The exhibition will run from April 23 to July 27, 2025.

The exhibition features a selection of photographs taken in the Kovno ghetto from 1941 to 1944, that document the lives of Jews imprisoned by the Germans. The images present a cross section of life that includes individuals, families, the orchestra, the destruction of the ghetto, and the exhumation of the bodies of the murdered at Kaunas Ninth Fort.

The photographer, Zvi Hirsh Kadushin/George Kadish (1910-1997), was a former teacher and engineer at the Kaunas Jewish Gymnasium, who risked his life to document ghetto life using a small, self-made camera hidden in his clothing. Having accumulated more than a 1000 photographs, Kadish created one of the most comprehensive photographic archives in Europe reflecting everyday life in the Kovno ghetto. This visual legacy is today an essential source for study to understand the history of the Holocaust in Lithuania.

The exhibition is presented in the museum of the Kaunas Ninth Fort – one of the primary execution sites of the mass murder of Jews during the Nazi occupation in Lithuania. The exhibition space is meaningful, as many of those documented by Z. H. Kadushin in the ghetto were murdered at Kaunas Ninth Fort. Their photographs, as exhibited in the museum, sustain the memory of their lives and of their fate.

The author of the exhibition is Lisa Anne Storer, a PhD student from the United States who is studying at Vytautas Magnus University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of History. Her research focuses on the lives of Jewish Lithuanian men who became ghetto policemen, as she identifies and situates them in pre-war Kaunas from 1918 to 1941, and then in the Kovno ghetto from 1941 to 1944. 

“As I investigate the Kovno ghetto, I realize that the photographs taken by Zvi Hirsh Kadushin/George Kadish provide a remarkable documentation of the lives of Lithuanian Jews trapped by German anti-Jewish policy. I prepared the exhibition with the hope of providing a visual resource to engage Lithuanian and international interest and inquiry into what took place during the Holocaust in Kaunas. Kadish’s photographs provide a critical vantage point from which to “see” how Jews lived in the ghetto amid devastation and destruction.” – Lisa Anne Storer, PhD Student, Vytautas Magnus University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of History.

Exhibition Team: Visual consultant: dr. Linas Venclauskas. English text editors: Eliza Hale & Veronica Zaleha. Lithuanian translator: Elena Pakalnyė. Photographic layout: designed and produced by www.muziejams.lt Team.

Kanas Ninth Fort Team: Vytautas Petrikėnas, Renata Vinckevičiūtė-Kazlauskienė, Eglė Pietarytė, Henrika Kryževižienė, Teresė Ringailienė.