm 69-28/
(Page 17)

***

Can pictures be taken of pain, suffering, despair, and death?
Yes, this book contains all this and those with eyes should see:
the ground, meadows, wild flowers, trees, bushes, and rocks
marking the boundaries of a large burial site, modest monuments
with eloquent inscriptions…

Not one picture is there of a person.

He lies buried in the ground.

You can see people alongside these pictures – perhaps they
are kneeling because of the burden of unbearable pain, perhaps
they are kissing soil soaked with blood, perhaps they are pounding
it with their fists and moaning. This book is a lament of the dead and living.

This book is a book of remembrance. A book of graves. The
book of the buried Lithuanian Jerusalem. “This is Lithuania’s
unhealed wound” – we read in one monument’s inscription. And
this wound is equally painful to everyone.

This book seeks to tell you, dear reader, about the pain, about
the excruciating constant pain left to us by the innocent.

Left as an undying eternal echo, to be passed on from
generation to generation, from heart to heart.

We are all brothers in life and death.

Poet Justinas Marcinkevičius,
1995
(Page 19)

***

Deep pits. Red clay.
Once I had a home.
Many years have passed
The pits are still there
The clay is even redder;
The clay. It is my home.

There my brothers rest
Who were torn to pieces,
Who were murdered in their homes,
Who were murdered at the pits.
Deep pits. Red clay.
Once I had a home.

Lines from S. Halkin’s verses,
translated from Lithuanian by
Nijolė Maskaliūnienė

(Page 23)

The below comment is of Dovid Katz, professor of Yiddish at Vilnius University (1999-2010), editor of DefendingHistory.com, author of Lithuanian Jewish Culture

“Joseph Levinson’s book on the Lithuanian Holocaust is the most important single book to appear on the topic in a generation. From the original documents of the murderous Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) and Provisional Government (PG), to the open confrontation with (and documentation of) the “Double Genocide” revisionist theory supported by some East European governments and academic establishments, Levinson’s book cuts right to the core. It goes to the heart of the issues the way no other has dared go in our times. An essential book for understanding not only the Lithuanian Holocaust but its 21st century legacies in the battle for memory.””

– Dovid Katz

The below comment are from Steinar Gil the former Norwegian ambassador in lithuania.

“Joseph Levinson’s ”The Shoah (Holocaust) in Lithuania” is one of the most important books about the Holocaust in Lithuania. Its broad and detailed documentation and the numerous stories of eyewitnesses and survivors give ample evidence to the singularity of this horrendous crime against humanity committed by the Nazi German occupiers and their local collaborators. The book is therefore a strong and convincing refutation of the thesis of a double genocide. It leaves no doubt that the Holocaust was unique in intent and scope. The goal was total extermination of the Jewish nation, and by 1945 more than 200.000 or about 95% of all Lithuanian Jews had been murdered. Joseph Levinson presents a chilling list of 239 sites of massacre in Lithuania. The Soviet regime committed terrible crimes against the Lithuanian nation, but it never aimed at killing all Lithuanians.

“The Shoah (Holocaust) in Lithuania” contains documents that prove beyond any doubt the Nazi ideology and the anti-Semitism of the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) and the decisions made by the collaborationist Provisional Government to deprive Jewish citizens of Lithuania of all rights, confiscate their property and establish a concentration camp (ghetto) for Jews. These documents were signed by Juozas Ambrazevičius (Brazaitis), Acting Prime Minister. The preamble to one of these documents reads as follows (English translation in ”The Shoah (Holocaust) in Lithuania”, p. 180: ”In gratitude to the savior of European culture, Chancellor Adolf Hitler of the Greater German Reich, and to his courageous army, which has liberated the territory of Lithuania…” It is a sad fact that Juozas Ambrazevičius was reburied with honours in Kaunas on 20 May 2012 in the presence of former heads of state Vytautas Landsbergis and Valdas Adamkus. The Government of Lithuania contributed financially to the reburial.

In all fairness it must be said that Joseph Levinson’s book also contains moving pages about brave Lithuanians who saved Jews at the risk of their own lives. Some of them paid the highest price for their noble efforts.

In the final chapter of his book Joseph Levinson draws a vibrant and deeply moving picture of Jewish life before the war in his home town Veisiejai. When he returned there after the war, he heard that his father and his friends had been shot in the very beginning of the German occupation.

Joseph Levinson is also the author of “Skausmo knyga – The Book of Sorrow” in which he presents photos and information about the 239 sites of massacre and burial and the memorials erected there.”

Oslo, 25 September 2013

– Steinar Gil

This is a book about the Holocaust, the unprecedented extermination of about 6 million Jews, including more than 200.000 from Lithuania, during World War II.

Within half a year of the beginning of the Nazi occupation, the Jewish inhabitants of Lithuania were annihilated. About 35 thousand remained in the ghettos of Vilnius, Kaunas and Šiauliai, where they were used as slave labour. Their fate is well-known. Out of nearly a quarter of a million Jews in Lithuania, only 6 to 8 percent survived – either those who were out of reach of the Nazi executioners and their local collaborators, or those whom time favoured. There were nearly 200 massacre sites in Nazi-occupied Lithuania, where deep ditches were often dug in Jewish cemeteries to serve as mass graves for thousands of innocent Jews, including children, women and elderly people.

With the emergence of the Lithuanian National Revival movement in 1988, the Jewish community immediately began tending the mass-murder sites in an effort to perpetuate the memory of those who were exterminated there. In response to a proposal by the Lithuanian Jewish Culture Society and the State Jewish Museum, the Supreme Council of Lithuania passed a resolution “On tending to the graves and cemeteries of the victims of the Jewish genocide and preserving the Jewish heritage”. Local municipalities and conservation services, together with Lithuanian Jewish organizations, cleaned up the extermination sites and erected monuments to the Holocaust victims. Some of the Lithuanian Jewish émigrés provided funds to complete this work. All the monuments bear inscriptions in Lithuanian and Yiddish about the tragedy that struck the Jewish population during World War II.

The book includes pictures of nearly all of the Jewish extermination sites in Nazi-occupied Lithuania. Some data from the State Jewish Museum is used in this book. Let this book serve as a modest monument to the annihilated Lithuanian Jewish community as well as a grave accusation against the organizers and executors of the systematic destruction of the Jewish people. Joseph Levinson