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

Pre-1940: Kelmė (Yiddish: Kelm), town, Raseiniai apskritis, Lithuania; 1940–1941: Kelmė/Kel’me, Raseiniai uezd, Lithuanian SSR; 1941–1944: Kelme, Kreis Raseinen, Gebiet Schaulen-Land, Generalkommissariat Litauen; post-1991: Kelmė, rajonas center, Šiauliai apskritis, Republic of Lithuania

Kelmė is located 100 kilometers (62.5 miles) northwest of Kaunas. In 1940, there were 2,000 Jews living in Kelmė.

German armed forces occupied the town on June 24, 1941, and the majority of the Jewish homes burned down during the fighting. A number of Jews fled the town to the east, and those Jews who lost their homes were accommodated in the few remaining Jewish houses, as well as on several Jewish farms near the town.

A few days after the occupation of the town, Lithuanian nationalists formed a town administration. The mayor was a Lithuanian named Cesnys, and the chief of police was a man [End Page 1071] named Barkauskas (or possibly Kurkauskas).¹ On or just before July 1, all the Jews were required to gather in the marketplace and listen to a virulent antisemitic address by the authorities, which insisted that “all Jews should be imprisoned in camps, since they were responsible for the war.” Then on July 1, 1941, the town administration ordered the Jews to wear yellow Stars of David, and the able-bodied men were separated from the women.

The Jewish women, children, and elderly people who were still in the town were resettled to seven Jewish-owned farms scattered in the countryside around the town, which formed a kind of rural ghetto. According to Haya Roz, “[T]he Jews in these farms lived relatively freely and worked on the farms in the area. There were no guards, but they were forbidden to leave the farm. One boy was shot by Lithuanians for going from one farm to another.”² Another survivor, Jaakov Zak, noted that there were no guards around the farms, but the Lithuanians would come and rob the Jews.³

At the same time, the able-bodied men were moved to a camp in the granary of Zunda Lunts, which was closely guarded by the Lithuanians. Under armed Lithuanian escort, the men were sent out from there daily to perform various labor tasks, including cleaning the town and clearing away rubble. For their labors, the Jews received one cup of coffee with a piece of bread in the morning and evening and a bowl of watery soup with a little grain at midday. While working, the Jews were humiliated and beaten by the Lithuanian guards and by local antisemites. On one occasion, 11 Jews whose poor health kept them from working were shot dead in the Jewish cemetery. In addition to this group murder, individual killings of Jews also took place.⁴ The Jewish farm owners were not taken to the granary of Zunda Lunts. They were ordered to keep running their farms and to provide work for the Jews from the granary.

On July 29, 1941, the first large-scale Aktion took place in Kelmė. On July 28, Lithuanian guards assembled all the Jews from the various farms at the Grušewskis farm and conducted a selection there. Then some of the women and children were sent back to the farms. On July 29, most of the Jews from the Lunts granary, apart from 36 who were left alive,⁵ were also taken to a gravel quarry near the Grušewskis farm, where they were shot together with those women and children who had been kept at the Grušewskis farm overnight. According to the estimate of Haya Roz, about 1,200 Jews were shot altogether. Jaakov Zak notes also that several groups of Jews were shot throughout the day and that he learned from two Lithuanian students that all the Jews from Vaiguva and a great part of the Jews from the Jewish-owned farms had been shot to death. Zak was taken to sort out the belongings of the murdered Jews and recognized the clothes of his father, uncle, and other relatives.⁶

On August 22, 1941, a second Aktion was carried out in Kelmė. The remaining Jewish women, children, and elderly from the farms, along with the few Jewish workers still at the Lunts granary, were taken to the gravel quarry near the Grušewskis farm and shot there by the Lithuanians.⁷

A number of Jews managed to escape from the farms before the second Aktion and sought refuge with local peasants. Only a few Jews survived, as many people were betrayed by the peasants or were caught by the Lithuanian policemen and partisans.⁸ When the Germans were driven from Kelmė in 1944, only 15 of the Jews who came under German occupation were known to be alive.