The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945

Pre-1940: Akmenė (Yiddish: Akmian), town, Mažeikiai apskritis, Lithuania; 1940–1941: Akmenė/Akmiane, uezd center, Lithuanian SSR; 1941–1944: Okmian, Kreis Moscheiken, Gebiet Schaulen-Land, Generalkommissariat Litauen; post-1991: Akmenė, rajonas center, Šiauliai apskritis, Republic of Lithuania

Akmenė is located 50 kilometers (31 miles) west-northwest of Šiauliai. As of 1940, there were 25 to 30 Jewish families, or about 100 Jews, living in Akmenė.

On June 26, 1941, German armed forces captured the town. Lithuanian nationalist collaborators immediately arrested all the Jewish men and put them into the town’s prison. On July 5–6, 1941, one of the few Germans present selected three Jews: the brothers Yosef and Faroush Yosselevich and a man named Shmidt. Assisted by 15 local Lithuanians, the Germans took these men out and shot them. The other Jewish men remained in the prison until early August. From available sources, it is not completely clear whether the Jewish women and children were imprisoned together with the men in July or rounded up only in early August.

On August 4, 1941, all the Jews of Akmenė were transported to three large grain silos on the banks of the Venta River near Mažeikiai. The escorting forces immediately took the men to the pits in the forest close to the Jewish cemetery, where German security forces and Lithuanian auxiliaries under the command of Lieutenant Vitkauska shot them together with the Jewish men from Mažeikiai and other nearby towns.¹ According to one account, the three rabbis from Akmenė, Mažeikiai, and Viekšniai donned their prayer shawls and phylacteries (tefillin) just prior to being shot. Kalman Maggid, the rabbi of Vekshne (Viekšniai), called out to the Jews not to show any signs of sadness to the Germans: “We must sanctify G-d. That is the loftiest, the holiest goal of a Jew. We must die as Jews, as holy people, as the members of G-d’s people.”²

The Jewish women and children from Akmenė were imprisoned together with the Jewish women and children of Mažeikiai and the surrounding area in the grain silos. On August 9, 1941, the Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators shot all these prisoners at the same site as the men.