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

Pre-1939: Dukszty (Yiddish: Duksht), village, Wilno województwo, Poland; 1939–1940: Dūkštas, Zarasai apskritis, Lithuania SSR; 1940–1941: Dūkštas/Dukshtas, Zarasai uezd, Lithuanian SSR; 1941–1944: Dukschty, Kreis Ossersee, Gebiet Ponewesch-Land, Generalkommissariat Litauen; post-1991: Dūkštas, Ignalina rajonas, Utena apskritis, Republic of Lithuania

Dukszty is located about 115 kilometers (72 miles) northeast of Wilno. Around 650 Jews were living in Dukszty on the outbreak of World War II, comprising two thirds of the population. Between September 1939 and June 1941, the inhabitants of the village witnessed two regime changes, as the region was first transferred from Polish to Lithuanian control in the fall of 1939, then came under Soviet rule in June 1940.

Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, in late June 1941, the Soviet authorities soon abandoned the village, and local Lithuanians began to plunder Jewish shops. German armed forces occupied Dukszty in early July 1941. A German commandant was officially in charge, but in practice local Lithuanians, led by Antoni Umbraz, the former owner of a bakery and a restaurant, seized control of local affairs. A few days after the Germans’ arrival, the Lithuanians began to terrorize the Jews, murdering a number of them brutally in public. Large “contributions” were also demanded from the Jewish community, which soon exhausted nearly all its financial reserves.

At the end of August, the Jews were driven from their homes into two separate ghettos, being allowed to take with them only a very limited amount of their property. The more propertied Jews were put in a ghetto on the peninsula in Disner Lake, known as “Ostrov”; the rest were placed in the Jewish bathhouse and surrounding houses, known as “Azshutoviner.” The Jews were completely isolated, and any contact with non-Jews was punishable by death. However, the Jews received help from some local inhabitants of Russian nationality, who brought food to them in the ghettos by various means. Every day men and women from the ghettos were escorted on foot several kilometers outside the village to work on the railway line.¹

In early September, all the remaining Jews, with the exception of a few craftsmen, such as cobblers, were removed from the ghettos and incarcerated on the Antonove estate, about 3 kilometers (2 miles) outside of Dukszty. Here they were accommodated more or less in an open field, exposed to the wind and rain for nearly three weeks. They continued to be taken every day to the same work. The Lithuanian guards closely watched the Jewish workers, but some were still able to barter their remaining possessions for food with non-Jews, bribing the guards if necessary to bring it to their families on the Antonove estate. Living conditions for the craftsmen still in the village were somewhat less harsh.

On the evening of September 21, 1941, 16 Lithuanians arrived at the Antonove estate and informed the Jews that they would be moved to better conditions. The sick and small children were put on carts, and the remaining Jews were driven on foot, all to the north in the direction of Zarasai, without a specific destination being disclosed. After a Lithuanian guard murdered a newborn baby who was crying on one of the carts, one Jew attacked the guard, trying to strangle him. However, he was soon overpowered and shot by three other guards.

In the Degutsh Forest, about halfway to Zarasai, the Jews of Dukszty arrived at a collection point for the Jews from several places in the region. On the morning of September 22, the Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators separated the children from their parents in a field with machine guns [End Page 1050] set up in each of the corners. From the description of a local forester, who observed events from a distance, the Jews were all shot as they attempted to run, mowed down by the machine guns. The craftsmen and their families from Dukszty were probably also included in the “last march” of the Dukszty Jews. At the end of the war, only one surviving Jewish family returned to live in the village.²