[image snagged from http://www.gutstein.net/kaunas/kaunas-ninthfort.htm]

I am preparing to visit Lithuania for the first time in late September to visit my grandfather's birthplace and have been researching sites of historical interest.

I'm not sure yet whether Kaunas is on my travel itinerary but I am drawn to this image again and again. The 50,000 lives lost at the 9th Fort in Kaunas have been memorialized by this stark sculpture.

A work colleague, also of Lithuanian extraction, visited this place earlier this summer and the experience changed him. I've encouraged him to speak about it and to show the world the photographs he took. I hope he will.

"But the most moving exhibit in the area is the Ninth Fort complex on the edge of town. It is a cluster of three sites: a small building filled with artifacts, jail cells where Jews were confined before being executed and a huge, jagged concrete monument. These structures stand where tens of thousands of Jews (as well as Lithuanians and Poles) were murdered during World War II _ not in a gas chamber, but by handguns _ in just three years (1941-1944), virtually wiping out Lithuania's Jewish population.

"Beneath the soaring concrete monument, five long slabs of polished granite resembling giant tombstones are set low in the grass. Each is inscribed in a different language, but all say the same thing: 'This is the place where Nazis and their assistants killed more than 30,000 Jews from Lithuania and other European countries.' Beneath the stretch of tidy lawn behind the markers are their remains."

Olson, Karen Torme. "Lithuania: History has roots in a small country with a big soul." Chicago Tribune (November 8, 2004).