Kuldīga Municipality, Padure Parish, Vicinity of the Old School I

Location of the monument:

Latitude: 57.016966
Longitude: 21.938213

The Nazi troops entered Kuldīga on 1 July 1941. Already on the following day a number of orders were issued that restricted the life of Jews in the town, and a couple of hundred Jews were arrested. Mass murdering of Jews was started in mid–July by a SD unit, with the assistance of the local self–defenders, and continued until the beginning of August in various locations. Two sites, where Jews were shot in a forest of Padure parish, not far from “Old School” (approximately 3–4 kilometres from Kuldīga) are known; however, the exact number of victims and circumstances of murder are unknown.

In the Soviet period on one of the murder sites in the forest close to “Old School” a monument was erected – a stone with a plaque bearing an inscription in Latvian: “Here in 1941– 1945 fascists murdered 200 people.”

Further reading:

  • Meler M. Jewish Latvia: Sites to Remember. Tel-Aviv: Association of Latvian and Estonian Jews in Israel, 2013.
  • Ezergailis A. The Holocaust in Latvia, 1941-1944: The Missing Center. Riga: The Historical Institute of Latvia; Washington, DC: US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1996.


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