PUMPĖNAI
[End Page 1107] Pre-1940: Pumpėnai (Yiddish: Pumpian), village, Biržai apskritis, Lithuania; 1940–1941: Pumpėnai/Pumpenai, Birzhai uezd, Lithuanian SSR; 1941–1944: Pumpenai, Kreis Birsen, Gebiet Ponewesch-Land, Generalkommissariat Litauen; post-1991: Pumpėnai, Pasvalys rajonas, Panevėžys apskritis, Republic of Lithuania
Pumpėnai is located 23 kilometers (14 miles) north of Panevėžys. According to the 1923 census, 372 Jews were living in Pumpėnai. By June 1941, as a result of emigration in the 1920s and 1930s, the Jewish population had decreased significantly. One source has about 60 Jewish families living there when the war began.
German armed forces occupied the village on June 26, 1941. Immediately, Lithuanian nationalists formed a local administration and a police force, which implemented anti-Jewish measures. Valuable items were confiscated from the Jews, and they were required to perform various kinds of labor. They were subject to robbery, assault, and other forms of public denigration by local antisemites. They were also prohibited from walking in public places and maintaining any relations with the Lithuanians.
On July 15, 1941, all Jews of Pumpėnai were resettled into a ghetto. Several houses were assigned for this purpose, and the ghetto was surrounded by barbed wire. They remained there, reportedly without provisions, put to forced labor, and abused, until August 26, when the ghetto was liquidated. On that day, a detachment of Einsatzkommando 3, with the assistance of the Lithuanian police, shot nearly all the Jews of the village in a forest near Pasvalys. The town’s pharmacist and his family were killed in Pumpėnai itself.
SOURCES
Relevant publications include Dov Levin and Yosef Rosin, eds., Pinkas ha-kehilot. Encyclopaedia of Jewish Communities: Lithuania (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1996), pp. 451–452; and “The Holocaust in 21 Lithuanian Towns,” available at www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/lithuania3/lit3_002.html, pp. 9–10.
