© Richard Schofield
Held on or around Lithuanian Holocaust Memorial Day on September 23, the annual Reading of the Names—or Vardai—event is a privately organised initiative during which the names of Holocaust victims are read out in the Lithuanian towns and villages in which they perished. Surprised to discover that the event was of no interest to any of the 300,000 or so residents of Kaunas, in 2016 we decided to organise our first Vardai inside the city’s former Gestapo headquarters, and continued to do so in different locations around Kaunas until the pandemic made holding such events impossible. Click here to see several photographs from our 2018 event, which was held as the site of the 1941 Lietūkis Garage Massacre.