The Forest of Remembrance

The Forest of Remembrance is the first biography of a place to incorporate multiple perspectives of the Nazis and their local supporters' murder of seventy thousand people on the outskirts of Vilnius, including Jews, members of the Polish underground, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, communists, and Lithuanians who opposed the Nazi regime.

Zigmas Vitkus traces the transformation of the site from July 1944, when the first Soviet military units and Jewish partisans set foot on the former mass killing ground, to the present day. He not only analyzes the evolution of the memorial's content, the changes in its status, and the development of the physical site itself, but also uncovers the relationship between the memorial's development and the vicissitudes of memory policy. As Vitkus explores the significance of Paneriai, he reveals it as a symbol of the Holocaust for different commemorative cultures: those of Lithuania, Poland, Israel, and Jews in the United States.