Location of the monument:

Latitude: 56.978666

Longitude: 21.868946

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. In the Krāces Forest of Padure parish, which is one of the murder sites, the Latvian SD unit “Arājs’ Commando”, which had arrived from Riga, shot more than 300 Jews.

During the Soviet period on the site of murder in the Krāces Forest a memorial plaque was placed, it bears an inscription in Latvian and Russian: “Here from 1941–1945 fascists shot Soviet 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.

Search for the related names of Jews at http://names.lu.lv.