Plan your Visit to Yad Vashem
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Yad Vashem is open to the general public, free of charge. All visits to Yad Vashem must be reserved in advance.

Address on Behalf of the Survivors, by Joseph A. Melamed

State Opening Ceremony of Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day ‏2012

I was born in Kovno, Lithuania, where the Jews were murdered by the Nazis and the Lithuanians among whom they had lived for hundreds of years.

When the Soviets occupied Lithuania, a year before the Nazi invasion, they dissolved the Jewish organizations, closed the Jewish newspapers, imprisoned most of the Zionist leadership and exiled thousands of Jews to Siberia. At the same time Lithuanian army officers fled to Berlin, and when the Nazi invasion started, they returned to Lithuania with the Germans and began murdering Jews.