Kretinga Home

Kretinga is the Lithuanian name for the Shtetl that was home to the Gillis family for many centuries. Kretinga was home to Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, Germans and Jews, Jews making up a third of the population in the 19th. century. Emigration, the results of WWI, the Holocaust, Soviet rule and Lithuanian independence would change all that.

Peruse Kretinga's history, see some images of our Shtetl and read the horrifying story of the slaughter of Kretinga's Jews at the hands of the Nazis with the active complicity of the community's Lithuanian neighbours.