Holocaust remembrance in Šeduva

Šeduvos žydų kapinės ir holokausto paminklai

In the small town of Šeduva in the north of Lithuania a number of memorials was erected to remember the town's destroyed Jewish community.

History

Šeduva (German and Russian: Shadow, Yiddish: Shadeve) is a small town half way between Shiauliai (Lithuanian: Šiauliai) and Panevėžys in the north of Lithuania, a traditional agricultural town. Jews lived there since the 15th century. Beginning of the 18th century many more Jewish families settled there. From 1795 Lithuania was part of the Russian Empire and so was Šeduva. The main synagogue was consecrated in 1866. At the end of the 19th century more than half of the population was Jewish, the town was a shtetl. During the First World War the town was largely destroyed, after which many Jews left. Lithuania became an independent country in which antisemitism rose sharply, especially during the 1930s. Many Jews emigrated for instance to the United States or Palestine. At the same time Zionism gained many supporters, especially among the Jewish youth.
In 1940 Lithuania became part of the Soviet Union. In June 1941 the German Wehrmacht attacked the Soviet Union, Šeduva was captured only a few days later. Many Lithuanians greeted the Germans as liberators. During the first days of occupation Lithuanian nationalists murdered Jews whom they blamed to have collaborated with Soviet authorities. A few weeks later the Jews of Šeduva were deported to a nearby village where they were detained in barracks. Many were shot. On August 25, 1941 the Jews were loaded on trucks and taken to the forest of Liaudiškiai. On this and the following day the SS »Rollkommando Hamann«, which was made up of Germans and Lithuanians and which during these months annihilated entire Jewish communities all over Lithuania, murdered all remaining Jews of Šeduva.

Šeduva, 1935, Kibbutz »HaKovesh« celebrating Passover, Yad Vashem

Šeduva, 2015, The restored Jewish cemetery, Šeduva Jewish Memorial Fund, Arūnas Baltėnas

Victims

According to the »Jäger-report« from December 1941 – a situation report from the SS-»Einsatzgruppe A« (mobile killing unit) which operated in all of the Baltic states – on August 25 and 26, 1941, 664 Jews altogether (»230 Jewish men, 275 Jewish women, 159 Jewish children«) were murdered in Šeduva. The preceding weeks many Jews had already been murdered so the total number of murdered Jews in Šeduva is about 800. More precise numbers are not known.

After World War One Lithuania gained independence from the Russian Empire. In June 1940 it was occupied by the Red Army as the result of a German-Soviet agreement – the so-called Hitler-Stalin (or Molotov-Ribbentrop) Pact. Many Catholic Lithuanians blamed the Jews as a whole for the loss of sovereignty and for the Soviet terror. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Wehrmacht soon gained control of Lithuania. Just two days later German units carried out the first mass shooting of Jews during this campaign in the border region of Garsden. In the first days of the war Lithuanian nationalists killed hundreds of Jews. Subsequently, the German-Lithuanian mobile killing unit »Rollkommando Hamann« launched daily attacks on Lithuanian towns and villages. By the end of 1941 they had shot almost all of the Jews living in the countryside and in small towns. Lithuanian SS units and police battalions were also involved in killing operations, particularly in Belarus. By summer 1944, between 140,000 and 150,000 Lithuanian Jews had been murdered – almost 99 percent of the Jewish population of the country in the interwar period. There were also around 70,000 Jewish victims from Vilnius and its surroundings, which had again become part of Lithuania following the destruction of Poland in autumn 1939. After 1941, these acts of terror were also directed against mainly communist critics and other minorities. In addition, this period saw the start of deportations of forced labourers into the Third Reich. A total of around 170,000 non-Jewish Lithuanian civilians died in the process. After the Red Army had regained Lithuania in 1944, the country once again became part of the Soviet Union. Thousands of Lithuanians emigrated, whilst thousands more engaged in partisan combat against the Soviet occupation until the late 1950s (these partisans were also known as »Forest Brothers«). The Soviet secret service NKWD deported a total of around 500,000 Lithuanians to the Soviet Union. During the Soviet period, official memory in Lithuania focused above all on the heroes of the »Great Patriotic War« and on pro-Soviet Lithuanian patriots, but the murdered »peace-loving Soviet citizens and communists« were also commemorated. In 1958, a museum was opened at the former IX. Fort in Kaunas, one of the most significant mass murder sites in the country. An ensemble of monumental concrete memorials was erected on the site in 1984. In 1990-91, Lithuania fought for independence from Moscow. The associated struggle with Soviet troops cost 14 lives. Many monuments from the Soviet period were subsequently dismantled and the decades of occupation and resistance became the main feature of national memory. The Soviet annexation of Lithuania in 1940-41 and between 1944 and 1990 was placed on an equal footing with the German occupation. As in Latvia and Estonia, occupation museums were established with a focus on the years of Soviet terror. A broad discussion of Lithuanian involvement in the Holocaust did not emerge until the 1990s. In 1998, an international committee was founded to investigate crimes during the National Socialist and Soviet occupation regimes. In the decades since then, Lithuania’s memorial landscape has become much more diverse. One of the most important institutions is the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum. At the former mass shooting site Paneriai on the outskirts of Vilnius a new museum building is being planned to complement the number of memorials and monuments already there. Already since 2014, there is a new permanet exhibition in Fort IX in Kaunas, while the internet project »Holocaust Atlas of Lithuania« is providing in-depth information on the mass shooting sites all over the country.

Remembrance

There are no Jews living in Šeduva since August 1941. After the Second World War Lithuania was again part of the Soviet Union. During this time the mass graves of murdered Jews were marked and furnished with simple memorial stones. Of the town's former synagogues not even photographs remained. The only surviving trace of the Jewish community which once made up the majority of the town's population was the derelict and overgrown Jewish cemetery.
Twenty years after Lithuania regained its independence the local initiative »Šeduva Jewish Memorial Fund« (Lithuanian: Šeduvos žydų memorialinis fondas) aims at initiating in Šeduva one of the main places of remembrance for the Jews of Lithuania and the Holocaust. Its aim is to show the culture of Lithuanian Jews (traditionally called Litvaks in Yiddish) and the life in a shtetl, but also to be a dignified site of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust. As a first step the Jewish cemetery was restored and hundreds of headstones were deciphered and re-erected. New memorials designed by the artist Romas Kvintas were erected next to the mass graves of the victims of the mass shootings in the forest of Liaudiškiai, another memorial is about to follow in the town centre. A museum on the history of the Jews of Šeduva is planned near the cemetery for the future.

Šeduva, 2015, On the Jewish cemetery, Šeduva Jewish Memorial Fund, Arūnas Baltėnas

Šeduva, 2015, Holocaust memorial at a mass grave in the Liaudiškiai forest, Šeduva Jewish Memorial Fund, Arūnas Baltėnas

Open

The Jewish cemetery is opened daily except on Saturdays and Jewish holidays. The holocaust memorials in the forest are accessible at all times.

Contact

https://www.inforadviliskis.lt/en/sightseeing-places/old-seduva-jewish-cemetery/

Žvejų gatvė
82007 Šeduva

Kaunas, 1941, Extract of the »Jäger-report« which provided information on mass murders in the Baltic countries, Rossijskij Gosudarstvennyj Voennyj Archiv, Moskau

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