With part of Lithuania now liberated by the Russian armies, a picture emerges showing Catholic priests in Lithuanian towns often actively though futilely intervening with the German occupation authorities for the life of Jews and often risking their own lives to hide Jews from Nazi extermination.
Especially courageous was the behavior of a Catholic priest in the small Lithuanian town of Vidkule who hid fifty Jewish children in his church and called, in his sermons, upon Lithuanians to give every possible assistance to Jews. When Gestapo agents learned that he had secreted Jewish children and came to the church to get them, the priest not the Gestapo officials on the thresh hold, saying, “You will enter the church only over my dead body.”
After brutally beating the priest, the Gestapo broke into the church and dragging the children out, burned them alive. The priest was arrested soon afterwards and shot.
Similar incidents took place also in other townships in Lithuania. In a small town near Vilna the local priest succeeded in hiding in his house a Jewish family, the only family to survive the wholesale massacres organized by the Germans in that township. The Bishop of Vilna circulated an epistle calling upon all Catholics to give to the Jews utmost assistance.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
