The pogrom on the Jews in Slobodka, suburb of Kovno, upon the part of Lithuanian Fascists with the help of the police, has persuaded even the Jewish supporters of Prime Minister Waldemaras of Lithuania that Jewish blood in Lithuania is to be had for the shedding.
The Jewish community of Lithuania has lived through all kinds of conditions in the ten years which have elapsed since the establishment of the Lithuanian Republic. For a time conditions for the Jews were quite good. When the Christian Democrats came into power, however, things changed for the worse. There is on record the reply received by a Jewish delegation from a Prime Minister of Lithuania to the effect that the government would not protect the Jewish inhabitants from a physical onslaught. Nevertheless, conditions for the Jews were not as bad, their poverty so great and their blood so cheap as now.
The dictatorship in Lithuania is scarcely three years old and already there are more bloody pages written into the chapter of the Jews than in the seven years which preceded. The most tragic phase of it all is that the bloody facts relating to the Jewish position in Lithuania cannot be cited in the historical record. Every attempt on the part of the local Jewish press to cite the outrages perpetrated against the Jews is rigidly suppressed by the censor. Only when the hooligans have completed their bloody attacks and left their corpses are the facts permitted to be cited and then only in such a form as to leave the reader under the impression that the casualties are the victims of a band of robbers. The censor dictates the form of the announcement.
As if the economic pogrom upon the Jews was not enough of a tragedy to withstand, day in, day out, week after week, stories filter through of bloody attacks upon the persons of Jews in the towns and villages of Lithuania. Still fresh is the memory of bullet-riddled bodies and broken heads in Paren, Wilkowishki, in Telz and other Jewish towns. Hardly were these attacks over, when a band of armed Fascists fell upon an aged Jew because he attempted to rescue his child from the hands of murderers. Lithuanian hooligans have now taken to desecrating Jewish sacred objects. Regularly there are attacks upon the synagogues, desecrations of the scrolls of the law and the cemeteries.
A separate and bloody chapter is contributed by the “missing” Jews of Lithuania. Not a day passes that does not bring the story of a Jew who set out for the village and never returned. Fortunate is the family of the missing if it finds his dead body and buries it in consecrated ground. Very often, thanks to the protection of the authorities, every trace of the missing person is gone and no one knows where (Continued on Page 4)
For a while the anti-Jewish excesses were concentrated in the provinces, and as the local papers were prevented from publishing the facts, the Jewish population of Kovno endured with passivity the economic pogrom directed against it with the aid of the governmental power. The fact that the perpetrators were permitted to go free and unpunished incited them to more daring attacks against the Jews, reaching a point when on August 1, the Jewish population in the Jewish center, Slobodka, a suburb of Kovno, lived through a real organized pogrom.
From eleven in the evening until one-thirty in the morning, the hours when the Jews return from the city to their homes in the suburb, armed Fascists with drawn guns stood at every entrance to the town, demanding of all passersby that they show their papers. When the documents pointed to the possessor as a Jew, he was ordered to run. Knowing full well that the moment they started to run they would be riddled with bullets, the Jews refused to budge, with the result that the execution was carried out on the spot. Iron staffs, the butts of guns were the weapons used. So mercilessly were they beaten that the victims could scarcely drag themselves off to the nearest Jewish house. Police stood near the places where the assaults were carried on. When the victims dragged themselves off they were treated to blows from the policeman’s stick with the statement: “This is dessert.”
In the course of an hour and a half, sixty-five Jews, representing the leadership of Slobodka, including the son of the Yeshiva head, were murderously assaulted. Because of the state of war existing, exit and entrance to the town was prohibited after one o’clock. The result was that none of the wounded Jews could be transferred to the hospital. All through that night, there emanated from every Jewish house the heart-rending groans of the victims.
The next morning the most severely wounded were taken to the hospital. Those less seriously hurt and able to drag themselves about, went to the city, in their bloody garments, their broken heads and mutilated faces, and to the office of the local Yiddish paper, “Die Yiddische Stimme,” to request the publication of the unwarranted attacks upon innocent Jews. Every item concerning the bloody excesses in Slobodka, however, was suppressed by the censor. The Jews of Kovno are, however, well aware of what has occurred in Slobodka, and Tisha B’Ab for them began two weeks ahead of the rest of the world.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
