Letter from Paneriai: There were few happy endings in the woods of Paneriai. Located only 10 kilometres outside Lithuania's capital, Vilnius, this village carries the same baleful resonance for many Jews as do places such as Auschwitz and Dachau.
In seven circular pits among the trees, Nazi soldiers and their Lithuanian accomplices killed 100,000 people, 70,000 of them Jews. Most were from Vilnius, the city once known as the "Jerusalem of the North".
It used to be the European centre of Yiddish learning, attracted dozens of cultural leaders and prominent theologians and had six Jewish newspapers and 100 synagogues.
There is only one synagogue in today's Vilnius, and 4,000 Jews, compared to almost 80,000 in 1941 when Hitler's troops drove the Red Army from the city. Some 240,000 Jews lived in pre-war Lithuania; now only 5,000 call the country home.
That community still mourns relatives who died at Paneriai and many will gather beside the trenches this week to remember a rare story of survival.
It is 60 years since dozens of Jews escaped from the pit where they were being kept alive to dig up and burn thousands of bodies before advancing Russian troops could discover evidence of the Nazi crimes.
They covertly built a tunnel and fled on a moonless night, knowing that they too would be killed once their gruesome work was done.
Pursued by their SS guards, of the 80 who escaped, only a dozen made it to a group of partisans hiding in the forest. The rest were doomed.
The event offers Jews a rare spark of hope and a glimpse of life from a time when death was ever-present in Vilnius, not only at the hands of the Nazi invaders, but at those of their own Lithuanian neighbours.
"About 500 people helped save Jews here, hid them and risked their own lives doing it," said Dr Simon Alperovich, chairman of the Jewish Community of Lithuania. "But some 15,000 people played a part in the genocide, and Lithuania is still not ready to look clearly at what happened."
In a country where 96 per cent of resident Jews were killed, few deny that some Lithuanians helped Hitler with his dirty work, many at the behest of the local Nazi-sponsored security police, the Saugumas.
But only two Lithuanians have been tried for Nazi-related war crimes, and no one has gone to jail. Prosecutors are trying to persuade the German authorities to send a third man to Vilnius for questioning. This individual allegedly promised to help Jews escape, but then drove a group of them to the Saugumas in a truck.
"The spirit is not really there yet," Dr Alperovich said of attempts to hunt down war criminals. "It is done with little enthusiasm and they are slow to find evidence. Some investigators want to lessen the role played by locals in these crimes, but they played a big part."
The 20th century saw this north-eastern corner of Europe tossed from one power to another, between Polish, German and Russian hands.
Russia took control of Lithuania in 1940, only to be kicked out of Vilnius a year later by Hitler's men, who soon herded the Jews into ghettos and began the massacres at Paneriai and other sites throughout the Baltic.
When the Red Army returned in 1944, the fate of the region was sealed for the next five decades. Stalin's security police killed or deported to Siberia hundreds of thousands of people from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. These nations regained their freedom only in 1991, as the Soviet Union crumbled.
This litany of terror touched every Lithuanian family at some point, and for every Jewish accusation of collaboration with the Germans there is a counter-claim of Jewish support for, or participation in, communist atrocities. Myth is stronger than fact and, in a year when the country joins NATO and the European Union, few have the stomach to look back at who did precisely what with the Nazis and the KGB.
But Jewish groups insist that anti-Semitism is not just a thing of the past here. In February, a leading Lithuanian newspaper ran a series of front-page articles which outraged many locals and a number of EU officials, so crude was its caricature of Jews. One piece, entitled "Who Rules The World?", warned Lithuanians to be "especially careful with Americans, because America is ruled by Jews".
Many believe that such sentiments undermine a society which has not fully reckoned with its own grim history.
"We need at least 20 years of peace and quiet to judge things properly," said ghetto survivor Tobias Jafetas.
