Construction halted at Lithiania mass grave site

By · August 15, 2008

Construction plans at the site of a Jewish mass grave in Lithuania have been scrapped.

A site near Marijampole where tens of thousands of Jews were killed during the Holocaust recently had been sold to a company that had begun demolishing buildings at the site, disturbing the remains there.

Bones began to appear after concrete pavement at the site was dismantled. Heavy rains sometimes would wash new bones to the surface.

Jewish community leaders asked that the town halt work at the site, and Lithuanian authorities said this week the construction work would cease.

A local newspaper, Lietyvoa Zinios, reported that the remains that had risen to the surface would be buried with the cooperation of Jewish community leaders.

The site is located behind a czarist-era military town near Marijampole. Most of the Jews and other victims of the massacre there were killed by Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators on a single day: Sept. 1, 1941. The site had been marked by a memorial, and the bodies had remained under heavy slabs of concrete and buildings.