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

[End Page 1050] Pre-1940: Dusetos (Yiddish: Dusiat), town, Zarasai apskritis, Lithuania; 1940–1941: Zarasai uezd, Lithuanian SSR; 1941–1944: Kreis Ossersee, Gebiet Ponewesch-Land, Generalkommissariat Litauen; post-1991: Zarasai rajonas, Utena apskritis, Republic of Lithuania

Dusetos is located 126 kilometers (78 miles) north-northeast of Wilno, on the Svėtė River not far from Lake Dusetos, for which the town was named. According to the 1923 census, 704 Jews were living in the town. As a result of out-migration in the 1920s and 1930s, the number of Jews in the town decreased significantly, to around 500 by 1939.

After Lithuania was annexed by the USSR in 1940, a Soviet regime was imposed. Private property was nationalized. Workers in various fields were organized into cooperatives (artels). The language of instruction in Jewish schools was changed from Hebrew to Yiddish. Zionist groups were disbanded, and Hebrew-language books were banished from the library.¹

When the German army invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, l941, a number of Jews fled from Dusetos into the Russian interior, alongside the retreating Red Army. Others, however, did not make it and were forced to return. Armed Lithuanian activists seized control of the town even before the arrival of the Germans. They greeted the advancing German troops with shouts of joy and white flowers on June 25, 1941. The Lithuanian activists established a local administration and police force. Local antisemites subjected the Jews to robbery, assault, and other forms of public denigration. Jews were also prohibited from walking in public places or having any relations with local non-Jews.

In early July 1941, all the Jews were driven out of their homes into an improvised ghetto “beyond the bridge.” They were crammed into a number of houses from which the non-Jews had been evacuated, and there was great overcrowding. Each family was allocated one loaf of bread per day, and no one was permitted to leave the ghetto. This soon resulted in severe hunger among the Jews. Some were able to sneak out undetected and gather a few vegetables from the gardens of their former homes or from local Lithuanians to whom they had given property for safekeeping. Others, however, were not so lucky and were shot by the Lithuanian guards as they tried to cross the bridge or flee to the forest. The inmates of the ghetto suffered greatly at the hands of their Lithuanian captors. The vacated Jewish houses and property were seized by Lithuanians from the town and its vicinity. Over the course of several weeks, with little direct German supervision, the Lithuanian activists chased Jews with beatings and subjected them to forced labor in the town and on the farms.²

On August 26, 1941, the ghetto was liquidated. On that day, forces of Einsatzkommando 3, assisted by the Lithuanian police, escorted the Jews of Dusetos—the elderly and children on wagons and the others on foot—to the woods near the village of Diagušiai, a few kilometers to the southeast of Dusetos. There the Germans and their collaborators shot them, together with the Jews of Zarasai, and buried them in a long ditch, which had been dug by the Jewish victims themselves. A monument stands today at the site of the shootings. After the war, one of the local Lithuanian collaborators, Kuzmis, was tried and sentenced by the Soviet authorities.³