Kedainiai today is a town of about 25,000, situated near the geographical center of Lithuania, supported mainly by agriculture and ag-related processing. There’s a fertilizer plant, an ice-cream dairy and a number of cucumber-packing businesses. (Even in my grandfather’s day the town was famous for its cucumbers.)

Sadly, though, for Jews like me, the most compelling reasons to visit are the graves.

The historical Jewish cemetery extended for several hundred yards along a ridge above the little Smilga creek. The oldest part is today just a bare field with a single marker — the gravestones were probably looted during or after the war and used for paving or construction. Still standing are those erected after about 1900, among them those of Moshe Zusman and Sheyne Khaye Cassel, my paternal great-grandparents.

To view the largest Jewish graveyard, you need to drive several miles further west, across farmland and down several dirt roads, to an isolated spot near some fields. Here, on Aug. 28, 1941, Germans and Lithuanians methodically slaughtered 2,076 Jews from Kedainiai and two nearby towns, Šeta and Žeimiai. They were shot and buried in a long, narrow pit, dug earlier by Soviet prisoners of war.

The physical commemoration of that massacre has a history of its own. After the war, the Soviets put up a concrete block with a metal plaque, noting that “Soviet citizens” had been murdered here by the Nazis and their local collaborators. Soon after Lithuania regained its independence in 1991, however, it was replaced with one that identified the victims as Jews. This is what I saw when I visited in 1995.

In 2011, a new marker went up, the result of a years-long effort to further identify those buried here by name. The driver was the director of the Kedainiai Regional Museum, Rimantas Zirgulis. He’s standing by it, here.

I’ve had email contact with Rimantas for at least a decade, but our first face to face meeting was this weekend. A historian and activist whose Lithuanian family was deported to Siberia during the first Soviet occupation in 1940, he is passionate about Kedainiai’s multicultural heritage, which included Jewish, Polish, Russian, German and even Scottish communities living side by side for centuries. (Among the Yiddish folk songs my grandfather collected in his youth was one that translated nearly word for word a bawdy Scottish ballad about a drunk husband and a clever wife.)

From a distance, the memorial marker Rimantas caused to be erected here looks strange: It’s a series of metal panels, resembling a large rusting fence. Come closer, however, and you see names cut out of the metal. Jewish names — but in Lithuanian form: Joselovicius. Kaganaite. Grinbergiene.

Why? Because, Rimantas explained, it’s important that the people buried here be seen by latter-day Lithuanians as fellow citizens — not as members of an alien race, as Hitler portrayed them.

Makes sense to me.