SALAKAS
Pre-1940: Salakas (Yiddish: Salok), village, Zarasai apskritis, Lithuania; 1940–1941: Zarasai uezd, Lithuanian SSR; 1941–1944: Kreis Ossersee, Gebiet Ponewesch-Land, [End Page 1114] Generalkommissariat Litauen; post-1991: Zarasai rajonas, Utena apskritis, Republic of Lithuania
Salakas is located about 120 kilometers (75 miles) east of Panevėžys. In 1923, the village had a Jewish population of 917. By mid-1941, emigration in the 1920s and 1930s had reduced the number of Jews in Salakas slightly.
German armed forces occupied the town on June 26, 1941. Immediately, Lithuanian nationalists formed a local authority and a police force, which began introducing anti-Jewish measures. All the Jews’ valuables were confiscated, and they were deployed for various types of forced labor, during which local antisemites subjected them to humiliation and beatings. They were forbidden to go to the market, had to wear distinguishing patches on their clothes, and had to mark their houses with the word Jude (Jew). Some Jews were blackmailed by Lithuanian policemen. A Jewish Council (Judenrat) was established on which Rabbi Jacob Relve, Feibush Gilinksi, and Abraham Bach served.
In the first days, the local authorities arrested and shot people they suspected of having collaborated with the Soviet authorities, including Berl Krupnik, whose son had been a member of the Komsomol. Then on August 9, 1941, the first large-scale Aktion took place in Salakas when Lithuanian partisans rounded up about 150 people, mainly Jewish men, and shot them in the nearby Songard Forest.1
The remaining Jews, mainly women, children, and the elderly, were then placed in a ghetto on Planova Street. Lithuanians looted the vacated Jewish homes. The ghetto was liquidated on August 26, 1941, when all the Jews were shot in the Pažeimis Forest near the village of Diagušiai, along with other Jews from Kreis Zarasai.2 A local Lithuanian named Radzewicz was subsequently shot by the Germans when he was found to have aided Jews in hiding.
SOURCES
Information on the fate of the Jewish community of Salakas during the Holocaust can be found in these publications: “Salakas,” in Shalom Bronstein, ed., Yahadut Lita: Lithuanian Jewry, vol. 4, The Holocaust 1941–1945 (Tel Aviv: Association of Former Lithuanians in Israel, 1984); “Salakas,” in Dov Levin and Yosef Rosin, eds., Pinkas ha-kehilot. Encyclopaedia of Jewish Communities: Lithuania (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1996), pp. 427–430; and “Salakas,” in Shmuel Spec-tor and Geoffrey Wigoder, eds., The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before and during the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem; New York: New York University Press, 2001), p. 1120.
Documentation on the murder of the Jews of Salakas can be found in these archives: GARF (7021-94-439); LCVA; and YVA.
