Small Riga Ghetto

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others were taken to the Daugavpils ghetto. This remainder was joined on the
way by the remaining Jews from Preiļi and Višķi.
During a rest stop in Aglona, next to the world-famous Aglona cloister, they
were met with blows by the local population, and many of them died a martyr's
death next to this Catholic holy place.
Nor were the few Jews in Malta (Weinstock and others) forgotten.
***
Krāslava, the city that had become known because of the famous sculptor N.
Aronsohn, of whom the Krāslava Jews were very proud, was also not spared
in the general destruction.
In the first few days after the occupation the local people, supported by a
Latvian expedition from Riga, treated the Jews with extreme cruelty. All the
Jews, young and old, were assembled in the large firemen's square (Posharnaja).
The wealthy Jewish citizen Salman Rabinowitsch was arrested separately
and also taken there. In front of the assembled community he was hanged at
the door of the fire station. Most of the remaining Jews were shot with machine
guns and burned on a pyre. Israel Elzofon's wife, a dentist, was picked
out of the crowd and taken separately to the Augustover forest. There she was
hanged on a hill across from the Latvian heroes' memorial.
The rest of the Jews were forced to walk to Daugavpils. Among them were
the three old people Lea Federmann, Slate Lin and Jankel Laufer. Because of
their old age they could no longer keep up, so they were taken to the Daugavpils
prison. On the way, this column met the surviving Jews from Dagda.
The two groups were joined, and all of them were killed in the well-known spa
Poguļanka near Daugavpils. People said that the Latvian mayor of Krāslava,
Briedis, and an unskilled laborer in the militia, Pētersons, were especially active
in this operation. In addition to the "work" they accomplished in Krāslava,
they went along to Daugavpils just to see with their own eyes the destruction
of the Jewish community of Krāslava.
The only ones who managed to hide in a peasant's home were Mrs. Scheine
Dinermann and her daughter, her daughter's child, and her son-in-law Barkan.
Neighbors betrayed this hiding place to the Gestapo, and the whole house
was surrounded. In panic, Mrs. Dinermann lost her head and started to scream
uncontrollably. Her daughter, seeing the onset of the catastrophe that awaited
them all, tied her mother's mouth shut and thus inadvertently suffocated her.
The refugees were not found; they sought refuge with a Polish priest and so
were saved. People told me that a small child of the Sislin family was taken in
by a Polish man and thus survived.