PAKRUOJIS
[End Page 1100] Pre-1940: Pakruojis (Yiddish: Pokrai), town, Šiauliai apskritis, Lithuania; 1940–1941: Pakruojis/Pakruois, Shauliai uezd, Lithuanian SSR; 1941–1944: Pakruojis, Kreis Schaulen, Gebiet Schaulen-Land, Generalkommissariat Litauen; post-1991: rajonas center, Šiauliai apskritis, Republic of Lithuania
Pakruojis is located about 36 kilometers (22.5 miles) east of Šiauliai. According to the 1923 census, there were 454 Jews living in Pakruojis. By June 1941, the Jewish population had declined slightly as a consequence of emigration in the 1930s.
Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, many Jewish refugees arrived in Pakruojis. Some refugees and local Jews tried to flee on towards Biržai and the Latvian border, but many of these people were intercepted by Lithuanian nationalists. Some were murdered, and the others were forced to return home. German forces captured the town on June 28, 1941, and Lithuanian partisans immediately formed a local authority and a partisan force, which subsequently became an auxiliary police unit.
The Lithuanian partisans soon began to arrest Jews, accusing them of having collaborated with the Soviets. Some of those arrested, including Moshe Plocki and Chaja Edelman, were murdered, and about 30 others were transferred, in early July, to the prison in Šiauliai. Anti-Jewish measures enforced by the Lithuanian authorities included the seizure of property, the imposition of forced labor, and the requirement to perform menial tasks; Jews also endured physical abuse.1
On July 10, 1941, Lithuanian partisans rounded up and shot the Jewish men who remained. The women, children, and old people were then resettled into a ghetto formed in the courtyard around the synagogue, where they were detained under guard for several weeks. They were permitted to take part of their property with them and also some food. The ghetto was liquidated on August 4, when Lithuanian policemen shot all the Jews in a nearby forest. The Jews were made to stand on wooden boards placed across a prepared ditch and were then shot such that they fell into the ditch.2 According to one Soviet source, the total number of victims was 265.3 The Jews were shot and buried in the Morkakalnis Forest, about 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) southeast of Pakruojis.4
Some of those sent to the prison in Šiauliai were subsequently transferred to the Šiauliai ghetto, and a few of these people ultimately survived the war. The Jewish doctor in Pakruojis, Markus Screiber, was initially spared, as his services were still required. He was murdered in April 1942, in front of the church.5 Around this time, other Jews uncovered in hiding were also killed.
SOURCES
Information regarding the fate of the Jewish community of Pakruojis can be found in these publications: “Pakruojis,” in Shalom Bronstein, ed., Yahadut Lita: Lithuanian Jewry, vol. 4, The Holocaust 1941–1945 (Tel Aviv: Association of Former Lithuanians in Israel, 1984), p. 333; “Pakruojis,” in Dov Levin and Yosef Rosin, eds., Pinkas ha-kehilot. Encyclopaedia of Jewish Communities: Lithuania (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1996), pp. 472–475; and Joe Woolf, ed., “The Holocaust in 21 Lithuanian Towns,” available at www.jewishgen.org/Yizkor/lithuania3/lithuania3.html.
Documentation on the persecution and murder of the Jews of Pakruojis can be found in the following archives: GARF (7021-94-436); LCVA; VHF (# 34991); and YVA.
NOTES
1. Levin and Rosin, Pinkas ha-kehilot: Lithuania, pp. 472–475; David Katz, The Lord Has Chastised Me Severely (Stony Brook, NY: Y. Katz, 2001), pp. 31–32.
2. “Pakruojis,” in Bronstein Yahadut Lita: Lithuanian Jewry, vol. 4, p. 333; Woolf, “The Holocaust in 21 Lithuanian Towns”; VHF, # 34991, testimony of Ruth Igdal.
3. GARF, 7021-94-436, p. 29.
4. Josef Levinson, ed., The Shoah (Holocaust) in Lithuania (Vilnius: Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, 2006), p. 505.
5. VHF, # 34991.
