Mosedis Shtetl Project
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Mosedis is a small town in the Kretinga region between Skud and Salant. Before WW2 about 35 Jewish families corresponding to 130-150 people lived in Mosedis. The Germans occupied the town on the second day of the occupation of Lithuania on June 23rd , 1941 in the twilight. Even before the Germans entered the town, the local Hooligans painted German swastika in black on the Jewish houses. A number of Jewish men succeeded in fleeing to Russia. On the 24th of June all the Jews were ordered to gather at the synagogue. They were locked up there and not allowed to leave. Soon after that the torture began. The beards were torn from the men and the women were raped. On Sunday when the Lithuanians went to church a number of Jews were taken out and were forced to perform a running race. (When one passes the other one and..?) they ran the old Jews around the cross. All these humiliations were performed by Lithuanians. Only once, two Germans soldiers came by and spoke briefly to the head of Lithuanian bandits and then they went away. The Jews were given almost no food and water and they were not allowed to relieve themselves outside. They were held there two weeks and tortured. After that they were taken via Skud to Kretinga. Some were taken by carriages and some went by foot. Eliezer Hodes, one of the honorable people of then local community, and young man named Yakov Katz were tied up behind one of the carriages. Most of the men were shot in Skud in the Shavlistem Club in the beginning of July. The women were held about a week in Skud and then taken to perform labor to clean the streets or to carry bricks. Sometime after that they were transferred, with the children, to the Jewish cemetery in Kretinga. There, all of them were brutally tortured and beaten with sticks and clubs and ordered to undress to their underwear and shot to death. The screaming and cries of the miserable were heard far away. The local farmers said that the river water which ran close to the cemetery ran red from the blood of the victims. It was apparently at the end of the July, 1941. In the cemetery in Kretinga, the Soviet authorities raised a monument at the place where the women and children of Maishad were killed. It said that on this spot three Lithuanian women were killed who were members of a Soviet Communist Youth organization, and their names are engraved on the monument and it says and others referring to the Jews. None of the captured Jewish citizens of Maishad survived. Other Maishad citizens survived because they were in the Kaunas ghetto or in concentration camps in Germany. The others survived because they escaped to Soviet Union.