VIĻAKA
[End Page 1026] Pre-1940: Viļaka (Yiddish: Viliaki), town, Abrene aprinka, Latgale reǵions, Latvia; 1940–1941: Latvian SSR; 1941–1944: Marienhausen, Kreis Abrene, Gebiet Dünaburg, Generalkommissariat Lettland; post-1991: Viļaka, Latgale reǵions, Republic of Latvia
Viļaka is located about 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) northeast of Balvi. According to the 1935 census, there were 465 Jews living in Viļaka (29 percent of the total population).
German armed forces occupied the settlement on July 4, 1941, two weeks after their invasion of the USSR on June 22. During that time, a small number of Jews managed to evacuate to the interior of the USSR, although many were turned back at the former Soviet border. As a result, around 400 Jews remained in Viļaka at the start of the occupation.
A few days after the occupation began, all the Jews were isolated in a ghetto, for which the poorest quarter of town was allocated, bounded by Liepnenskaia and Balvskaia Streets. The Jews were allowed to go out on the street between 4:00 and 6:00 p.m.; those who violated this rule were beaten with a truncheon. In the ghetto, the Jews were subjected to systematic humiliation, beating, and robbery by the Latvian security force. The Latvian police also carried out a number of murders of Jews.
The Jews spent about one month in the ghetto. In the second week of August 1941 (either on August 8 or August 11, according to different sources), the ghetto was liquidated; all the Jews were shot in a forest near the village of Kazukalna. The shooting was carried out by a detachment of the Arājs Kommando, which had come from Riga, and by local policemen. A small group of Jews who found shelter with local peasants were subsequently found and also killed. Shortly before their retreat, the Germans burned the bodies of the Jews.
SOURCES
Information on the fate of the Jewish community of Viļaka during the Holocaust can be found in these publications: “Viliaka,” in Dov Levin, ed., Pinkas ha-kehilot. Encyclopaedia of Jewish Communities: Latvia and Estonia (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1988), pp. 119–121; Rabbi Menakhem Barkagan, ed., Unichtozhenie evreev v Latvii 1941–1945: Tsikl lektsii (Riga: SHAMIR, 2007), pp. 250–251; “Vilaka,” in Shmuel Spector and Geoffrey Wigoder, eds., The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before and during the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem; New York: New York University Press, 2001), p. 1396; “Viliaka,” in Rossiiskaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia (Moscow: Rossiiskaia Akademiia Estestvennykh Nauk, Nauchnyi fond “Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia,” “Epos,” 2000), 4:252–253. There is also a testimony by the former political prisoner A. Liede given on November 12, 1944, published in My obviniaem (Riga, 1967), pp. 108–111.
Documentation on the murder of the Jews of Viļaka can be found in the following archives: GARF (7021-93-93); LVVA; and YVA.
