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

Pre-1940: Telšiai (Yiddish: Telz), city and apskritis center, Lithuania; 1940–1941: Telšiai/Tel’shiai, uezd center, Lithuanian SSR; 1941–1944: Telsche, Kreis center, Gebiet Schaulen-Land, Generalkommissariat Litauen; post-1991: Telšiai, rajonas and apskritis center, Republic of Lithuania

Telšiai is located 159 kilometers (99 miles) northwest of Kaunas. In 1939, around 2,800 Jews lived in Telšiai, comprising 35 percent of the total population.¹

German expansionism first affected Lithuanian Jews on March 20, 1939, when Hitler issued an ultimatum ordering Lithuania to leave the port of Memel within 24 hours. As a result, about 7,000 Jews fled into Lithuania. Many found asylum in Telšiai, where the community offered them assistance. In June 1940, the USSR annexed Lithuania and imposed the Soviet political and economic system.

The Germans bombed Telšiai on June 23, 1941, and units of the German army entered the city on June 25. At this time, Lithuanian Major Alfonsas Svilas became commandant of the city and its surrounding area. Even before the arrival of the Germans, Lithuanian nationalist activists had started to loot Jewish property and arrest Jews. The initial arrestees were soon freed, but the next day Lithuanian nationalists took about 200 men from their homes and held them for a full day before releasing them. Jews appealed to Lithuanian civic and religious leaders to intervene, to no avail.

On June 27, remembered as the “Friday of Terror,” Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators went house to house and ordered all Jews to assemble in the main square. From there they were marched to the shore of Lake Mastis, where the Lithuanians proclaimed that the Jews were responsible for the murder of 72 Lithuanian political prisoners during the final hours of Soviet occupation. (During the night of June 24–25, 1941, following a prison uprising, the fleeing Soviet authorities took the prison inmates to the neighboring town of Rainiai, shot them, and buried them in a mass grave in the nearby forest.)² The Lithuanians forced the Jews to exhume, clean, and reinter the bodies. The Jewish men were subjected to torture, then finally shot on July 15–16.

After a few days, the surviving women and children were moved to a detention camp at Geruliai.³ They were joined there by women and children from the Viešvenai camp. Jews from a number of smaller towns had been concentrated at this site: Alsėdžiai, Rietavas, Varniai, Luokė, Laukuva, Žarenai, Navarėnai, and other places.⁴ Altogether about 4,000 women and children were held at Geruliai, packed into six abandoned and empty army barracks, where they slept in two-tier bunk beds nailed together from boards. Several hundred young women were made available to local farmers, who used (or [End Page 1131] abused) them as agricultural laborers. Most of the others remained in Geruliai, where a committee managed the affairs of the camp. Food was obtained by bartering with the farmers. There was widespread disease (especially typhus and diphtheria), with virtually no medical resources, and many children died. Worst of all, the inhabitants were exposed to armed incursions and rapes by their Lithuanian guards. When the agricultural jobs were finished by the end of August, rumors spread about an impending Aktion. One day before the Aktion, the camp commander, B. Platakis, offered to save the people in exchange for a gift of 100,000 rubles. Overnight the women’s committee conducted a frantic collection of valuables, which Platakis happily accepted. However, on Saturday, August 30, 1941, a group of about 600 women ages 15 to 30 were ordered to stand aside. The rest of the women and all the children were taken to the Geruliai Forest, murdered, and thrown into pits.⁵

The 600 young women were taken back to Telšiai and put into a ghetto that had been established in a run-down neighborhood on Ezero Street near Lake Mastis.⁶ It was enclosed on one side by the lake and on three sides by a high wooden fence and several lines of barbed wire. The empty buildings had been stripped of their windows, doors, and furnishings. There were neither blankets nor sheets, and the prisoners slept on the floor. The women and girls were compelled to wear Star of David armbands, but they were allowed to leave the ghetto to search for menial work and beg for food. However, most of the local population avoided them like the plague. A few threw them scraps of food. There were some medical services in the ghetto, as two male Jewish doctors had been kept alive and ran a dispensary, assisted by a nurse.⁷ At the end of December, between Christmas and the New Year, the women learned that the ghetto would be liquidated within a few days. A fair number fled, some of them finding shelter with the farmers they had met during forced labor as agricultural hands. A small number of Jewish women were subsequently accepted into the Šiauliai ghetto. On December 30–31, 1941, the downtrodden and exhausted remnant was taken to Rainiai and shot to death.⁸ Of those women who escaped from the ghetto at the end of 1941, only 64 were alive when the Red Army liberated the area.