BATAKIAI
Pre-1940: Batakiai (Yiddish: Batok), village, Tauragė apskritis, Lithuania; 1940–1941: Taurage uezd, Lithuanian SSR; 1941–1944: Botocken, Kreis Tauroggen, Gebiet Schaulen-Land, Generalkommissariat Litauen; post-1991: Batakiai, Tauragė rajonas and apskritis, Republic of Lithuania
Batakiai is located 19 kilometers (12 miles) northeast of Tau-ragė. According to the 1923 census, there were 88 Jews living in the village. In 1940, the Jewish community consisted of about 10 families. In the nearby village of Skaudvilė (Yiddish: Shkudvil), there were 1,017 Jews in 1923 and, according to one estimate, almost 2,000 Jews out of a total population of 2,800 in June 1941.1
German forces occupied the villages of Batakiai and Skaudvilė on June 22, 1941, the first day of their invasion of the USSR. Consequently, very few Jews were able to flee in time. As the German forces passed through Skaudvilė, many Jews sought shelter in the surrounding countryside. On their return home a few days later, some found their houses had been looted.
A German military commandant was based in Skaudvilė and a Lithuanian local administration was soon established there. Lithuanian partisans wearing white armbands, under the command of a man named Liepa in Skaudvilė, appeared on the streets acting as an auxiliary police force. One Jew, named Abromson, had managed to flee from Skaudvilė with the Soviets; a few days after the occupation, his remaining property was confiscated and taken away by truck on the orders of German officials.2
On July 16, 1941, an announcement was posted in Skaudvilė, signed by the German commandant and the partisan leader Liepa, which ordered all men over the age of 14 to appear at the horse market. Here the Lithuanians were separated from the Jews, and all the Jewish men, including Rabbi Rubinstein, were told that they were being sent on a labor assignment to the nearby village of Pužai. Nachum Levy was fortunate that his father instructed him to remain at home on this day, although he was over 14 years of age.3
About 300 Jewish men were escorted out of Skaudvilė on foot by a large group of Lithuanian partisans brandishing whips. In Pužai, they were joined in a storage building by small groups of men brought there from Batakiai and Upyna. Within three days, all the men gathered there were taken into the Pužai Forest and shot by a unit of German SS with machine guns, assisted by the Lithuanian partisans.
In Batakiai, the remaining Jewish women, children, and elderly persons were moved into barracks near the railroad line. Construction of the barracks was still incomplete, and many of them lacked a roof. A few days after the mass shooting, more than 100 horse-drawn wagons arrived in Skaudvilė and loaded up the remaining Jews of the town, together with much of their property. Tearful Jewish women gave a few of their more expensive items to neighbors they thought they [End Page 1043] could trust, “asking not to be forgotten, and, if an opportunity should arise, to be helped in the future.”4
The Jewish women, children, and old people from Skaudvilė, together with those from Upyna, were then crowded into three dilapidated barracks with the Batakiai Jews. Guarded by armed Lithuanian police, the Jews stayed in these barracks for about two months. Able-bodied women and adolescents were sent out every day to perform various kinds of work on Lithuanian farms in the vicinity. Conditions in the camp were filthy, and the Jews suffered from hunger. Nachum Levy recalls foraging for food: “During the day I would creep out to the neighboring villages and buy foodstuffs in exchange for clothing items and personal trinkets. I would set out with a few other boys, and we would barter with the locals. Another possibility was to buy food from the Lithuanian peasants who would bring farming products to the camp in horse wagons and sell them for money.”5
On September 15, 1941,6 this Jewish ghetto/camp was liquidated by shooting all of the prisoners, probably some 800 people, in the woods not far from Batakiai. The terrified and half-starved victims were forced to dig the grave and remove their clothing before they were shot. The shooting was carried out by members of the Lithuanian police and eight Gestapo officials from the Grenzpolizeiposten Laugszargen (Lauksargiai), headed by Kriminalsekretär Schwarz. Initially Schwarz suggested to SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans-Joachim Böhme, the head of the Tilsit Gestapo, that the barracks should be blown up along with the women and children inside, but this plan was rejected because the blasts could have damaged the nearby railroad station.7
After the war a number of Lithuanian partisans from Tau-ragė were tried by the Soviet authorities for their participation in the mass shooting of Jews in Batakiai. The massacre in Batakiai is mentioned also in the records of the trial conducted of Bernhard Fischer Schweder, Hans-Joachim Böhme, and a number of other defendants in Ulm in 1958 and in another German trial conducted against a member of the Lithuanian auxiliary forces in Frankfurt am Main in 1972.
SOURCES
Information regarding the fate of the Jewish communities of Batakiai and Skaudvilė during the Holocaust can be found in these publications: Dov Levin and Yosef Rosin, eds., Pinkas ha-kehilot. Encyclopaedia of Jewish Communities: Lithuania (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1996), pp. 169–171, 695–698; Josef Levinson, ed., The Shoah (Holocaust) in Lithuania (Vilnius: Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, 2006), pp. 130–135; Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, The Annihilation of Lithuania Jewry (New York: Judaica Press, 1995), p. 253; Alfonsas Eidintas, Jews, Lithuanians and the Holocaust (Vilnius: Versus Aureus, 2003), p. 279; Urteil des Landgericht Ulm (Ks 2/57) v. 29.8.1958 gegen Böhme u.a., in KZ-Verbrechen vor Deutschen Gerichten. Bd. II, Einsatzkommando Tilsit. Der Prozess zu Ulm (Frankfurt/Main, 1966) and Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, vol. 15 (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 1976), Lfd. Nr. 465; Urteil des Landgericht Frankfurt/Main (4 Ks 2/71) v. 27.4.1972 gegen Juozas Sta., in JuNS-V, vol. 37 (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2007), Lfd. Nr. 773; and Nachum Levy, “How I Survived the Holocaust,” available at shtetlinks.jewishgen.org.
Documentation on the persecution and murder of the Jews of Batakiai can be found in these archives: BA-L (e.g., B 162/14080); GARF (7021-94-429); LCVA; LYA (3377-55-2); MA (A.401); USHMM (RG-02.184); VHF (# 3247); and YVA (e.g., O-71/10 and 11).
NOTES
1. “Everything Began in This Way,” in Levinson, The Shoah, p. 135.
2. Ibid., p. 130.
3. Ibid., pp. 131–132; and Levy, “How I Survived the Holocaust.”
4. “Everything Began in This Way,” p. 134.
5. Levy, “How I Survived the Holocaust.”
6. This date is given by Oshry, The Annihilation, p. 253, and is corroborated by Levy, “How I Survived the Holocaust,” who escaped from the Batakiai camp on the eve of the Aktion. Other sources, e.g., Levin and Rosin, Pinkas ha-kehilot: Lithuania, date the killing in August. Estimates for the number of victims vary between 300 and 1,800.
7. JuNS-V, vol. 15, Lfd. Nr. 465, pp. 215–216. A more precise description of the mass grave site can be found in JuNS-V, vol. 37, Lfd. Nr. 773, p. 213. See also, MA, A.401, testimony of Yoseph Ben-Yaakov, who managed to escape from the killing site.
