PAJŪRIS
Pre-1940: Pajūris (Yiddish: Payura), village, Lithuania; 1940–1941: Pajūris/Paiuris, Taurage uezd, Lithuanian SSR; 1941-1944: Pajuris, Kreis Tauroggen, Gebiet Schaulen-Land, Generalkommissariat Litauen; post-1991: Pajūris, Šilalė rajonas, Tauragė apskritis, Republic of Lithuania
Pajūris is located about 97 kilometers (60 miles) southwest of Šiauliai. The 1923 census recorded 280 Jews residing in Pajūris, constituting about 58 percent of the total population. Just prior to the German invasion, only about 30 Jewish families remained.
The Wehrmacht occupied the village of Pajūris shortly after the start of the invasion on June 22, 1941. According to the account in Pinkas ha-kehilot, at this time, a part of the Jewish population of Pajūris escaped to the nearby village of Teneniai, where two local families had been killed by local Lithuanians. The arriving Jews were imprisoned in a barn and held for several days without food or water. Subsequently they were taken to Kvėdarna. Pinkas ha-kehilot reports that these Jews were killed in Kvėdarna on June 29, 1941. Other sources, however, indicate that on June 29, most able-bodied Jewish men were rounded up in Kvėdarna and taken to the Heydekrug (Šilutė) forced labor camp. Only a smaller group of 11 elderly Jews, deemed unable to work, were shot by Lithuanian partisans in Kvėdarna on June 30, 1941.1
Of those Jews who remained in Pajūris, very little information is known concerning their fate. It is likely that the SS also rounded up most of the able-bodied men and took them to the Heydekrug camp, where some of the prisoners were killed a few weeks later. The remaining prisoners there worked as forced laborers for more than three years; some of them later went into the concentration camp system, where they passed through Auschwitz II-Birkenau in 1943.
In early September 1941, the remaining Jews in Pajūris, consisting of only 4 men and 51 women and children, were locked up on an estate near the village, which became a provisional ghetto.2 After about two weeks in the ghetto, they were all taken to the Tūbinės Forest, near Šilalė, and were murdered there together with other Jews from the surrounding villages.
SOURCES
Information about the persecution and murder of the Jews of Pajūris can be found in the following publications: “Pajuris,” in Dov Levin and Yosef Rosin, eds., Pinkas ha-kehilot. Encyclopaedia of Jewish Communities: Lithuania (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1996), pp. 477–478; and Christoph Dieckmann, “Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941–1944” (Ph.D. diss., Universität Freiburg, 2002), section F.1.2.2.
