To fully understand what the Holocaust was, you can't start in Auschwitz.

Auschwitz was the end point of a much longer road of horror.

If you want to know where the Holocaust really begins, you begin in Lithuania -- in particular, in the town of Kaunas, in the summer of 1941.

It was here that the Germans first discovered that others might actually want to support them in the mass murder of European Jews.

Kaunas was once home to Lithuania's second-largest Jewish community.

Today, there's almost nothing left.

And Kaunas, or Kovno, as it was known in Yiddish, means a huge amount to me because it's where my mother's family came from.

There were 40 -- 40!

-- synagogues in Kaunas before the war.

And Jews in Kaunas were an amazing community, they're an amazing community.

There were five Yiddish newspapers.

There was youth organizations.

There was an athletic club.

There was every kind of Jewish activity.

So it was flourishing, prospering, culturally and in every other way, too.

And that's why, when a few days after the Germans arrived in the last week of June, the shock actually of the hatred that the Jewish community felt was traumatic.

In the summer of 1941, the Germans invade Lithuania, as part of the war against the Soviet Union.

And almost immediately Jews are subject to violent persecution, not just by the Germans, but also by the local population.

[speaking Yiddish] [speaking Yiddish] [speaking Yiddish] [speaking Yiddish] [speaking Yiddish] [speaking Yiddish]