ZILUPE
Pre-1940: Zilupe (Yiddish: Rozinovsk), town, Lūdza aprinka, Latgale reǵions, Latvia; 1940–1941: Latvian SSR; 1941–1944: Rosinhof, Kreis Ludsen, Gebiet Dünaburg, Generalkommissariat Lettland; post-1991: Zilupe, Latgale reǵions, Republic of Latvia
Zilupe is located 114 kilometers (71 miles) northeast of Daugavpils. According to the 1935 census, there were 471 Jews living in the town (30 percent of the total population).
On July 6, 1941, two weeks after the German invasion of the USSR, German armed forces occupied Zilupe. Some Jews were able to evacuate to other parts of the Soviet Union. Around 400 Jews remained in the town at the start of the occupation. The German military administration (Ortskommandantur) required that the Jews be registered. At night they were allowed to stay in their homes, but each morning they had to report to the Ortskommandantur.
Sometime in late July or early August 1941, all the Jews of Zilupe were isolated in a ghetto, in the poorest part of the town. Confined within this ghetto were 150 to 200 Jews, including some refugees from Lithuania and other towns in Latvia who had failed to get across the Russian border in time. Jews in the ghetto were subjected to systematic robbery, assault, and human degradation by the Latvian security force. The Latvian policemen also carried out a series of murders against the Jews. For example, at the start of August 1941, 17 Jews were shot.1
The ghetto for the Jewish population existed for about one month. On August 24, 1941, the ghetto was liquidated. Local police herded the Jews, carrying their belongings, into the market square. They were informed of their impending transfer to Lūdza and, in groups of 15 to 20, were escorted in that direction. Those who could not walk were taken by truck. All the Jews were shot in a forest about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) outside the town, near the village of Zabolotskie. David Deutsch resisted the murderers and was beaten viciously before being buried half alive. Along with the Jews, 24 Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) were executed. The killings were carried out by a [End Page 1028] detachment of the Arājs Kommando, which had come from Riga, and by local policemen. In May 1944, the corpses were exhumed and burned.2
SOURCES
Information on the fate of the Jewish community of Zilupe during the Holocaust can be found in the following publications: “Zilupe,” in Dov Levin, ed., Pinkas ha-kehilot. Encyclopaedia of Jewish Communities: Latvia and Estonia (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1988), pp. 128–130; “Zilupe,” in Rabbi Menakhem Barkagan, ed., Unichtozhenie evreev v Latvii 1941–1945: Tsikl lektsii (Riga: SHAMIR, 2007), pp. 283–287; “Zilupe,” in Rossiiskaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia (Moscow: Rossiiskaia Akademiia Estestvennykh Nauk, Nauchnyi fond “Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia,” “Epos,” 2000), 4:484; and Max Kaufmann, Churbn Lettland: Die Vernichtung der Juden Lettlands (Konstanz: Hartung-Gorre, 1999), p. 289.
Documentation on the murder of the Jews of Zilupe can be found in these archives: GARF (7021-93-114); LVA; and YVA.
