Commemorating the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of All Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes, Kaunas Ninth Fort Museum is joining the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS) campaign “Remember. August 23”.

ENRS public-education initiative recalls the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, signed on 23 August 1939, which carved up Central and Eastern Europe between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, clearing the way for the Second World War.

The terror inflicted by these totalitarian regimes – concentration camps, Soviet gulags, the Holocaust and decades of oppression – still shapes the region today and continues to echo through the family histories the ENRS campaign sets out to tell.

Each “Remember. August 23” edition puts a spotlight on people who found the courage to resist, against the odds.

This year’s campaign centres on Dr Stefania Perzanowska, a physician who, in January 1943, established a hospital inside the German concentration camp at Majdanek, saving the lives of fellow prisoners despite having almost no medical equipment or medicines at her disposal. At the time, she had no idea that her husband, Dr Zygmunt Perzanowski had already been murdered by the Soviet NKVD in the Katyn massacre.

“The story of Stefania and Zygmunt Perzanowski reveals something often missed in accounts of the Second World War: that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, for all their different methods of terror, devastated the same families – sometimes at once, from opposite directions,” says Rafał Rogulski, Director of the ENRS.

A short film introducing Dr Perzanowska’s story is available on YouTube and the ENRS website, alongside educational and multimedia materials exploring her life and the moral dilemmas of medicine under totalitarian rule.

As part of the campaign, Kaunas Ninth Fort Museum, alongside other museums and memorial sites across Europe, will be handing out commemorative badges reading “Remember. August 23”.

Visitors to the Museum will be able to pick up the badges at the Ninth Fort entrance (Žemaičių pl. 75) on August 22 and 23.