On 9 September 1941, shortly after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the Jews of Butrimonys were massacred by Einsatzgruppen and Lithuanian collaborators. Rounded up and marched along a road, they were lined up beside a mass grave and machine-gunned. According to the Jäger Report, 740 Jews were murdered in one day: 67 men, 370 women, and 303 children.[2]
What distinguished Butrimonys from hundreds of similar crimes in the Baltic region was the survival of a detailed record left by a local Jew Khone Boyarski. Hiding with his son, Boyarski described the events in a farewell letter to his relatives abroad. Boyarski was later killed by the Nazis; the letter was discovered by accident by a graduate student in the archives of Yad Vashem.[3]
^Cohen, Nathan (1989). "The Destruction of the Jews of Butrimonys as Described in a Farewell Letter from a Local Jew". Holocaust and Genocide Studies. 4 (3): 357–375. doi:10.1093/hgs/4.3.357. ISSN1476-7937.
^Hult, Joan S.; Trekell, Marianna (1991). A Century of women's basketball : from frailty to final four. Reston, Va: National Association for Girls and Women in Sport. p. 33. ISBN9780883144909.
Lithuania
Alytus County
Media related to Butrimonys at Wikimedia Commons
