Akniste, Palanga, and the border settlement Lithuania remembers without the Jewish objection

Akniste is not an abstract place to me. My grandfathers family was murdered there. That is why a border settlement signed more than a century ago does not read to me like cartography. In 1921, the international settlement placed Akniste on the Latvian side and Palanga on the Lithuanian side. Twenty years later, the Jewish communities in both places were slaughtered.

The usual account is tidy. Latvia and Lithuania could not agree on portions of their new border after the First World War, so they submitted the dispute to a commission chaired by the Scottish professor James Young Simpson. Lithuania obtained Palanga and the Baltic coast; Latvia obtained most of the disputed Ilukste area, including Akniste. Palanga’s municipal history still commemorates the result as Palanga’s “return to Lithuania.”

That same municipal history supplies an inconvenient qualification: Lithuania received less land by area, but the more valuable part. It acquired a 19.5-kilometer coastal strip and retained Mazeikiai, the railway junction Latvia wanted; Latvia received almost all of the disputed Ilukste district. A Lithuanian scholarly summary adds that Latvia had proposed exchanging the Sventoji-Palanga coast for Mazeikiai. Lithuania rejected the trade as unacceptable because it regarded both as Lithuanian. The arbitration left Lithuania with Mazeikiai and awarded it Sventoji and Palanga as well.

But another population lived inside the territory being valued, traded and awarded. Palanga had a substantial Jewish community. And the surviving scholarly record says that community asked for Latvia.

The finding Lithuania already published

The load-bearing source is Latvian historian Krišs Kapenieks’s study, “Attitudes of the populace towards the issue of sovereignty over Palanga region in 1918-1921 in the Latvian historical records: what can be learned about the viewpoint of the Jewish community.” It appeared in Palangos žydai. Išnykusi miesto bendruomenės dalis, ed. Hektoras Vitkus (Klaipėda: Druka, 2017), pp. 63-74, 169-172, proceedings of a scholarly conference held in Palanga. Lithuania’s Lituanistika record catalogs it as a scientific publication.

That provenance matters. This is not a Latvian nationalist claim imported from outside. The finding was published in Lithuania, under a Lithuanian editor, and catalogued in Lithuania’s scholarly bibliography. Lithuania did not suppress it. Lithuania published it – and later commemorated the centenary of Palanga’s “return” without giving the Jewish objection any comparable place in the public story.

Kapenieks’s published abstract is explicit. Drawing on records in the Latvian State Historical Archive, he says Palanga’s Jewish community supported the region remaining part of Latvia. He identifies long-standing economic and social ties with Courland, especially Liepaja; trust in the Latvian government and administration; and skepticism toward the Lithuanian government. The position was communicated to the Latvian administration in Palanga, the Latvian-Lithuanian Border Commission and the Latvian government.

I have not yet obtained the complete chapter or the underlying petitions. I therefore do not claim every Jew in Palanga agreed, or that there was a plebiscite. The published record supports the narrower proposition: an organized Jewish community position was expressed in favor of Latvia. If the full chapter records dissent, that belongs in the record too.

Not a plebiscite – a petition

“Chose Latvia” would overstate the evidence. Nobody held a sovereignty referendum. “Asked for Latvia” is more precise. These Jews petitioned, spoke to administrators and placed a political judgment into the record while larger powers decided their fate.

Kapenieks also records what can look like counter-evidence: at the beginning of 1919, Palanga’s town executive committee consisted of seven Lithuanians, three Jews and two Latvians, and its minutes were kept in Lithuanian. Administrative language and committee arithmetic tell us who operated local government; they do not tell us which sovereignty a minority preferred. Jews could serve on that body and still tell Latvian officials and the border commission that they preferred Latvia.

The demographic figures need context too. Kapenieks gives 1,121 Jews among 1,618 residents in 1881. The Yad Vashem community encyclopedia, available through JewishGen, gives 925 Jews in 1897, 454 in 1920 and 455 in 1923; by 1940 it records only 50 to 70 Jewish families. Between those dates came war, the Russian authorities’ 1915 expulsions from western border provinces, refugee movement and emigration. The Museum “Jews in Latvia” describes that upheaval. The contraction is real; those figures alone do not prove its cause.

What they do establish is that Palanga’s Jews were not incidental observers in somebody else’s town. Kapenieks even cites a 1921 Latvian description that reduced the ethnic geography to a blunt formula: Sventoji was Latvian, the countryside Lithuanian, and the town of Palanga Jewish.

The settlement and the Jews inside it

The legal instrument matters because it tells us what the arbitrators were supposed to consider. The September 28, 1920 convention appears in the League of Nations Treaty Series, vol. II, No. 68, pp. 233-235, registered December 16, 1920. Article 3 required the commission to consider ethnographic and historical principles, each state’s military, strategic, economic and transit interests, and “the interests of the local population.” A Cambridge International Law Journal analysis places the award in that broader legal setting.

The dispute was not entirely genteel. In September 1920 Latvian and Lithuanian troops confronted one another around Subate; shots were fired, a Lithuanian soldier was killed and others were wounded, according to Latvia’s official legal-information portal.

But Subate cannot be reduced to a military incident. In 1920 it had about 1,400 residents, 533 of them Jews – 38 percent. The Yad Vashem community encyclopedia in JewishGen describes houses of prayer, welfare institutions, a Jewish school, Zionist activity and a community heavily involved in trade. Jews in nearby Akniste even used Subate’s Jewish loan-and-savings institution.

In 1941 the remaining Jews of Subate, together with Jewish refugees from Lithuania, were murdered outside the town. The community account says children were killed first in sight of their parents. Yahad-In Unum identifies members of the Death Battalion from Ilukste among the executioners. A national history that remembers Subate because Latvia and Lithuania nearly fought there, but forgets that more than a third of the town was Jewish, reproduces the distortion this article is about.

Why might Palanga’s Jews have preferred Latvia?

The safest answer is still Kapenieks’s: their commercial and social world was tied northward to Courland and Liepaja; they trusted the Latvian administration and were skeptical of the Lithuanian one. We do not need to pretend they foresaw 1941.

There was also a contemporary institutional contrast. Independent Latvia’s 1919 minority-school system gave minorities substantial educational autonomy, and Jewish political life included elected representatives and publicly supported schools. The Museum “Jews in Latvia” and YIVO describe that early framework.

Lithuania was making large promises of its own. On August 5, 1919, its delegation at the Paris Peace Conference sent a declaration on Jewish rights to the Comité des Délégations Juives. It promised equality before law, use of Jewish languages, control of religious, educational and social institutions, and an equitable share of public funds. I have written separately about the autonomy system that followed.

Ruth Leiserowitz, in “The Jewish Contribution to Lithuanian Independence 1918/1919”, Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis 38 (2019), pp. 153-162, records the reciprocity directly. Shimshon Rosenbaum drafted the declaration for the Lithuanian delegation. Leiserowitz describes the arrangement as quid pro quo: Lithuania promised broad Jewish autonomy and, in return, the Comité promised to support the Lithuanian delegation at the Peace Conference. She concludes that Jewish support improved Lithuania’s international position and helped its effort to secure recognition. I have also written separately about Jewish service in Lithuania’s independence struggle.

None of that proves Jewish diplomatic support caused Simpson to award Palanga to Lithuania. I cannot prove that, and I will not claim it. What the chronology does show is that Lithuania made the autonomy promise in 1919; Jewish diplomatic support was given in return; Lithuania received Palanga in 1921; and within three years the central institutions created under that promise were being dismantled.

The dates matter because they answer the claim that the Jewish preference for Latvia looks meaningful only in hindsight. On December 24, 1923, JTA reported that the “National Assembly” – its English rendering of the Seimas – rejected continued funding for the Ministry for Jewish Affairs. Rosenbaum resigned; his resignation was finally accepted in February 1924. On March 19, JTA reported abolition of the Jewish minister’s cabinet post. In September police dispersed the Jewish National Council: its own statement, reported by JTA, gives September 16, while YIVO gives September 17. The one-day discrepancy does not change the event. A Vilnius University study by Raimundas Valkauskas says the autonomy structures were tolerated through the end of 1922 and abolished by political decisions in 1923–1925.

The retreat did not occur in a social vacuum. The Lithuanian Jewish Community records blood-libel accusations at Sveksna in 1922 and Linkuva in 1924, and attacks on Jewish institutions in September 1923 that injured twenty Jews. These events do not prove why Palanga’s Jews petitioned for Latvia. They do make it impossible to narrate the early 1920s as an unbroken Lithuanian success in minority protection.

The comparison with Latvia must stop where the evidence stops. Latvia was not a Jewish haven. Antisemitism existed there, and after Karlis Ulmanis’s 1934 coup minority political and cultural autonomy was sharply restricted. But Latvia’s minority-school autonomy survived until that authoritarian turn. Lithuania’s central Jewish national-autonomy institutions had been dismantled a decade earlier. That is a documented difference in interwar state conduct – exactly the kind of difference a trading community on a disputed frontier could assess in real time.

Akniste prevents any romance about Latvia

My grandfather is the reason I cannot turn this history into praise of Latvia. Akniste, placed on the Latvian side by the same settlement, became a killing place for its Jews. The Center for Jewish Art records that about 150 to 170 Jews were confined in the Hotel Austrija; on July 18, 1941, part were murdered in the hotel yard by the Ilukste self-defence unit and others were taken to the outskirts and shot. Subate lay in the same Ilukste district.

Yahad-In Unum independently records two killing sites and 175 victims. Its historical note says the Jews were rounded up by the local Self-Defense unit and that the shootings were carried out by members of the Akniste unit together with men who had arrived from Ilukste. Ilukste personnel therefore appear in the killing records of both Subate and Akniste, without requiring any claim that the same individuals acted in both towns.

My grandfathers family was murdered at Akniste. There is no Latvian innocence available to me. The point is narrower: when Palanga’s Jews assessed the two new governments during the border dispute, the surviving scholarly record says they asked for Latvia. What Latvia later became does not erase what they said in 1919-1921.

Palanga’s official memory contains both stories – separately

This is where Lithuania’s own public record becomes hardest to read. Palanga’s municipality celebrates the centenary of the town’s “return to Lithuania.” The city’s tourism service separately records that on October 11-12, 1941, Jewish women, children and elderly people were taken from the temporary ghetto and murdered at Kunigiskiai; it says Kretinga County, Palanga District and Palanga City police carried out the massacre under SD and Gestapo orders.

Those two municipal narratives belong together. The municipality celebrates Palanga’s return to Lithuania; Palanga’s own tourism site records Palanga City police among the forces that murdered the town’s Jewish women, children and elderly. The juxtaposition is not imported polemic. It is Palanga’s public record confronting itself.

The October massacre was not the whole destruction. A Palanga cultural-heritage page records mass killings on June 27 and October 12 and says more than 400 members of the Palanga Jewish community were murdered. JewishGen separately describes the earlier separation and murder of Jewish men and the later murder of women and children.

Nor does the attribution come only from outside critics. Alfredas Rukšėnas published “Holocaust in Lithuania: Annihilation of the Jewish Communities of Palanga and Darbėnai Rural Areas of Kretinga County in Summer and Autumn 1941” in Genocidas ir rezistencija. The journal’s About page identifies it as published by scientists of the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania. Rukšėnas’s abstract describes cooperation between German authorities and the Tilsit operational squad, and Lithuanian institutions including the Security Police, public police and auxiliary police. In the Palanga rural area alone, it identifies 51 people as contributors to the genocide, 15 of them directly.

Put the sources beside one another and the commemorative story changes character. Lithuanian scholarship records that Palanga’s Jews asked for Latvia. Palanga celebrates the territorial acquisition. Its own public record acknowledges local police participation in murdering the Jewish community. A journal published by Lithuania’s Genocide Centre records Lithuanian institutional participation in the annihilation. The evidence is not hidden. It is simply rarely required to confront itself.

The border award did not cause the Holocaust. That would be ahistorical. The connection is memory: who gets remembered as a political subject when a state tells the story of territory it gained?

The question that remains

National histories are comfortable counting Jews. They are less comfortable letting Jews testify politically. Palanga’s Jews were not scenery in a Lithuanian-Latvian dispute. They had businesses, schools, families, regional ties and a judgment about which government they preferred. They put that judgment into the record before diplomats drew the line over them.

Subate’s Jews deserve the same restoration to the map. They were 38 percent of that town in 1920, not an annotation beneath a military skirmish. Akniste’s Jews were not merely residents of territory transferred to Latvia. These were communities living inside the border question.

Nor is this a story of Lithuanian concealment. The more disturbing point is that Lithuania has preserved much of the evidence itself: scholarship publishes the Jewish preference for Latvia and the dismantling of Jewish autonomy; Palanga’s websites record both territorial triumph and local police participation in murder; a journal published by the Genocide Centre records Lithuanian institutional participation in annihilation. The evidence can sit in plain sight while the commemorative story proceeds around it.

Palanga’s Jews asked for Latvia. Lithuania received Palanga. Akniste became Latvia, and my grandfathers family was murdered there. Neither state emerges innocent from what followed. But the Jews of 1921 are entitled to have their own judgment restored to the history of the border drawn over them.