Today, the beautiful Smecere Forest is the site of a popular cross-country skiing trail, and BMX track. People flock here from Latvia and abroad to train and compete, giving the place a positive energy. However, the forest has a dark past. In 1941, when the Nazi troops arrived in Latvia, and the local Jewish population began to be arrested and annihilated, it was the site of a mass shooting. Approximately 700 hearts stopped beating here.
After the war, the area was marked with a monument to commemorate the “Soviet people who had died in the hands of German occupants and bourgeois nationalists,” but this monument did not survive.
The striking granite monument seen here today in the shape of a skull is the work of sculptor Gvido Buls and was erected in 1993 when Latvia had regained its independence from the Soviet Union. Next to it, the memorial stone states that this is a place to remember the residents of Madona and surroundings who were killed in the summer of 1941 following the arrival of the Nazi soldiers.
