Murder Story of Ludza Jews on Rezekne Street in Ludza

... The arrested vice commandant of the Jewish ghetto, Pavel Alexandrovich Kovalevsky, relates in detail how a mass annihilation of the Jewish population of Ludza was organized and executed. Kovalevsky testifies that at the end of July 1941, Captain Westergauzen, the German commandant of Ludza, ordered that those Jews incapable of work were to be annihilated first. Following the order of Zauer, the first ghetto commandant who received the order from commandant Westergauzen, Kovalevsky and other policemen selected thirty-five elderly Jews from the ghetto and shot them during the night at the end of Rezhitsa [Rezekne] Street, at the site of a former rope factory ... The shooting was carried out under the command of Rekstynsh, head of the Ludza county police. The Aizsargi group [an extreme Latvian nationalistic military organization that collaborated with the Nazis before and during their occupation of Latvia] shot the victims in the back of their heads with their revolvers. The shooting took place by the light of a bonfire, where Jewish religious books, brought by the victims, were being burnt ....