יהודים בבלבי – Jews in Balvi

Balvi (Latvian: Balvi) is a town in the eastern part of Tegelia, Latvia. The town has been the administrative center of the county since 1949.

In the mid-1930s, about 400 Jews lived in my heart, close to one-fifth of its inhabitants. Zionist youth movements operated in the town during this period, and a number of Jews immigrated to Israel. In 1940 the town came under Soviet rule.

With the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Soviet authorities evacuated the town, and the German army occupied it. About fifty of the town's Jews managed to escape from it to the east, and about 150 Jewish refugees arrived there.

In mid-July 1941, the Jews of the town and the surrounding villages were concentrated in a ghetto established in a poor neighborhood, which was surrounded by a barbed wire fence. From time to time, there were rapes and murders in the ghetto by Latvian police.

On August 8, 1941, about 500 ghetto Jews were rounded up by the Latvian police, being told that they would be sent to Israel. The Jews of the town were robbed, and then transported in trucks to

pits dug in advance in the forest, where they were shot with machine guns or buried alive.

source: Wikipedia (translated from Hebrew)