Obj. ID: 50163
Memorials Holocaust Memorial in the Ančupāni Hills near Rēzekne, Latvia, 1973
Official name
Māte ābele (Mother Apple Tree)
Who is commemorated?
Victims of the Nazis from Rēzekne and other settlement, including Jews, killed on this site.
Description
The memorial consists of two parts. The lower part called the Valley of Death, is a long paved pathway along a low stone wall on the left-hand side and a green lawn on the right-hand side. In its middle, there is a low granite block serving as a symbolic tomb. The pathway brings to a concrete wall with the words of the Latvian writer Miervalda Birzes ( (1921-2000) "They died so that you could live". In its center, there is a large entrance opening through which a visitor accesses a wide staircase leading to the upper part of the memorial called the Life Square. It is a large paved square. The "Mother Apple Tree" by the sculptor Rasa Kalniņa-Grīnbeg and the landscape architect Alfons Ķiškis is installed in the northeastern part of the square. It presents a figure of a woman with long hair. She holds a child in her right hand, and an apple in her raised left hand.
Inscriptions
In Latvian:
Vini mira,
lai dzīvotu tu
Translation: They died so you could live
Commissioned by
Authorities of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic
sub-set tree: 
The troops of Nazi Germany entered Rēzekne on July 3, 1941. The first murders of Jews took place already on the following day. A week later, for propaganda purposes, a group of Jews was ordered to unearth Latvians killed by the retreating Soviets. After that, regular shootings of Jewish inhabitants began in the Jewish cemetery, lasting during the first two weeks of August 1941.
The shootings of Jews in the Ančupāni Hill, mainly women and children, took place from August 23 to November 1941. During this period, several thousand people were killed – Jews and people of other ethnicities from Rēzekne and its vicinity.
A memorial was unveiled in the Ančupāni Hills in 1973. The architect of the memorial is Alfons Kišķis, and the author of the central sculpture “Mother Apple Tree” is sculptor Rasa Kalniņa–Grīnberga.
Renovation of the memorial was made in 2012, for the planned total cost of 79,000 Latvian Lats, 90% of which were covered by the European Union. Reconstruction works, including the building of a parking lot, were carried out by SIA "Asko AS."
Barkahan, Menahem, Rita Bogdanova, Meier Meler, Latvia: Synagogues, Jewish Cemeteries, Burial Places of the Holocaust Victims. Map of Memorable Places of Jewish History (Riga, 2005).
Ezergailis, A., The Holocaust in Latvia, 1941-1944: The Missing Center (Riga: The Historical Institute of Latvia; Washington, DC: US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1996)
"Holocaust Memorial Places in Latvia," a website by the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Latvia, http://memorialplaces.lu.lv/memorial-places/latgale/rezekne-municipality-the-ancupani-hills/.
Meler, Meyer, Jewish Latvia: Sites to Remember (Tel-Aviv: Association of Latvian and Estonian Jews in Israel, 2013), p. 280.
Meler, Meyer, Mesta nashei pamiati: Evreiskie obshchiny Latvii, unichtozhennye v Kholokoste (Riga: by the author, 2010), p. 308.