Following the Jäger Report

Approximately 200,000 Jews were murdered in Lithuania during the Holocaust. The stories of about half of these victims—those who perished in the ghettos of Vilnius, Kaunas, and Šiauliai—have been documented, studied, and preserved in historical memory. However, the fate of the other half—the Jews from small towns (shtetls)—has remained largely unknown. The film Following the Jäger Report is dedicated to the memory of these communities, where only one in a hundred Jews survived. It is the tenth and final installment in a documentary series exploring the Holocaust in the territories of the former Soviet Union. In this film, Boris Maftsir embarks on a journey through Lithuanian towns in an effort to understand a profound historical rupture: Why, in Lithuania—a country with a rich, intertwined Jewish and Lithuanian history—did many Lithuanians come to view Jews as traitors after the Soviet occupation of 1940? How did this perception evolve into a driving force behind the persecution and mass murder of Lithuanian Jews following the German invasion on June 22, 1941? How did a centuries-old, vibrant Litvak heritage come to a brutal end within just a few months—at the edges of mass graves?