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

[End Page 1095] Pre-1940: Obeliai (Yiddish: Abel), village, Rokiškis apskritis, Lithuania; 1940–1941: Obeliai/Obialiai, Rokishkis uezd, Lithuanian SSR; 1941–1944: Obeliai, Kreis Rokischken, Gebiet Ponewesch-Land, Generalkommissariat Litauen; post-1991: Rokiškis rajonas, Panevėžys apskritis, Republic of Lithuania

Obeliai is located about 14 kilometers (9 miles) east of Rokiškis. In the early 1920s, there were about 760 Jews living in Obeliai, comprising around two thirds of the total population.

Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, many Jews tried to flee to the east, but the border with Latvia remained closed, and most were forced to return home. In Obeliai, local peasants exploited the power vacuum to attack the Jews and steal their property.

Germans forces occupied Obeliai on June 26, 1941. Lithuanian nationalist activists seized authority in the village. They arrested a number of Jewish men, who then disappeared, presumably killed. They forced the remaining Jews to perform hard labor. On August 6, 1941, the Lithuanian commandant in Rokiškis, Lieutenant Žukas, issued an order that any local inhabitants who collected Jews for work but then allowed them to move to other places or to avoid work by paying a bribe instead would be severely punished.¹ This reflected the common practice in the region of Jews being requisitioned by local farmers to work on their land.

As no survivor testimony could be located for this entry, details about the existence of a ghetto in Obeliai remain scant. However, a Lithuanian girl, who lived through the German occupation, mentioned the existence of a ghetto in testimony given more than 50 years after the events. She recalled that on the day when the Germans and Lithuanians planned to kill the Jews, some Soviet partisans intervened, emerging from the woods and opening fire, which apparently caused the Aktion to be delayed by 24 hours. The next day she went to the ghetto and observed that it was empty of Jews. She heard the sounds of shooting in the distance, and Jewish clothing was being brought back to the ghetto, where some Lithuanians had arrived with carts to loot the empty houses. She notes also that the Jewish men from Obeliai were taken to Rokiškis to be murdered, while the women and children were brought from Rokiškis to Obeliai to be killed.²

The men were probably shot first around August 15, 1941, in the Velniaduobė Woods, 5 kilometers (3 miles) north of Rokiškis. Then on or around August 25, 1941, Jewish women and children from Kamajai, Rokiškis, and several other places were brought to the village of Obeliai, where they were murdered together with the remaining Jews of Obeliai. This second mass grave lies near the village of Antanašė, 5 kilometers (3 miles) south of Obeliai. The shootings were conducted by units of Rollkommando Hamann, subordinated to Einsatzkommando 3, assisted by Lithuanian partisans. According to the Jäger report, on August 25, 1941, the Germans and their collaborators murdered 112 men, 627 women, and 421 children (1,160 people) near Obeliai.³

About six months after the massacre, Elena Zalogaite witnessed a local Lithuanian policeman and another man escorting two Jewish women to be killed, presumably after they had been denounced or revealed in hiding.⁴

In the spring of 1944, the Germans arrested a Lithuanian named Vladas Andonas, whom they accused of having given shelter to Jews.