Ashley Blog #2: Motl Kuritsky and the Anykščaia Massacre

This week I received a book in ILL, and was very excited to see that the entire second half of the book was devoted to translations of Lithuanian Holocaust survivors’ testimonies. It certainly makes my job a bit easier! Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be critically evaluating these primary sources to see what they reveal about the motives of the Lithuanian pro-Nazi volunteers. These testimonies will be particularly useful for their descriptions of the Lithuanians that volunteered to help the Nazis and the reactions of both Jews and Lithuanians to the German occupation. I’ve included the citation and analysis below. For the purposes of this blog post, I focused solely on a particularly chilling testimony by a man named Motl Kuritsky, from the town of Anykščaia.  

Bankier, David, ed. Holocaust Testimonials from Provincial Lithuania. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2012.

In his retelling of the events of June 29, 1941, when the Jewish men of his town were isolated in synagogues and tortured, Motl Kuritsky reveals the unbridled violence of the Lithuanian partisans after they stormed Anykščaia. From his testimony it is revealed that the Lithuanians raped Jewish women and dehumanized the Jewish men before brutally killing “more than 30 men” (Bankier 180).

Kuritsky begins his testimony by stating that the Lithuanian partisans entered his town and removed men from the synagogues, all while “removing a number of pretty young girls from their homes and raping them in the streets and yards” (Bankier 180). One Jewish man, laying down beside her husband, was commanded to accompany the partisans, to which her husband pleaded, “Don’t take my wife” (Bankier 181). In response to this, the partisans “stepped on his throat and choked him” (Bankier 181). Yet another girl, whom Kuritsky names as Dobke Dubinovsky, was “brought unconscious into the synagogue after being raped,” and afterward admitted that the Lithuanians had “held… her hands and feet while the rest of them raped her” (Bankier 181). Kuritsky also reveals that “only a few women” survived these encounters (Bankier 181).

The Lithuanian partisans’ actions toward the Jewish men were equally ruthless. Jewish men were required by the partisans to bury their dead neighbors, at which point they were shot themselves. Additionally, those men that they did manage to herd into the synagogues were “forced to strip naked;” Kuritsky describes “the sounds of blows – from shovels, iron rods, clubs and whips – to the bodies of the Jews inside the synagogues,” as well as the sound of “cries from the beaten men, strange heartrending howls from Jews with cracked skulls, their hands, legs, and ribs broken” (Bankier 181-182). He finishes by describing the Lithuanians of the town, whose neighbors cried out to them as they were being murdered, saying they “stood with their women and children and happily grabbed the bloody clothes” of those that were killed (Bankier 182).

From his testimony, Kuritsky reveals the mercilessness of the Lithuanian partisans as they beat, raped, and murdered his neighbors. Particularly unnerving is his description of his own Lithuanian neighbors, who watched the attacks joyfully, ignoring the cries of the dying. While his testimony reveals little of the motives behind these attacks, it is nevertheless clear that the perpetrators behind the massacre in Anykščaia were Lithuanian, with no mention of the German SS at all.