Butrimonys | |
---|---|
Town | |
![]() Central square in Butrimonys | |
Coordinates: 54°30′10″N 24°15′10″E / 54.50278°N 24.25278°E | |
Country | ![]() |
County | ![]() |
Municipality | Alytus District Municipality |
Eldership | Butrimonys eldership |
Capital of | Butrimonys eldership |
Population (2011) | |
• Total | 941 |
Time zone | UTC+2 (EET) |
• Summer (DST) | UTC+3 (EEST) |
Butrimonys is a small town in Alytus County in southern Lithuania. In 2011 it had a population of 941.[1]
Butrimonys massacre
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ad/Farewell_letter_Butrimonys.jpg/220px-Farewell_letter_Butrimonys.jpg)
On 9 September 1941, shortly after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the Jews of Butrimonys were massacred by Einsatzgruppen and Lithuanian collaborators. Rounded up and marched along a road, they were lined up beside a mass grave and machine-gunned. According to the Jäger Report, 740 Jews were murdered in one day: 67 men, 370 women, and 303 children.[2]
What distinguished Butrimonys from hundreds of similar crimes in the Baltic region was the survival of a detailed record left by a local Jew Khone Boyarski. Hiding with his son, Boyarski described the events in a farewell letter to his relatives abroad. Boyarski was later killed by the Nazis; the letter was discovered by accident by a graduate student in the archives of Yad Vashem.[3]
Famous people
- Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), a famous and still influential American art historian
- Senda Berenson (1868–1954), known as the Mother of Women's Basketball. Berenson introduced basketball to women in 1892 at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, United States, a year after being first invented by James Naismith. She also authored the first Basketball Guide for Women (1901–07).[4]
References
- ^ "2011 census". Statistikos Departamentas (Lithuania). Retrieved August 2, 2017.
- ^ Austin, Ben (1997). "The Einsatzgruppen -- Mobile Killing Units". Middle Tennessee State University. Archived from the original on 2010-06-19.
- ^ Cohen, Nathan (1989). "The Destruction of the Jews of Butrimonys as Described in a Farewell Letter from a Local Jew". Holocaust and Genocide Studies. 4 (3): 357–375. doi:10.1093/hgs/4.3.357. ISSN 1476-7937.
- ^ Hult, Joan S.; Trekell, Marianna (1991). A Century of women's basketball : from frailty to final four. Reston, Va: National Association for Girls and Women in Sport. p. 33. ISBN 9780883144909.
External links
Media related to Butrimonys at Wikimedia Commons