Small Riga Ghetto

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It was said that a certain Simka Bersin defended himself with an axe when
the Latvians tried to arrest him. He was very strong and with his axe he killed
three men. After being overpowered, he was beheaded with his own axe.
Many of the Rēzekne Jews were taken from the prison to the Viping forest.
There, on Mount Zemena, they died a terrible death. They were thrown into
the graves still half-alive, and the local Russian people said that the earth
above the graves had continued to move for three more days.
In mid-1944 a Kommando of thirty men was taken from the Central Prison
of Riga to the Rēzekne prison. It was bound for the 1005 Kommando, or Stuetzpunkt.
They worked in chains and had to burn the corpses and then clear
away all the traces. After they had finished their "work", they themselves were
murdered. People told me that my schoolmate Isaak Misroch was among those
who died there.
The following incident shows the local people's attitude toward the Jews. A
butcher whose shop was in the central market across from the prison grabbed a
small Jewish child and literally tore it to pieces, in order to show the peasants
who had gathered in the marketplace how to deal with the Jews.
Of all the Jews who were in Rēzekne during the German occupation, only
two men survived (Israelit). These two men had been hidden by a Polish man
who lived in the city.
***
The roughly 350 Jews of Zilupe were assembled and led by the Latvians to a
bridge about two kilometers outside the city. There all of them were killed
without exception. Among those killed were the rabbi and the prominent
Dreier, Feinstein, and Aron families. The only person who resisted was David
Deutsch, and for this reason the murderers beat him savagely and buried him
half-alive. The prominent Laser family was killed on the road to Tukums.
They were burned alive in a synagogue. The children died in various other Aktionen.
The small nearby towns (Pasiena, Polizk, Vec-Sloboda, Kuprava, Pilda and
Rundēni) were not spared by the Latvian expeditions. Only a few of the Jews
living there had the opportunity to flee to Ludza and find shelter in its ghetto.
***
In Ludza the Latvians set up a small ghetto for about 300 persons in the synagogue,
after killing many Jews. However, the inhabitants of this ghetto were
transported to the Daugavpils ghetto. Only a very small fraction of them arrived;
the others were killed on the way there. Some of the Jews in the towns
of Kārsava, Varakļāni and Vilāņi were killed by the Latvians on the spot; the