SEMELIŠKĖS
Pre-1940: Semeliškės (Yiddish: Semilishok), village, Trakai apskritis, Lithuania; 1940–1941: Semeliškės/Semelishkes, Trakai uezd, Lithuanian SSR; 1941–1944: Semelischkes, Kreis Traken, Gebiet Wilna-Land, Generalkommissariat Litauen; post-1991: Semeliškės, Trakai rajonas, Vilnius apskritis, Republic of Lithuania
Semeliškės is located about 40 kilometers (25 miles) west of Wilno. About 60 Jewish families resided in the village on the eve of World War II.
No ghetto was established in Semeliškės for the 261 Jewish inhabitants until the end of the summer of 1941.1 Fifty-four Jewish refugees from Baranowicze were also living there. On July 21, 1941, on German orders, the Jews assembled in the synagogue and elected a 12-man Jewish Council (Judenrat), which was headed by Šaja Šeškinas. At some time during the summer a group of Jewish men was shot by the local Lithuanians in charge of the village.
At the beginning of September, the local Lithuanian police moved all the remaining Jews into the synagogue, the Bet Midrash, and the former church building (that had been converted into a social club by the Soviet authorities), establishing a form of ghetto. Every day a number of Jews were taken out to perform various forced labor tasks.
On September 22, several hundred more Jews from Vievis and Žasliai were also brought to Semeliškės on carts. The Jews of Vievis were robbed of most of their property by Lithuanian auxiliary policemen just before their departure. In Semeliškės, the new arrivals were incarcerated separately from the local Jews. In early October, all the Jews in Semeliškės, including those brought in from outside, were escorted to a forest about 1.6 kilometers (1 mile) outside the village to the northeast, where they were shot. According to the report of Karl Jäger, forces subordinated to Einsatzkommando 3 shot 962 Jews (213 men, 359 women, and 390 children) in the vicinity of Semeliškės on October 6, 1941.2
A number of Jews managed to escape before or at the time of the Aktion. However, some of these people were caught subsequently, and only a few survived until the end of the occupation. Liubovė Slepak-Zacharaitė recalls:
Some people sheltered us for one night. Others for a week, or for some three days. They used to feed and hide us, risking their own lives and the lives of their families because there were many collaborators and local nationalists from whom nobody could expect mercy…. Death lay in wait for us around every corner and every bush…. In the autumn of 1942, my mother, brother and sister were caught and I never saw them again.3
SOURCES
Relevant publications include Guy Miron, ed., The Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos during the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2010), p. 697; Neringa Latvyte-Gustaitiene, “The Genocide of the Jews in the Trakai Region of Lithuania,” translated by Svetlana Satalova, available at jew ishgen.org; and Rima Dulkiniene and Kerry Keys, eds., With a Needle in the Heart: Memoirs of Former Prisoners of Ghettos and Concentration Camps (Vilnius: Garnelis, 2003), p. 330.
Documentation on the persecution and murder of the Jews of Semeliškės can be found in the following archives: GARF (7021-94-431); LCVA; RGVA (500-1-25); VHF (# 10804); and YVA.
NOTES
1. Dulkiniene and Keys, With a Needle, p. 330, testimony of Jewish survivor Liubovė Slepak-Zacharaitė.
2. Report of Einsatzkommando 3, December 1, 1941, RGVA, 500-1-25, p. 114; Josef Levinson, ed., The Shoah (Holocaust) in Lithuania (Vilnius: Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, 2006), p. 506.
3. Dulkiniene and Keys, With a Needle, p. 330.
