IX FORT
Where heartbreaking history lives
IX FORT - a 19th century fortress with heartbreaking past
Kaunas is the second-largest city in Lithuania, known for its consistent focus on academic and cultural development. Despite this very attractive policy and its beautiful location in the confluence of two rivers, Kaunas has never been a place I wanted to get to know better. In my student days, I might have hitch-hiked there from Vilnius to a couple gatherings with friends and quite enjoyed them, but that’s pretty much as far as Kaunas and I go.
So when I was creating our holiday agenda this summer, I wanted to give this very distant relationship another go. And off we went to visit a 19th century fortress that changed its function a few times over the years - 9th Fort in the outskirts of Kaunas.
I won’t write about the history of it in detail, there are already much better sources for this if you would like to take a look (https://www.9fortomuziejus.lt/?lang=en).
What I would like to tell you, is that you should not come here expecting interactive displays or to be entertained. There isn’t a souvenir shop or even a cafe onsite either. It is a place that is brutally factual about the horrors of its past, recording and perpetually lamenting all lives that were lost.
Built as a fortress (one of 9 others built around Kaunas) against German army forces in 1913, it was surrendered by its defenders without a single battle. There is something tragically comical about spending 10 years painstakingly designing and building a fortress against a strike you know is coming and then just abandoning it because the telephone lines were cut off and you were not sure anymore who was coming and from where and when exactly they will get here. (#sadface, as my 7 year old would say).
From around 1917 until the end of the WWII it was used as a prison and then as a concentration camp, a site of murder of around 50,000 Jews and other nationals from Lithuania and other European countries, a site of deportation of Lithuanians to Siberia during the Soviet occupation times. The cells and concrete corridor walls still hold the echoes of the pain and fear.
There are no words to describe the horror of those times, instead, it is conveyed by inviting you to look in the eye of all those who perished here and whose photographs are lining the walls, to witness the inscriptions still visible on the walls left by those who were imprisoned, to be touched by the boundless pain expressed in the art exhibits of the museum wing.
I won’t write about the history of it in detail, there are already much better sources for this if you would like to take a look (https://www.9fortomuziejus.lt/?lang=en).
What I would like to tell you, is that you should not come here expecting interactive displays or to be entertained. There isn’t a souvenir shop or even a cafe onsite either. It is a place that is brutally factual about the horrors of its past, recording and perpetually lamenting all lives that were lost.
Built as a fortress (one of 9 others built around Kaunas) against German army forces in 1913, it was surrendered by its defenders without a single battle. There is something tragically comical about spending 10 years painstakingly designing and building a fortress against a strike you know is coming and then just abandoning it because the telephone lines were cut off and you were not sure anymore who was coming and from where and when exactly they will get here. (#sadface, as my 7 year old would say).
From around 1917 until the end of the WWII it was used as a prison and then as a concentration camp, a site of murder of around 50,000 Jews and other nationals from Lithuania and other European countries, a site of deportation of Lithuanians to Siberia during the Soviet occupation times. The cells and concrete corridor walls still hold the echoes of the pain and fear.
There are no words to describe the horror of those times, instead, it is conveyed by inviting you to look in the eye of all those who perished here and whose photographs are lining the walls, to witness the inscriptions still visible on the walls left by those who were imprisoned, to be touched by the boundless pain expressed in the art exhibits of the museum wing.
Infinitely sad and haunting place, which will stay with you for a long time.
I would recommend getting an English tour guide to get to see places otherwise not visible to the visitors and to get more of the context and history behind the exhibits.
I would recommend getting an English tour guide to get to see places otherwise not visible to the visitors and to get more of the context and history behind the exhibits.
