On 15 December, 2019 a remembrance ceremony dedicated to the mass extermination of Liepāja Jews during the Holocaust was held in Šķēde.
The largest massacres of Liepāja Jews took place on December 15 to December 17, 1941.
On December 13, 1941 the bilingual newspaper of Liepāja ‘’Kurzemes Vārds’’ published an order by Emil Diedrich, SS-Lieutenant colonel, local SS and police chief in Liepāja, which required all Jews in the city to remain in their residences on December 15 and December 16, 1941, thus facilitating the killing operations.
The order came from SD headquarters in Riga The Latvian police began arresting the Jews in the city on the night of December 13 to 14, bringing them to the Women’s Prison at Tiesas Str. There was too little room for the people. Conditions there were cruel and inhuman. Victims were ordered to stand facing towards the wall, and not move, look for relatives, or look at the guards, who beat people and treated them with brutality.
The largest massacre, which was carried out on the very shore of the Baltic sea in Šķēde, was conducted by E. Diedrich and carried out by police units under his command from December 15 to 17, 1941.Almost the whole Jewish population of Liepāja was murdered then.
As every year, members of the Jewish community, families and friends have gathered at the memorial. Speakers from the Jewish Community and Liepaja Jewish Heritage Foundation have underlined the importace of remembrance of those terrible events in order to live on and prevent a repetition of this crime in the future.
