Lida had been a Jewish town for centuries. Through the first half of the twentieth century, Jews made up something close to a third of the population of this old market center on the rail line between Vilnius and Minsk. There were schools and synagogues and a Yiddish press; Lida was one of the bright threads in the dense Jewish life that ran across what had been the Pale of Settlement. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the town fell within weeks, and the new occupation administration under Gebietskommissar Hermann Hanweg moved quickly. By summer 1941, Jews from Lida and from the surrounding villages of Berezovka, Beilitsa, Selts, and others had been concentrated into a ghetto bounded roughly by the railroad to the north, Postovskaya Street to the south, the Lida River to the east, and what is now Sovetskaya Street to the west. Approximately seven thousand people were forced into housing meant for a fraction of that number, often several families to a single apartment.

The killing did not begin in May. On April 23, 1942, an earlier execution claimed the first lives in the ghetto, and a small group of about twenty young men used the chaos to escape into the forest. The Germans pursued them and failed to bring any back. On May 2, after days of torture in the prison yard, eight members of Lida's Jewish intelligentsia were taken to the cemetery and shot. They were later reburied near the village of Stonbitsi in a place called Khovanshchina. These were the rehearsals. The mass killing of May 8, which the Germans called by the bureaucratic euphemism Aktion, was the operation toward which everything in the ghetto's eleven months had been moving. Of the roughly 8,000 Jews murdered in Lida and its district during the German occupation, the postwar investigation could reconstruct only 342 names. The other names exist only in family memory, or have been lost altogether.

Some did escape. The forests around Lida hid one of the most remarkable Jewish resistance efforts of the war: the Bielski partisans, formed by four brothers from a nearby village, who eventually sheltered more than twelve hundred Jews in a forest community deep in the Naliboki wilderness. Others from Lida joined other partisan units operating from the same forests. In the spring and summer of 1943, more groups slipped out of the remaining ghetto with help from the partisans. The ghetto itself was finally liquidated in September 1943, when the survivors were sent to camps from which most did not return.

Today, in the southwestern outskirts of Lida, in the forest near the village of Ostrobl, two mass graves hold more than six thousand people. In 1992, with funding raised by Jewish communities of Lida origin scattered across the world and led locally by Tamara Moiseyevna Borodach, a memorial in the form of two granite wings was raised there, inscribed in Russian and Hebrew. An obelisk placed by Soviet authorities in 1967 had marked the May 8 mass grave without naming who lay in it. A Holocaust memorial plaque was added in town in 1990. In Israel, the Lida community is commemorated in the Nachalat Yitzhak cemetery in Tel Aviv. Every May 8, a ceremony is held in Lida for the dead. The names that are read are still mostly the same 342.