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Murder Story of Skuodas Jews on Mount Alkos

Murder Site
Alkos Hill
Lithuania
On July 17, 1941 the Jewish women and children were deported from the town of Skuodas. While they were being marched away, they were severely beaten. Anyone who could not keep up was shot. After two days of walking, they arrived in Dimitravas, 12 kilometers from the town of Kretinga. The women and children were kept there for a month and, then, on August 15, 1941, were taken by Lithuanian nationalists to Mount Alkos. There they were ordered to undress. Whatever they had with them was then stolen and they were shot.

The Soviet commission that in 1945 investigated what happened at that location established that 510 people - 31 infants, 94 children, and 385 women - were shot on Mount Alkos itself or just below it.

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Chaya Chasman (Reif), who was born in Skuodas, testified:
... The women and children were kept for another week in the synagogue without food or drink. They were guarded by armed “partisans.” Afterwards, they were taken to the Demitravas estate between Kretinga and Drobian [Darbėnai]. Before the war, when Smetona was head of Lithuania, political prisoners lived on this property. The women and children suffered from the terrible conditions. They were forced to perform hard labor where they were living and also heavy agricultural work. When they were beginning to kill all the women from Telsh [Telšiai] at the Goral [Geruliai] estate, they also killed all the women and children on the Demitravas estate. I learned about these things when I was in the ghetto of Shavli [Šauliai] from people who had been in Shkod [Skuodas] at that time. Esther Zelkovich, whose step-father had strangled a Lithuanian, told me that she had personally witnessed this taking place. Her whole family, her mother and her [other] children, were killed on the Demitravas estate. Esther fled from the ghetto and hid in villages, fields, and woods until liberation by the Red Army. She then returned to Shkod. There she received threatening letters from Lithuanians so that she was forced to leave the town. Some of the Jewish youth who had escaped to the Soviet Union volunteered to join the Lithuanian Division, 50 percent of which was actually made up of Jews. Many of the latter fell in combat. A few of them returned to Shkod, where they wandered in shock through the streets of what had been their town but was now a hostile environment....
YVA O.71 / 66
Alkos Hill
Murder Site
Lithuania
56.270;21.533