On this day in 1941, in Nemenčinė, a small town northeast of Vilnius, 403 Jewish residents were murdered by a German-led unit with local collaborators. Lithuania had been home to Jewish communities for more than five centuries. Most of the killing there took place in the second half of 1941, town by town, in the space of a few months.
We know the number because it was written down. A tally kept by the commanding officer of the killing unit, compiled that December, set out the places and the dates in columns, and against Nemenčinė and the twentieth of September it entered men, women and children separately, adding to 403. It was filed as an administrative record. The people it counted had names that the columns did not keep: families, neighbours, a synagogue, a street where they had lived.
The Wikipedia article below gives the wider account of what happened in Lithuania in those years. Today the town, and the number, and the day.
The columns you describe survive because they were typed and filed like any other return — ledgers outlast the intentions of the people who keep them. That the 403 can be counted at all is owed to bookkeeping; the names have to be recovered from elsewhere, and in many towns they have been, one household at a time.
Thank you, Miriam. Those communities had been part of the region for some six centuries before that autumn, with their own schools, councils and printing houses, and Nemenčinė was one small place among them.