Ančupānu Hills Related Communities
Rēzekne Related Murder Sites
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Murder story of Rēzekne Jews in the Ančupānu Hills
Murder Site
Ančupānu kalni
Latvia
In August 1941 a large number of Rēzekne Jews who had been incarcerated in the town’s prisons were murdered in the Ančupānu Hills - about four kilometers from the town. On August 23 the final local mass murder operation against the Jews began. The Germans and their Latvian collaborators took a large group of Jews, some on foot and some by truck, to the site, where they were forced to undress and then shot. On November 15, 1941 an additional group of Jews was taken to the site and shot. Among them were a woman who had been baptised and her two adult daughters from a mixed family. Jews from other places in the area were also killed in the Ančupānu Hills, as were many people of other nationalities, including Roma and Latvians, along with Soviet prisoners of war. In April 1944 the Germans exhumed the bodies of the victims and burned them.
Related Resources
Written Testimonies
ChGK Soviet Reports
From the diary of I. Kolosova (Mikhaylovskaya), who was born in 1926 and lived in Rēzekne during the war:
November 10 [1941]. … Today, Jews who fled from Rezhitsa [Rēzekne] were brought back again….
November 16, Sunday: Indeed! Either matters are getting worse for the Germans, or they have been driven absolutely crazy by blood. Yesterday they eliminated the last Jews [in town]. They gathered all of those who remained, even wives and children of Christians. They didn’t spare Tanya and Vera Mikhailova [two sisters age 22 and 18 whose mother Lyubov Mikhailova (née Polak) had been Jewish but was baptised].
The murders continued all day yesterday at Ančupāni. This morning 22 Red Army political instructors were shot. An orgy of bloodshed is taking place. Now the policemen are carrying away the clothes that were taken off, but the people are no longer here. Human life costs nothing – only one rifle shot….
November 19, Wednesday: Is this the Western culture that is being hailed in all the papers? With the temperature outside 12 degrees below zero, they brought people (women and children) to a field, forced them to take off their clothes (including socks or stockings) and shot them. Their brutality must represent some kind of record…. One policeman said that, after she had to undress, Vera Mikhailova had voluntarily stepped into the first line of victims….
Yuliya Aleksandrova, “Rezhitsa literally flows with blood, the houses are intact but the people are gone" (Russian),” published in Relga, November 16, 2005.
Ančupānu kalni
tell
Murder Site
Latvia
56.539;27.312
Photos
Sketch of the Ančupānu Hills murder site
GARF, MOSCOW R-7021-93-28 copy YVA M.33 / JM/21221; JM/21222