Černė Percikovičiūtė was an artist who studied at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas and at the Justinas Vienožinskis studio. During her career as an artist, she took part in eighteen exhibitions, including having her work accepted to Lithuanian Art Exhibition in Chicago in 1936. According to the art historian Violeta Krištopaitytė, feminist ideology was of great importance to Černė, who was an active member of the Lithuanian Women Artists’ Association. Today, there are only five extant works by the artist available to the public, which includes her hand-written autobiography, and pictures of eleven of her lost works. In 1941, Černė was interned in the Kovno Ghetto and is presumed to have been killed during one of the extermination operations in the ghetto.

Isakas Anolikas was a famous Olympic cyclist in Lithuania, who represented the country in the Olympic Games twice: in Paris in 1924, the first Olympics in which Lithuania participated as a state, and in 1928, during the Amsterdam Olympic Games. During the 188km long race in Paris, Isakas tyres burst and he wasn’t able to reach the finish line. Famously, he was helped by a local Frenchman to get back to Paris by train. Thirteen years later, in 1941, Isakas was imprisoned in the Kovno Ghetto. After two years in the ghetto, in 1943, he was killed in Kaunas Ninth Fort, which served as an execution site.

Jakovas Lipšicas was an artist whose drawings depicted scarring life in the Kovno Ghetto. He took part in exhibitions and illustrated books before the start of World War II. In 1941, the painter was imprisoned in the Kovno Ghetto. At first, he would draw in the attic at night. He later joined Esther Lurie, who was tasked by the ghetto’s Council of Elders to document her surroundings in drawings. As the war was close to an end, Jakovas was sent to Dachau and later transferred to the Kaufering concentration camp. He died there due to poor health. The painter’s surviving daughter Pepa and wife Lisa returned to the former ghetto and found his artwork hidden in the cemetery. Jakovas best-known painting, titled “Beaten (My Brother Gedalyahu)”, depicts a man’s wounded back. It is stored in the Yad Vashem Collection archives in Israel. “For a long time, I stopped drawing. These were days of constant fear, of a harsh and coarsening struggle for existence. The German method was action followed by a brief relaxation until the next action, which caught us off-guard. I was conscripted to do forced labor. Only occasionally, on some free day, did the painter Jakovas Lipšicas and I sketch Ghetto Types,” wrote painter Esther Lurie in her memoirs. This is one of the few remaining entries about the talented painter.

Before the Holocaust, Vladimiras Lazersonas established the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Pedagogy at Vytautas Magnus University, together with scientist Jonas Vabalas-Gudaitis. The two founders were the only professionals in this field. Vladimiras would treat various mental disorders in his private clinic. He would apply hypnosis to help desperate alcoholics and would offer free services to the poor. Not much is known about the professor’s wife, Regina, who was a paediatrician. She was incarcerated in the Kovno Ghetto and deported to the Stutthof concentration camp in 1944. There, she treated the other female prisoners, but died of unbearable living conditions. Vladimiras’ fate is similar, he was brought to Dachau in 1944, where he died after a year. Tamara and Victor, two of the three Lazersonas children, survived the Holocaust. Their oldest son Rudolf was arrested by Lithuanian collaborators at the start of the Nazi occupation and later shot dead at the Ninth Fort in Kaunas.

Born in Vilnius, the young Icchokas Rudaševskis studied at the Jewish gymnasium before the start of World War II. His father worked as a typographer in one of the largest Yiddish newspapers "Vilner tog". In June 1941, the Germans occupied Vilnius and drove all the Jews out to the ghetto. It was during this time that Icchokas started writing a diary, which detailed his life and struggles living in the ghetto. In September 1943, the destruction of the Vilnius ghetto began, and Icchokas and his family escaped and were in hiding in an attic in a building along Disna Street in Vilnius. They only lasted in hiding for a month, in October they were found and the entire family were shot during the Ponary massacre. His diary was discovered by his cousin Sore Voloshin, in 1944. The original manuscript is kept at the Jewish Science Institute in New York. In 1953, the diary was published through the efforts of Sutskever and the Golden Star Publishing House. “I think that everything has to be put in writing, even the worst events. Later everything will be important,” Icchokas Rudaševskis

Dr. Jakovas Vygodskis was a Polish–Lithuanian Jewish politician, Zionist activist and a medical doctor. He was one of the most prominent Jewish activists in Vilnius and served as a member of parliament and as Minister for Jewish Affairs. Jakovas was born to a family of Hasidic Jews who had moved to Vilnius in 1860. He was the eldest of seven brothers and received traditional Jewish education at a cheder. He studied at the Imperial Military Medical Academy in Saint Petersburg and later continued his medical studies in Vienna, Berlin and Paris. In 1884, he returned to Vilnius and established his practice as gynecologist and pediatrician. Jakovas was one of the first Zionist activist in Vilnius and chaired their organization. In 1905, he was one of the founding members of the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) in Vilnius Region and in 1908, he established and chaired the Union of Jewish Doctors. During World War I, he was a member of a Jewish relief committee and established the daily Yiddish newspaper Flugblat. Throughout the years, he was arrested several times for his activism, both by the Nazis and the Bolsheviks. He supported Lithuanian independence was appointed to the Council of Lithuania in 1918, the same year he became the first Lithuanian Minister for Jewish Affairs. In 1919, when Poland captured Vilnius, Jakovas was chairman of the Jewish community in the city. Although he opposed the occupying forces, he was elected to the Polish parliament in 1922 and 1928 where he focused his efforts on improving Jewish education in Hebrew and Yidish languages. In 1941, following the German invasion of Poland, Jakovas was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in the Lukiškės prison, where he was tortured to death at the age of eighty-four.

Samuelis Petuchauskas was the deputy mayor in the municipality of Šiauliai in the inter-war period. Although he was born in Vilnius, Samuelis devoted all his energy to modernising the growing industrial city of Šiauliai. During his time as deputy mayor, he was leading initiatives such as improving the water supply system, building a museum-library and issuing residents with passports. Whilst the mayors and ruling parties changed, he kept being re-elected for the post of deputy mayor. He remained in office for 20 years, until the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania and abolished municipalities. At the start of the first Soviet occupation, the Petuchauskas family moved to Vilnius. During the subsequent Nazi occupation, in 1941, Samuelis was detained and shot dead in August that same year during the Ponary massacre.

Chaimas (1864, - 1941), Leiba (1896 - 1944 ) Tirca (1914 - 1944), Eliezeras (1938 - 1944). The Bass family lived in Vilnius and were owners of the trading company “Ch. Bass & Sohn”. The company sold fur, caps and hats. The father of the household, Leiba, was born in 1896 in Kaunas. In 1934, he married Tirca. Their first child, Eliezeras, was born in 1938. Shortly after the birth of their first child, the family were forced to the Kovno Ghetto, in which their second child, Ruth, was born in 1942. They struggled for food, and Tirca managed from time to time to sneak in food supplies from work, which she divided equally between the family's relatives and neighbours. In 1944, 6 year-old Eliezeras was abducted and subsequently murdered. Later that year, both mother and father died in the ghetto during the liquidation. Young Ruth was the only one of the Bass family who survived the Holocaust. She was saved and adopted by Jadvyga and Alfonsas Babarskis,. The couple were awarded the title Righteous Among the Nations for helping Jews during World War II.