The history of the Holocaust in Lithuania is well documented, yet essential parts of that history remain missing. What is often absent is not what happened, but how people lived—how families navigated fear, how dignity was preserved under constant threat, and how survival depended on quiet, undocumented acts that left no trace in official records.

The Gens Family Project exists to preserve these missing dimensions. Grounded in family testimony, primary sources, and archival research, we document the Holocaust in Lithuania as it was lived—locally, personally, and community by community. Our work restores individual lives, names, and moral complexity to a history too often reduced to abstractions.

We focus especially on leadership under coercion, women’s active roles in survival networks, cultural life as a form of resistance, and the continuity between ghetto experience and postwar lives devoted to justice, public service, and remembrance. These stories deepen, rather than simplify, our understanding of the past.

As survivor generations pass, the most fragile layer of Holocaust history—the lived, unwritten layer—is disappearing. The Gens Family Project exists to ensure that it is preserved with care, accuracy, and responsibility, so that the history of the Holocaust in Lithuania is not only remembered, but truly understood.