PLUNGĖ
[End Page 1104] Pre-1940: Plungė (Yiddish: Plungian), town, Telšiai apskritis, Lithuania; 1940–1941: Plungė/Plunge, Tel’shai uezd, Lithuanian SSR; 1941–1944: Plunge, Kreis Telsche, Gebiet Schaulen-Land, Generalkommissariat Litauen; post-1991: Plungė, rajonas center, Telšiai apskritis, Republic of Lithuania
Plungė is located 26 kilometers (16 miles) west-southwest of Telšiai. According to the 1923 census, there were 1,815 Jews living in the town.1 By June 1941, emigration had reduced the Jewish population, and about 1,700 Jews remained in Plungė.
German armed forces captured the town on June 25, 1941. Immediately afterwards, Lithuanian nationalists formed a town administration and police force, which implemented anti-Jewish measures; the Germans played only a minor role in what followed, although they did immediately round up and kill approximately 60 young male Jews, whom the Lithuanians accused of having provided a rear guard for the retreating Red Army.
On or about June 26, the Lithuanians gathered all the Jews on the grounds of the synagogue and the Bet Midrash, which the captors declared a ghetto. Each day, Jews were taken out of the ghetto to perform different kinds of heavy physical labor in the town—s uch as street sweeping or cleaning latrines by hand—or on local estates. Beatings and humiliation accompanied the work. Some of the laborers never returned but were murdered. At the same time, the Lithuanian authorities extorted and stole the Jews’ valuables.
The living conditions for Jews in the ghetto were nearly unbearable. Overcrowding, filth, and lack of food and water brought about disease and death, especially among the elderly. The Jews lived in those conditions for approximately three weeks. The ghetto was liquidated on July 13 or 15, 1941 (sources differ), when Lithuanians trucked and marched the Jews to ditches located 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) to the northwest of the town, near the village of Kausenai, where they shot them.2 Only those few Jews who had escaped or been deported to the interior of the Soviet Union survived.
SOURCES
Information about the persecution and murder of the Jews in Plungė can be found in the following publications: B. Baranauskas and E. Rozauskas, eds., Masinės žudynes Lietuvoje (1941–1944): Dokumentu rinkinys, vol. 2 (Vilnius: Leidykla “Mintis,” 1973), p. 408; Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, The Annihilation of Lithuania Jewry (New York: Judaica Press, 1995), pp. 223–225; Josef Levinson, ed., The Shoah (Holocaust) in Lithuania (Vilnius: Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, 2006), pp. 125–127; “Plunge,” in Dov Levin and Yosef Rosin, eds., Pinkas ha-kehilot. Encyclopaedia of Jewish Communities: Lithuania (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1996), pp. 484–491; and Alfonsas Eidintas, Jews, Lithuanians and the Holocaust (Vilnius: Versus Aureus, 2003), p. 278. Avotaynu: The International Review of Jewish Genealogy 12 (22) contains a list of Plungė ghetto residents.
Documentation regarding the killing of the Jews of Plungė can be found in the following archives: GARF (7021-94-430); USHMM (e.g., RG-50.473*0097 and 0098); and YVA.
