Qualla: Siauliai Ghetto

Siauliai Ghetto: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stasys Ivanauskas, CC BY 4.0. On 5 November 1943, the SS came for the children of the Siauliai Ghetto. Trucks rolled through the Kaukazas neighborhood and the Trakai Street compound, and SS officers and Lithuanian auxiliaries hunted house to house for anyone under thirteen. The Kinderaktion took roughly 800 children, along with elderly people and the sick. They were driven to the train station and sent to Auschwitz, where most were murdered on arrival. A few mothers managed to hide their children in attics, in coal cellars, in walls. Most could not. Within a single day the ghetto - which on the morning of 5 November still held living children, lullabies, schools held in secret, and play - was emptied of them.

Read more: Siauliai Ghetto on Qualla

Image: Stasys Ivanauskas | CC BY 4.0

Siauliai Ghetto: Before

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit yeowatzup, CC BY 2.0. Siauliai was the second-largest city in independent Lithuania between the wars, and roughly a quarter of its 32,000 residents were Jewish - about 8,000 people. The community had elected a Jewish businessman, Rafal Riazanskis, as deputy mayor. Jews ran the city's largest shoe fact...

Read more: Siauliai Ghetto on Qualla

Image: yeowatzup | CC BY 2.0

Siauliai Ghetto: Summer 1941

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Homo ergaster, CC0. German troops entered Siauliai on 26 June 1941, four days after the launch of Operation Barbarossa. Within weeks, mass killings began in the surrounding forests. In July, the Germans took 732 Jews and accused communists from the Siauliai jail to a place near the village of Prociu...

Read more: Siauliai Ghetto on Qualla

Image: Homo ergaster | CC0

Siauliai Ghetto: Two Compounds

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ernst Hofmann or Bernhard Walte, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. The Germans established the ghetto in two parts: one in the working-class Kaukazas suburb at the edge of town, the other along Ezeras and Trakai streets near the city center. Roughly 3,000 Jews were crowded into each. The first census in May 1942 counted at least 4,665 prisoners;...

Read more: Siauliai Ghetto on Qualla

Image: Ernst Hofmann or Bernhard Walte | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Siauliai Ghetto: The Kinderaktion

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thomas Stegh, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 5 November 1943, the Germans carried out a coordinated operation against children, the elderly, and the sick across both ghetto compounds. The action took roughly 800 victims; most were children under thirteen. Survivor Nesse Godin, who had been hidden by her mother during ear...

Read more: Siauliai Ghetto on Qualla

Image: Thomas Stegh | CC BY-SA 3.0

Siauliai Ghetto: Liquidation and Memory

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kazys, CC BY-SA 4.0. In July 1944, as the Red Army approached, the Germans liquidated what remained of the Siauliai Ghetto. The surviving prisoners - roughly 2,400 by then, almost all of them adults - were deported to Stutthof concentration camp on the Baltic, and from there into the death-march syst...

Read more: Siauliai Ghetto on Qualla

Image: Kazys | CC BY-SA 4.0