Small Riga Ghetto

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On the road between Daugavpils and Rēzekne lay the small Rušona railroad
station and, 17 kilometers further on, the small town of Preiļi, where about
1,800 Jews lived. This prosperous and fruitful region had seen the formation
of a large merchant community (including Potasch, Kaufmann, Lechowitzki,
Kopp and others). In this little town the Jews had established a small religious
center.
When the Germans occupied Preiļi on 28 June 1941, all the Jews were
herded together into the marketplace and divided into groups according to the
streets where they lived. The inhabitants of Daugavpils Street and Rušonu
Street were shot the same day, the others in two Aktionen on 4 and 8 August
1941. It was Latvians who committed these murders! Before the murders they
picked forty Jews out of one group, forced them to put on clown-like masks,
and led them through the streets singing. Later they were taken to Znotiņi and
murdered there.
The Jew Skutelski, helped by Schachtner, set fire to his house, which had
been entered by the Gestapo. But both of them also died in the flames, because
people grabbed them and threw them into the burning house. Some of the Jewish
inhabitants – Schaffer, Simon Chagi with his wife and child, Samuel and
Montik Ostband, and Hacker with a child – had hidden in a ditch in the woods
with the help of an Aryan. Hacker and the child died in this ditch. All of the
others were able to stay there for a long time, but later on they too were betrayed
by Latvians.
Salman Plawin and Grischa Starobin also hid in the woods until 1943, but
then they were discovered by Latvians and shot. Of the entire Jewish population
of Preiļi, only nineteen people survived; seven of them now live in Riga.
Of those who fled at that time to Soviet Russia, the ones who returned were
Minna and Schloime Silbermann with their three children, Moische and Jechiel
Zemel (both of them were invalids), and Schaja Skutelski (Dr. Skutelski's
brother), who had survived first the Riga concentration camp and then a German
concentration camp.