Murder story of Ukmergė Jews at the Antakalnis II Farmstead

The Antakalnis II farmstead was located some five kilometers southeast of Ukmergė; both before and during the war, it belonged to the Ukmergė prison, and its inmates were used as farmhands. Immediately after the retreat of the Soviets from Ukmergė, on June 24 (i.e., even before the final takeover of the town by the Germans), the Lithuanian "activists", followed by the reestablished Lithuanian police, began to arrest suspected former Soviet collaborators, most of them Jews. The main wave of arrests fell on July 4, with the Lithuanian policemen citing a German order. The alleged communists arrested by the Lithuanian police were held in the prison. On July 10, 1941, a Lithuanian police officer named Vaclovas Deveikis asked the prison warden, P. Kuzmickas, how many "communists" were being held in the prison, and how many of them were Jews. He was told that 100 of the approximately 150 arrestees were Jews. Two hours later, Deveikis informed the warden that the Jewish inmates were to be transferred to Antakalnis II. The Jews were told that they would be taken to the farm to do some fieldwork; to make the ruse more believable, shovels were distributed among them. After arriving at the farmstead, the arrestees underwent a selection, with the women being locked in a barn, and the men being moved into the prisoners' quarters, which used to house the farmhands before the war. The farm was surrounded by Lithuanian policemen. At 10 or 11 PM, the execution began. Upon the orders of Deveikis, the victims were to be hanged in a hay barn one by one; a pit had been dug in advance behind the barn. A prison clerk named Butvilas, heavily drunk, would call each man's name from a list and hand him over to the policemen. On the way to the place of execution, the men were blindfolded. A two-meter-tall gallows had been erected in the barn. Deveikis and one of the jailers would place the noose around the man's neck, and other policemen would then push him off the bench. Ten minutes later, the policemen would take the body down from the gallows, whereupon Paškevičius, the chief of a security police squad, would chop off the fingers with golden rings and extract the gold teeth. At dawn, the executioners decided that the process was too slow. They took all the women and some men, thirty-four people in total, to the Pivonija Forest. There, the policemen divided the victims into three groups and shot them with rifles. A total of 117 Jews from Ukmergė were killed on that night at the Antakalnis II and in the Pivonija Forest, eighty-three of them dying at the former site.