Taurage, Lithuania, Postal Code 72263

Taurage is an industrial city. The name comes from two Lithuanian words, Tauras, which means “aurochs” and ragas, which means “horn.” The aurochs was a type of large cattle that lived in Europe, Asia and North Africa. The aurochs of North Europe stood 61-71 inches at the shoulders and weighed up to 3,000 pounds. An aurochs' horns reached to slightly less than three feet.

Over the centuries, Taurage was kicked around between Czarist Russia, Napoleonic France and Brandenburg-Prussia. Lithuania became independent from Russia following World War I, but the country was first seized by the Soviet Union in 1940 and then by Nazi Germany in 1941. Nazis murdered about 4,000 Jews in Taurage and in nearby villages. The Red Army took Lithuania in the autumn of 1944, keeping the country under Soviet control until 1990.

The 2011 population was 26,444. By the 1897 census, Jews made up 55 percent of the city’s population, 3,634 of 6,655 total. The Czarist army when retreating from German forces in 1915, exiled the Jews to Poltava and Jekaterinoslav.

Twenty-six years later, the next invading German army helped complete the job.

“The German army occupied Tavrig on June 22, 1941, after bombing the town and destroying most of the houses. About 20 Jews were injured. Inhabitants escaped to nearby villages, Shavl and other regional towns in this region. Only a few escaped to Russia. Returning Jews found their homes looted by Lithuanian neighbors. Lithuanian nationalists and Gestapo detained 300 Jewish men and 25 non-Jewish Communists. The Jewish men were kept in the detention barracks of the 7th Infantry regiment of the former Lithuanian army. On July 2, created an aktion to teach how it was to be done elsewhere. The Jews were brought to the nearby village of Vizbutai (Vizhbutai) where anti-tank ditches were deepened. Stripped of clothing and valuables, they were forced to kneel at the edge of the ditch. Then the Gestapo men and their Lithuanian collaborators shot them in the back of their necks and pushed them into the ditch. The next group, 122 Jewish men, was murdered on the road to Shilel (Silale) between July 3 and 10. Arrests of Jewish men and abuse of young Jewish women continued no limits to Lithuanian Nazi atrocities. Forced labor and random murders were daily events. A ghetto was set up in incomplete huts in Vytautas Street started by the Soviet army as sheds for trucks. Surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by Lithuanian auxiliary police, food was scarce and hygiene impossible. On September 13, they were told they would move to a place where their conditions would ‘improve’. On September 16 (24 of Elul 5701), trucks transported all of them to the Tavrig grove, about 6 km NW of the town, 100-150 meters from the road to Shilel where they were shot by drunken Lithuanian auxiliary policemen. Babies were cut in two or their sculls (sic) bashed on trees or rocks and thrown into the pits. They raped girls. 513 old women and children, stripped and robbed, were murdered. Several Jews hid with peasants but were caught. Only a few were left in Tavrig to work at the military command, but several weeks they were murdered. One family was left alive for several more months. About 3,000 men, women and children are buried in the mass graves in the Tavrig grove near the village of Antosunija. Another 900 men and one woman are buried near the village of Vizbutai.

http://iajgs.org/cemetery/lithuania/taurage.html

At one time, the Ottoman Empire was a place of safety for Jews. At another time, Jews found safety in Spain. And France. And Germany. And Poland. And Holland. And Belgium.

The Baltic countries, Ukraine and Poland were especially diligent in helping Germany make Europe free of Jews.