Rachel Sayevich’s report: 

ANNIHILATION OF THE JEWS OF THE LITHUANIAN SHTETEL PAKROY. 

This is the evidence of Rachel Sayevich (nee Sherman), born in Pakroy on 30th October 1918. Her father’s name was Shalom. Until a few months before the war she lived in Pakroy. At the outbreak of the war she lived in Kovno, later in the Kovno Ghetto. Pakroy is in the district of Shavel, 35 km from Shavel, 50 km. from Ponevez. The shtetel is on the banks of the Kruoja River. In 1941 there were about 250 Jewish families in Pakroy. Most of them were in commerce. There was a Hebrew primary school, a Hebrew/Yiddish library, a Jewish loan bank, an old synagogue with an old and beautifully carved Aron Kodesh, and the wonderful, beautiful paintings on the walls and ceiling made it the third most beautiful synagogue in Lithuania. There was also a bet midrash, a kloiz and a shtibel. The local mill was famous throughout the whole district and belonged to David and Shalom Maisel. In addition there were lime ovens owned by Hirschel Sheinkman and Yaacov Tray. Most of the Jewish youth were organized in Zionist youth movements. The attitude of the Lithuanian population to the Jews of Pakroy was very anti-Semitic.

When the ghetto in Kovno was sealed, 15th August 1941, Rachel Sayevich and her friend Rivka Shapiro (now Igdalsky) received their last letter, smuggled to them via a peasant who had been paid a handsome fee. The letter was written by Rachel’s married sister, Sheine Kagan, and was signed by Freda Shapiro (Rivka’s mother), and Latzman. In this letter they wrote that all Jewish men of a certain age had been taken from the shtetel via Linkova and that no one knew their fate. The women and children were expelled to the street of the Bet Midrash. There was no fence, but they were already forbidden free access to the shtetel centre by armed Lithuanians. In the letter all the signatories warned their relatives in the Kovno Ghetto not under any circumstances to come to Pakroy, coming to the shtetel was tantamount to coming to their death. About one month later, after the Kovno ghetto had been sealed and receipt of this letter, the Pakroyer in the ghetto heard via a Lithuanian farmer, whom they met in Kovno, that all the women and children had been taken from Pakroy and shot.

Until the end of the war the Pakroyer in the Kovno ghetto had no details of the fate of the Jews in Pakroy. Rachel Shayevich was in the Kovno ghetto throughout. Two months before the liquidation of the ghetto she was in a prison camp in Aleksat near Kovno. Together with the surviving Jews she was sent to Germany to Stutthof and some other camps, the last camp being in Timbelsen where she spent a few months. From there the women were evacuated because the Red Army was approaching. There were 1300 women in this camp, most of them from Lithuania - the Kovno and Shavel ghettos. In January 1945 they expelled these women from the camp. All were barefoot. The poor women wrapped their feet in rags and were kept marching for two weeks. Of these 1300, only about 50 survived at this stage. On the way the unfortunate ones died of hunger, most of them were barefoot and their feet froze and they collapsed in the snow. From the rear the Germans shot at them. The German guards used to shoot the collapsed and exhausted women. There was a lot of frost. Sometimes they got a few boiled potatoes, sometimes not even this. The frost was terrible. There was always a cold wind blowing and this helped to kill the Jewish women. Rachel, together with her girlfriend Rachel Vechter, ran away from the barn where they were being held. They wandered into a Polish village but no farmer let them in. At night both girls used to hide in barns where they would spend the night. Terribly cold, hungry and exhausted, both girls held on from 25th January until 21st February 1945. All this time they wandered close to the front line. The officers of the Red Army artillery encouraged them to struggle on till the end, until liberation. The commander billeted the girls in a village with a Polish-German farmer and for the first time in five years the two Jewish girls could live as free human beings. The Russian soldiers kissed the girls over and over again. They wept when they heard what the German fascists had done to the young women. After liberation both girls went back to Lithuania. Rachel Sayevitch went straight to her home town Pakroy.

The Lithuanian villagers whom she knew told Rachel that two weeks after the start of the war the local Lithuanian bandits, on the order of the Lithuanian Advocate Pozela, arrested eleven Jewish men and held them in the Pakroy prison. There the men were kept for 24 hours, afterwards they took them away in the direction of the cemetery and shot them. These Jews were all young and healthy, except for two. These are their names: Yitzhak Leib Eliason; Benzion Abelovitch; Kalman Hotz; both brothers Zozze and Notte Kaplan; both brothers Yaacov and Baruch Epstein; Chaim Edelman, Aranovitch. Rachel does not remember the names of the other two. About the murder of these eleven men Rachel was told by the Lithuanian farmers: Ignacunas Mikolas; Usinskas Aleksas, Jackiliene Emilija (a woman). These Lithuanians and others also told Rachel that after the shooting of the above eleven, a group of men were taken away to Shavel ghetto. The rest of the Jewish men were taken to a forest 3 km from the shtetel in the direction of Rozalia and they were shot there. In the shtetel there remained only two Jewish men, Berel Luria and Avraham Yitzhak Azrilowitch. These two men were appointed “guardians” of the women.

Three weeks after the shooting of the men, all the women and children were chased to a kind of ghetto in the street of the Bet Hamidrash. The women were not allowed out beyond this street. The area was patrolled by armed Lithuanian murderers who did not allow the women to go to the market in the shtetel or to Lithuanian acquaintances in the village for food. Not all the women were forced to go out to work. Those who did work, worked mainly on the estate of Baron von Roppas. An order was issued for the women to hand over all money, gold, silver and other valuables. The helpless women fully conformed with this order. Later there were more robberies. The murderers used to break into the houses where the women lived and raped them. The women and children were kept in this ghetto for three weeks. The Pakroy Lithuanian, Aleksas Usinskas, then 26 years old, told Rachel that one night two armed Lithuanian murderers – amongst whom were the teachers Simkevicius, Gigevicius – and others came to his home. They drove him, together with another 14 peasants, 3 km out of Pakroy to Morkekalnis. There they were shown where and how to dig a ditch. Usinskas thought that this ditch would be used for burying him and took an opportunity to escape. He ran with a friend to a field opposite and hid there. In the morning they heard a commotion and weeping. They saw how the Jewish women and children were being chased to the ditch. In a short while they heard terrible screams and crying, then shooting by automatic weapons. Usinskas and his friend lay not too far from the ditch and they even heard familiar voices and cries of Jewish women. He heard clearly the screams of the young girl Rachel Eliason. Her voice was stronger than others. She cried and screamed very loudly. Usinskas even saw from a distance how the women after being shot fell into the ditch. Usinskas did not remember the exact date that this took place and Rachel, after a six week stay in Pakroy, did not succeed in verifying the date. Not one Jew of Pakroy was saved, except for those who were in the Kovno ghetto and two young men who ran away to the Soviet Union and survived. The shtetel has remained as it was before the war, the Jewish houses have remained the same. Only Lithuanians live in these houses, no Jews, only Lithuanians of Pakroy or from other villages and shtetlach.

The following Lithuanian murderers of Pakroy actively participated in torturing, robbing and then shooting the men and later the women and children of Pakroy: Pozela, the Pakroy advocate who became Commandant; Gigericius a teacher; Simkevicius; Zinkevicius, a tailor, Lipskis; one of the bandit partisan leaders was the representative of the Pakroy Cooperative at the time of the Smetanas regime, “the intellectual” Dojokas.

Rachel Sayevitch.

22.1.1947,

Landsberg a. Lech.