Location of the monument:

Latitude: 56.493333
Longitude: 25.916389

At the beginning of July 1941, mass–scale arrests of Jews started in Krustpils. Initially Jews were driven into the slaughterhouse, but in a couple of days’ time part of the Jews were taken to the Krustpils Sugar Factory on the outskirts of the town and to Jaunā muiža (approximately 4 km from Krustpils), but the remaining – to the premises of the former Jewish School of Krustpils (182 Rīgas Street), which became a provisional ghetto. On 1 August 1941 all imprisoned Jews were shot by a SD unit (“Arājs Commando”), which had arrived from Rīga, together with local self–defenders and policemen in the former shooting–range of the Latgale Artillery Regiment of the Latvian Army in Kaķīši peat swamp (5–6 km from Krustpils). On 1 August 1941 also the Jews brought from Gostiņi and Pļaviņas were shot in the same place – the Kaķīši Forest, but in 1942 – Jews of the German Reich.

In 1958 the remains of Jews from Krustpils, Pļaviņas and Gostiņi, as well as Western Europe, murdered in the Kaķīši Forest, as well as of the killed Jews from Zīlāni and the farm “Daukstes” in Krustpils parish were reinterred in Asote Jewish Cemetery. On the site of reinterment a monument was erected, with an inscription in Russian and Yiddish: “Eternal remembrance to the perished inhabitants of Krustpils and Pļaviņas, who were shot by German occupants in 1941”.

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.