Right next to the Church of the Icon of the Mother of God ‘Joy of All Who Sorrow’ is a Holocaust Memorial. In the autumn of 1941, a Jewish ghetto surrounded with a barbed wire fence was established in Druskininkai into which approximately 1,000 Jews were driven. In November in the following year however, the ghetto was liquidated and the Jews were deported to the Kolbasin concentration camp near Grodno. During this period, over 30 percent of the population of Druskininkai were murdered.
In memory of this tragedy, in 1992 an unknown artist created a memorial to commemorate the Jewish victims on the site of the former ghetto. Today, the Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History is located next to the memorial.
A Star of David, a menorah and an inscription in Yiddish, Lithuanian and Russian saying ‘Prisoners of the Jewish Ghetto’ are all engraved into the monument’s brown polished stone.
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