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"A Hole in the Heart"

Where's Kedainiai?

Roughly in the center of what is today the independent nation of Lithuania. For hundreds of years it was an administrative seat in the kingdom that included most of contemporary Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. When that kingdom was divided up in the 19th century, it became part of the Russian Empire. From 1918 to 1939 it was part of independent Lithuania, and from 1944 until 1990 it was in the Lithuanian Republic of the Soviet Union.

Detail from 1880 map of Russia's Baltic provinces

Where was Keidan?

The Russian empire was divided into provinces, or guberniyas. Keidan was a district capital in what the Russians called Kovno guberniya, a province governed from the city of Kovno (Kaunas), some 40 kilometers south. In the 1880 British map at left, Keidan is represented in one of its variant spellings, "Keijdani", in the south-central section of the province. To view the full map, click on it here.

View a street map of contemporary Kedainiai, with Jewish synagogues and cemeteries marked.