KREKENAVA
Pre-1940: Krekenava (Yiddish: Krakinove), village, Panevėžys apskritis, Lithuania; 1940–1941: Panevėžys/Panevezhis uezd, Lithuanian SSR; 1941–1944: Kreis Ponewesch, Gebiet Ponewesch-Land, Generalkommissariat Litauen; post-1991: town, Panevėžys rajonas and apskritis, Republic of Lithuania
Krekenava is located 26 kilometers (16 miles) southwest of Panevėžys. According to the 1923 census, there were 527 Jews living in Krekenava, comprising half of the total population. By mid-1941, emigration, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, had somewhat reduced the size of the village’s Jewish community.
At the onset of the German invasion on June 22, 1941, many Jews attempted to flee from Krekenava in a convoy of horse-driven wagons, but they were stopped by Lithuanian nationalist activists in Panevėžys and forced to turn back. German armed forces occupied the town on June 25, 1941. Lithuanian activists immediately formed a local authority and a police force, which began their work by introducing a series of anti-Jewish measures.
First, the young Jewish men were arrested and jailed; a few days later they were taken from the jail and divided into two groups. Each group was taken to a separate site outside the village, where they were forced to dig their own graves and then shot. The Lithuanian activists also arrested a group of young Jewish women; in the jail they were subjected to gang rape and then murdered.
The remaining Jewish men were assembled in the Bet Midrash by Lithuanian activists. They were kept there under close guard without any food or water. One of the Jews attacked a Lithuanian guard with a knife, when the guard prevented him from leaving the Bet Midrash. After a few days the Jewish men were taken outside the village on the pretext of a work assignment breaking rocks for road construction and then shot. In total, about 200 people were shot near the village in the summer of 1941.1
The remaining Jewish women, children, and old people in the village were herded into the synagogue and a few neighboring houses, which the Lithuanian activists declared a ghetto. Hungry and thirsty, they remained in this ghetto until July 27, 1941, when they were told they could take their most valuable possessions with them, as they would soon be transferred to another camp. They were then loaded onto carts and escorted off in the direction of Panevėžys. The Jewish women and children were killed in the Pajuostė Forest, 8 kilometers (5 miles) west of Panevėžys, probably sometime later in August 1941. In the meantime they were apparently kept in a makeshift camp at the Pajuostė airfield, left without even the few possessions they had loaded onto the carts, which had been stolen on their arrival. They were shot together with other Jews from the Panevėžys ghetto and region. The report of Einsatzkommando 3, prepared by SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger, noted that 7,525 Jews (including 4,602 Jewish women and 1,312 Jewish children) were shot at Panevėžys on August 23, 1941. These figures probably include the remaining Jewish women and children from Krekenava.2
SOURCES
Information about the fate of the Jewish community of Krekenava during the Holocaust can be found in these publications: “Krekenava,” in Shalom Bronstein, ed., Yahadut Lita: Lithuanian Jewry, vol. 4, The Holocaust 1941–1945 (Tel Aviv: Association of Former Lithuanians in Israel, 1984), pp. 354–355; “Krakenava,” in Dov Levin and Yosef Rosin, eds., Pinkas ha-kehilot. Encyclopaedia of Jewish Communities: Lithuania (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1996), pp. 621ff.; Shmuel Spector and Geoffrey Wigoder, eds., The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before and during the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem; New York: New York University Press, 2001), p. 676; and Guy Miron, ed., The Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos during the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2010), p. 368.
Documentation regarding the murder of the Jews of Krekenava can be found in the following archives: BA-BL (R 70 SU/15); GARF (7021-94-426); LCVA; and YVA (M-9/15[6], O-3/3034).
