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

Pre-1940: Radviliškis (Yiddish: Radvilishok), town, Šiauliai apskritis, Lithuania; 1940–1941: Radviliškis/Radvilishkis, Shauliai uezd, Lithuanian SSR; 1941–1944: Radwilischken, Kreis Schaulen, Gebiet Schaulen-Land, Generalkommissariat Litauen; post-1991: Radviliškis, rajonas center, Šiauliai apskritis, Republic of Lithuania

Radviliškis is located 19 kilometers (12 miles) southeast of Šiauliai. According to the census of 1923, there were 847 Jews living in Radviliškis. By June 1941, the Jewish population had decreased as a result of emigration in the 1930s.

German armed forces captured the town on June 25, 1941. Immediately, Lithuanian nationalists formed a local administration and a police force, which began to implement anti-Jewish measures. The authorities confiscated all the Jews’ valuables and used the Jewish population for forced labor. Local antisemites subjected the Jewish laborers to humiliation, taunts, and beatings. Jews were forbidden to appear in public places or to maintain relations of any kind with non-Jews.

Accounts of events in Radviliškis vary somewhat. The most detailed, that in Pinkas ha-kehilot, states that the Lithuanians forced all the Jews into a ghetto in an abandoned Lithuanian army barracks on July 8. Some of the Jews had to build a barbed-wire fence around the place. Then, on July 12, the first Aktion took place when Lithuanian gunmen rounded up nearly all the men in the community (some 300 total), marched them to a grove next to the Jewish cemetery, and shot them.¹ The remaining women, children, and old people were later sent on to an enclosure that had formerly held Soviet prisoners of war. On August 22, 1941, the chief administrator of the town and of the county of Šiauliai (Kreis Schaulen-Land), J. Norejka, citing directives from the Gebietskommissar in Šiauliai, ordered all the county’s Jews to be resettled into a single ghetto—the Žagarė ghetto—between August 25 and 29, 1941.² In compliance with this order, the ghetto in Radviliškis was liquidated in late August 1941, and all the Jews were transferred to the Žagarė ghetto. On October 2, 1941, they were shot along with the other Jews in the Žagarė ghetto. (Other accounts state that only about 400 of the Jews went to Žagarė, while the rest went to the Šiauliai ghetto. Some of these Jews subsequently wound up in camps in Germany and thus survived the war.)