Jews started settling in Druskininkai relatively late by Lithuanian standards in the middle of the 18th century, working as craftsmen and businessmen as well as in various merchant trades. The town’s most famous Jew was the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973), who lived there until he was 18. Making up around half of Druskininkai’s population by the beginning of the 20th century, WWII saw the town’s thriving Jewish community thrown out of their homes and forced to live in huts in the outskirts of the city before being sent via the concentration camp at Kielbasin in August 1942 to their deaths in the gas chamber at the Treblinka extermination camp soon after. What’s left of the town’s Jewish cemetery is hidden in the woods a few hundred metres directly southwest of the Tourist Information Centre at Gardino 3.
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