The Ninth Fort: The Place Where My Memories Start
A prison, a place of mass murder, a burial site. The place where my memories start, my eternal playground
For years I’ve been trying to write about the Ninth Fort, but I can never find the words. It has grown too vast, almost impossible to apprehend, not only because of the countless personal memories related to it but because of the magnitude of atrocities that took place on its grounds.
The Ninth Fort was the last and the most modern fortress of my hometown Kaunas, completed on the eve of the First World War and meant to protect the city from enemy invasions although never used for that purpose.
From 1924 to the end of the Second World War it was used as a prison: first by the newly independent Lithuania, then by Soviet NKVD who kept political prisoners there before sending them to Gulags, and lastly by the Nazis who, together with Lithuanian collaborators, converted the Ninth Fort into a mass murder place. More than fifty thousand Jews were killed and are buried on its grounds.
