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

Pre-1940: Kudirkos Naumiestis (Yiddish: Naishtat-Shaki), town, Šakiai apskritis, Lithuania; 1940–1941: Šakiai/Shakiai uezd, Lithuanian SSR; 1941–1944: Neustadt, Kreis Schaken, Gebiet Kauen-Land, Generalkommissariat Litauen; post-1991: Kudirkos Naumiestis, Šakiai rajonas, Mariampolė apskritis, Republic of Lithuania

Kudirkos Naumiestis is located 60 kilometers (37 miles) west-southwest of Kaunas, on the banks of the Šešupė River. On the eve of the German invasion in June 1941, the Jewish community consisted of about 800 people, including a number of Jews expelled from the Suwałki region of Poland in 1939.

On the arrival of German troops on June 22, 1941, a number of individual Jews, including two Jewish barbers, were shot in reprisal for the killing of a German soldier in the town near the barbers’ shop. Lithuanian nationalists established a local administration and a militia (police force) who wore white armbands. The policemen were subordinated to regional Lithuanian authorities recognized by the Germans in Kaunas. The new authorities soon imposed a series of anti-Jewish measures. Members of the local militia and other residents seized Jewish property and valuables. The community was also required to fulfill daily labor quotas for construction work and other forms of manual labor. Those working on these projects were often beaten and humiliated by their guards. The town administration also decreed that it was now illegal for Jews to [End Page 1079] have any contact with non-Jews, and Jews were banned from public places.¹

One evening during the first week of July, members of the Tilsit Gestapo and men from the Border Police (Grenzpolizei) post at Szyrwinty (Schirrwindt), led by SS-Hauptsturmführer Werner Hersmann, arrived in Kudirkos Naumiestis. With the assistance of the local militia, the German police rounded up all of the town’s Jewish males over the age of 14 and assembled them at the District Council building. There they were ordered to hand over their valuables. Then they were escorted in groups of 50 to the Jewish cemetery, where they were forced to line up at the edge of several pits that Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) had dug earlier that day. Members of the Lithuanian militia shot the Jews into the pits; Gestapo men and men of the SD walked among the bodies, finishing off any who were still alive. After the Germans and their collaborators had shot 192 Jews, the murderers attended a banquet organized by the district governor and the mayor of Kudirkos Naumiestis, who had witnessed the executions. A few days after the Aktion, the Lithuanian militia discovered several male Jews in hiding who had evaded the roundup. These unfortunates, 9 in all, were also shot at the Jewish cemetery.²

Following the Aktion, Jewish women and teenagers were taken daily to perform public works in the town. On August 23, 1941, the remaining Jews in Kudirkos Naumiestis were relocated into a ghetto established in the most run-down part of town on Bath house and Synagogue Streets. Although the ghetto was not surrounded by barbed-wire fencing, it was heavily guarded by Lithuanian militia, and a curfew was imposed from 8:00 p.m. in the evening. Three weeks later, on September 16, 1941, the Lithuanian militia in the town liquidated the ghetto. The Jews were told that they would be sent to East Prussia for labor. Once assembled, the 650 ghetto inmates were loaded into carts and driven to a prepared execution site in the Paražniai Forest, 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) outside the town, where members of the local militia shot them into pits. On instructions issued by the Gebietskommissar in Kaunas, the property of the Jews was collected. Valuable items were taken by the German administration, while real estate and items of lesser value were administered by the local authorities. The distribution among local Lithuanians was accompanied by fierce disputes over who should get each item.³

A few of the Jews of Kudirkos Naumiestis, including Izaokas Glikas and his family, managed to escape from the ghetto prior to the liquidation Aktion. Two acquaintances of the Glikas family who served in the Lithuanian militia tipped them off, and the family went to hide on the militiamen’s family farm, even though these men still participated in the ghetto liquidation. From this initial hideout, they subsequently moved on to Lithuanian farmers in more remote locations, who hid them without receiving any payment. Later, owing to security risks, the family was transferred to a Salesian monastery, where they were hidden, along with other Jews from the region, by Antanas Skeltys, the priest in charge. Although a handful of the Jews of Kudirkos Naumiestis managed to survive until liberation, the town’s Jewish community was not reconstituted after the war, as the Jews soon moved away.⁴