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From the Israel Kaplan collection:
Avraham Olsvang: his testimony about events in the Siauliai ghetto in Lituania and the Pavenciai camp.
Testimony delivered in the Feldafing DP camp on Sept. 30, 1947. 14 pages, handwritten, in Yiddish.

In July 1943, an SS officer named Foerster came to the ghetto and notified the residents that they would be relocated to their workplaces. On Sept. 30, 1943, a group of 300 men and women and thirty children between the ages of 5 and 16 to a camp beside the sugar factory in Pavenciai near Siauliai. In the beginning they worked at private farms and a farm of the SS. One of the SS staff, dubbed "the Horse," would abuse the Jews. On Oct. 1, 1943, they began working in the sugar factory, particulary in unpacking sugar beets from their packing cartons. This work was supervised by a manager named Didzbalis, who would abuse any worker who was too slow for his liking. The inmates lived in a structure that had been a sugar warehouse, without separate accomodations for men and women. The Ukrainian guards maltreated the inmates and robbed them, although it was possible to obtain food from peasants in the vicinity. On Nov. 4, 1943, Foerster arrived and took away nine children and two adults. He promised that the children would be in Siauliai for the winter months in more comfortable conditions. Later it became known that they were taken to the Daugailiai camp where they were joined by more children and elderly people, and then taken to Siauliai. There they and the remainder of the ghetto's children were loaded into [freight?] cars and sent to their deaths on Nov. 5, 1943. After the "Children's Aktion," 60 Jews were returned to the ghetto from Pavenciai. A month later the camp was liquidated; some of its inmates were transferred to Daugailiai and otheres to the ghetto. Close