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

Pre-1940: Butrimonys (Yiddish: Butrimants), town, Alytus apskritis, Lithuania; 1940–1941: Eyshishkes uezd, Lithuanian SSR; 1941–1944: Kreis Olita, Gebiet Kauen-Land, Generalkommissariat Litauen; post–1991: Alytus rajonas and apskritis, Republic of Lithuania

Butrimonys is located 69 kilometers (43 miles) south-southeast of Kaunas. In 1934, there were 948 Jews living in Butrimonys.

On June 23, 1941, the day after the start of the German invasion, Soviet forces abandoned Butrimonys, and units of the Wehrmacht seized the town. Immediately after the occupation began, Lithuanian nationalists established a town administration, and a militia or local police force was formed, composed of about 40 Lithuanians who were antisemitic. This force is also described in some sources as Lithuanian partisans. In Butrimonys, they were commanded by Leonardas Kasperiunas.¹

The provisional Lithuanian administration in Butrimonys quickly implemented a series of anti-Jewish measures. Jews were marked with yellow stars, and special signs were put up on their houses. Jews were ordered to perform humiliating forced labor tasks without pay, such as cleaning toilets. The local partisans robbed and assaulted them. During the first two weeks, the partisans evicted all the Jews from the large houses on the market square and sent them to the side alleys. Many Jews were afraid even to go out on the street, as the Lithuanians and Germans could arrest or shoot them on the slightest pretext. Jews were not permitted to leave town except with special police permits, and non-Jews were forbidden to allow Jews into their homes or trade with them. According to one account, Jews in Butrimonys were not even permitted to wear shoes.² [End Page 1045]

On June 30, 1941, Lithuanian policemen carried out the first Aktion in Butrimonys. They arrested all remaining Communists and Soviet officials and imprisoned them. Shortly afterwards, the policemen released some of those who had been arrested. The remaining individuals, five Jewish men who worked as teachers and one Jewish woman, were taken to Alytus with a group of prisoners of war. On the way there, the Lithuanians murdered the Jewish woman and one of the teachers. All the others were shot in Alytus.³ Sometime later, another six Jews were escorted to Alytus and shot.

During two separate Aktions on August 12 and August 22, 1941, 217 Jews from Butrimonys (including 32 women) were escorted to Alytus and shot there.⁴ On their arrival in Alytus, some of the Jews were instructed by the Lithuanian police to write letters to their families asking them to send money, clothes, and food. In Butrimonys, a local Lithuanian named Vaitkevicius, among others, tried to use some of these letters to trick Jews into giving him the items, knowing full well that the intended recipients were dead. Riva Losanskaya recalls, however, that she learned from other neighbors that her father had already been murdered.

The Lithuanian police also exploited Jewish girls sexually. Pranas Senavaitis received permission from his boss, Kasperiunas, to “put to work” Asya, a 20-year-old Jewish girl of exceptional beauty. He continued periodic sexual relations with her until mid-November, when he shot her himself. Other Jewish women, handpicked by Kasperiunas for his “harem,” were also among the few Jews temporarily spared from the mass shooting on September 9, 1941, along with the “leader of the ghetto,” Izhak Miliunsky, his wife, and a few others.⁵

At the end of August, about 70 Jews from the nearby village of Punia were brought into Butrimonys and given temporary shelter. On the morning of Friday, August 29, 1941, the Lithuanian authorities again ordered all the Jews to assemble in the marketplace.⁶ They conducted a further selection, choosing all the men (old and young) and some young children and younger women. Then they sent them to Alytus, where they were murdered. After the selection, they ordered the remaining Jews—the women and children—to leave their houses all over town and move into two streets, Tatarshe and Klidze. Those who lived outside this area moved in hurriedly, clutching their remaining bundles of belongings. This became the ghetto, which was guarded by the Lithuanian police. In the meantime, local Lithuanians, including a priest, helped themselves to confiscated Jewish furniture that had been put into storage near the synagogue.⁷

Over the next few days, more Jews from the villages of Stakliškes and Birštonas were forcibly resettled into the temporary ghetto in Butrimonys.⁸ In the ghetto, the Jews now had no illusion as to their fate. Local Polish and Lithuanian neighbors offered to take their possessions into safekeeping, expecting that few, if any, would survive. On September 4, 1941, news arrived of the shooting of the remaining Jews of Jieznas (a few kilometers to the northwest) on the previous day. Over the next few days, as many as 80 Jews managed to leave the ghetto as some Lithuanian police turned a blind eye, being more intent on securing Jewish property. Most who left went into hiding with local peasants, although only a small proportion of them managed to survive until the end of the occupation.⁹

On September 6–8, 1941, some of the residents of Butrimonys and others from neighboring farms, under the direction of local authorities, dug two pits near the village of Klydzionys, about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from town. Then, on September 9, a church holiday, a detachment of German Security Police from Einsatzkommando 3, along with Lithuanian police, liquidated the ghetto. The Lithuanian police, assisted by local residents, rounded up the Jews and escorted them in a long column out of town. The Jews, shuffling to their deaths, were weak from hunger and trembling with fear. As the guard remained lax, Riva Losanskaya and her mother managed to escape into the forest just as the column was approaching its final destination. At the pits some Jews tore up their money, while others threw their clothes to peasants they knew in the watching crowd, to prevent the murderers from benefiting from their crime.¹⁰ According to the Jäger report, on that day the Germans and their collaborators shot 740 Jews, including 67 men, 370 women, and 303 children.¹¹ Over the following weeks, Lithuanian policemen shot the few Jews (about 10 or 20) who remained.¹²

After the liquidation Aktion, the Lithuanian police continued to hunt down those Jews who had gone into hiding with local peasants, punishing also those non-Jews who concealed Jews. After one Polish family who hid Jews, the Golembowskis, was betrayed in 1942 by a greedy and vengeful relative, leading the Lithuanian police to arrest and kill the family’s head, many other Jews were then turned out by their anxious protectors.¹³

In July 1944, the Red Army drove the Germans from the area. Shortly after the war, the few Jews who had survived locally, together with others who had returned from the Soviet interior, erected two memorials next to the mass graves, dedicated to the memory of the murdered Jews of the town. However, these monuments soon fell into disrepair, as no Jews remained in Butrimonys to look after them.

In 1961, the criminal affairs board of the Supreme Court of the Lithuanian SSR sentenced to death three former policemen, K. Stoškus, A. Jauneika, and I. Steponkavicius, who in 1941 had participated in the extermination of the Jews in Butrimonys. Kasperiunas/Kasperkis settled in Canada after the war. He died in Edmonton on April 18, 1974.