As soon as the Germans entered Kurkliai, they decided to kill/ to have killed  the strongest Jewish men from this village. They found five Jewish young men who met their demand. Unfortunately, I don’t know their names.
They were driven  through the village, escorted by some Germans and some of the so called white armbanders*).

*) The white armbanders were the supporters of the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF), a coalition of political parties established in Nazi Germany by Lithuanian emigres who were political leaders in their country who escaped to Nazi Germany when, or shortly after, the Soviet occupation of Lithuania on June 15, 1940.

The LAF was established with the blessing of the Nazis and under their aegis and the LAF in turn fully supported the Third Reich and their staunchly anti-Semitic agenda.

Prior to the Nazi invasion of Lithuania, the LAF sent messages into the country calling upon Lithuanians to "settle scores" with the Jews and which declared that the day of reckoning with Lithuanian Jewry was rapidly approaching and that the rights of residence in Lithuania granted to Jews by Gediminas (in the 14th century) would soon be repealed.

These exhortations found practical expression in a wave of violence launched against Lithuanian Jews  in more than forty communities EVEN BEFORE the arrival of the German troops.

Following the invasion of the Wehrmacht, it was the white armbanders who in many locations carried out pogroms against the local Jews. Until the organization of the Lithuanian collaborators into organized units, which were initially called National Labour Defence Battalions and later Lithuanian Auxiliary Police Battalions, it was the white armbanders who were doing the persecution and murder.

These men were usually Lithuanian army veterans or members of the Sajunga, which was a rifle club.

source:Dr. Efraim Zuroff, Simon Wiesenthal Centre Jerusalem.

Very soon they reached the boundary of Kurkliai and the men were forced to follow the country road which starts at the corner of this house (house 1).

Moliakalnis 1

Moliakalnis hill

Finally, the Jewish men arrived where the Germans wanted them to arrive. See below

They were forced to dig their own graves, marked by the  two crosses  on this photo.

There they were shot, murdered by the so called  white banders, while the Germans were watching.

Till (December 2005) their corpses are there, not properly buried…..

Yizkor-Prayer 

O God, full of mercy, Who dwells on high, Defender of widows and Father of orphans, grant proper rest on the wings of the Divine Presence- in the lofty levels of the holy and the pure ones, who shine like the glow of the firmament- for the souls of millions of Jews, men, women and children, who were brutally and tortuously murdered, gassed and cremated, or buried alive, for the sanctification of Your Name. Holy and pure were they all, among them scholars and saints as majestic in Torah as the cedars of Lebanon. May the Master of Mercy shelter them in the shelter of His wings for eternity and may He bind their souls in the Bond of Life.May their resting place be in the Garden of Eden.Hashem is their heritage. May He remember their martyrdom, and may their righteousness stand in merit for us and all Israel.Earth, do not cover their blood! Do not silence their cries! In their merit may the scattered ones of Israel be gathered to their possession. May the martyrs’ righteousness forever be before Hashem. May they repose in peace in their resting places and rise at the end of days to life. Now let us respond: Amen.