Vilnius to host Memory Road march marking Holocaust anniversary
Tuesday 22nd September 2026 on 07:00 in
Lithuania
More than 400 students and teachers will take part in a Memory Road march in Vilnius on Tuesday to mark the 85th anniversary of the start of the Holocaust in Lithuania, LRT reports. For the first time, participants will walk from the Paneriai Memorial to Rūdninkų Square in central Vilnius.
The march will begin at the Paneriai Memorial, where participants will visit a memorial site for Holocaust victims. They will then travel by train from Paneriai railway station to Vilnius railway station before walking to Rūdninkų Square.
Organisers said the route would run in the opposite direction to previous years. The journey from Paneriai towards the city centre is intended to symbolise bringing knowledge and remembrance of destroyed Jewish communities back from oblivion, along with their heritage returning to public consciousness and to the places where those communities lived and created.
During the commemoration, a student choir will perform musical works. The ceremony will conclude with the word “I KNOW” formed from stones bearing the names of Holocaust victims.
The traditional civic initiative invites people, especially teachers and students, to remember Lithuania’s Jewish communities destroyed during the Holocaust and walk together to sites of mass killings along the routes by which Jews were taken to their deaths. There are more than 200 such locations in Lithuania.
This year, the International Commission also launched the Memory Road 1941–2026 project. It aims not only to mark the official Holocaust Remembrance Day on September 23, but also to remember the dates when several hundred Jewish communities were destroyed in different Lithuanian cities and towns.
Memory Road marches and other commemorative events are being organised by around 100 to 150 Lithuanian schools this year.
Lithuania’s Jewish Genocide Remembrance Day is observed on September 23. On that day in 1943, the Vilnius Jewish ghetto was liquidated. About 195,000 Jews were killed in Lithuania during the Second World War, while about 208,000 Jews lived in the country before the war.