Ghetto in Gorki

In the city of Gorki in the Mogilev region (Belarus), fascists and their accomplices on October 7, 1941, shot more than 2,500 people. They were killed solely because they were Jews. The authorities urged them not to panic and did not evacuate them.

According to the 1939 census, 12,475 people lived in Gorki, with Jews (2,031 people) making up about 16% of the total population. After the start of the Great Patriotic War, some Jews from Gorki managed to evacuate to the eastern part of the country; Jewish men were drafted into the Red Army, but the exact number of Jews remaining in the city by the day of occupation cannot be established, as witnesses reported that about a thousand Jews from the western regions of Belarus were in the city.

On July 12, 1941, Gorki was occupied by German troops, and the occupation lasted until June 26, 1944. At the beginning of July, fighting approached the city. District institutions, enterprises, and the agricultural institute prepared valuable equipment and property for evacuation. However, much could not be taken out because transport was overloaded with troop movements. Only on July 3 and 6, 1941, were two railway echelons sent from Pogodino station. Mainly, students and teachers of the institute and some institutions were evacuated in an organized manner—about 2,000 residents in total. The Hitlerites scattered leaflets: “We are not fighting against peaceful residents. We are fighting against Jews and commissars.” Most people did not believe the fascists and held no malice against Jews, but frightened by these leaflets and rumors that not only Jews but also those who helped them would be destroyed, they did not want to let us into their homes. At best, they would give a little bread and say: “Leave quickly.”

Why was the Jewish population of the city not evacuated? There were several reasons. First, the central Soviet and party authorities did not explain to the local authorities, and they in turn to the Jewish population, the full danger of remaining in the occupied territory.

Until the last days, local party and Soviet workers fervently persuaded and urged the population “not to panic!” and not to leave anywhere.

In our opinion, this happened because the USSR did not have a detailed evacuation plan for the population in case of enemy invasion of the country, and the mechanism for transferring production and human resources to the rear was formed during the war. It was believed that if the war started, it would be fought on foreign territory and with little bloodshed.

When the war began, party and Soviet bodies cared only about evacuating enterprises and institutions, party and Soviet workers and their families. The civilian population as a whole, as facts show, was abandoned to fate. This applied to all nationalities and Jews in particular. But if representatives of other nationalities were not under immediate threat of death, Jews were immediately exterminated by the fascists after occupation.

At the same time, it is known that in the first days of the war, such high-ranking party officials as the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus, Ponomarenko, wrote in a note to Stalin on July 12, 1941: “...the mood of Belarusians is exclusively patriotic... As a conclusion, I must emphasize the exceptional fearlessness, resilience, and implacability toward the enemy of the collective farmers, unlike some of the urban employees who think of nothing but saving their skins. This is explained to some extent by the large Jewish layer in the cities. They were gripped by animal fear of Hitler, and instead of fighting—flight...”

Secondly, many elderly Jews, especially those who had been on German-occupied territory during World War I, believed that they, as peaceful citizens, would not be touched (they recalled the Germans who occupied part of Belarus in 1918). Unfortunately, they were terribly mistaken. These were no longer the same Germans but fascists whose goal was the extermination of the entire Jewish population. Although, as witnesses recall, refugees who arrived in Gorki in the first days of the war told about how the fascists were exterminating Jews.

Revekka Aleyeva recalled that “...in 1939, Polish refugees lived in Gorki. They told about the atrocities of the fascists, but everyone thought that frightened people were exaggerating, that it happened to someone else, and the Red Army would be able to protect its people. We had nothing to fear...”

Among the Jews of Gorki, as among many city residents, there was an opinion that the fascists would be stopped at the Dnieper River line. However, as is known, they were not stopped.

Already on the afternoon of July 12, 1941, the Hitlerites captured the city of Gorki. They immediately established a regime of bloody terror, robbery, and violence against citizens. The once noisy and cheerful student city of Gorki was turned into a city of death and suffering. The first thing the fascists did was to plunder the laboratories and library of the Belarusian Agricultural Institute. The former academic buildings housed the Gestapo and gendarmerie, as well as other military institutions.

The symbol of the new order became four gallows erected in the square near the former administrative building. The occupiers drove townspeople there to intimidate them with the terrible sight of the execution of patriots. On the outskirts of the city, in the garden of the agricultural institute’s experimental farm, trenches were dug that became mass graves of thousands of Soviet citizens. Here the fascists committed a monstrous atrocity, shooting 150 children from an orphanage.

It is known that even before the start of World War II, the fascists developed a plan to seize “living space” for Germans. Russians, Belarusians, Gypsies, Jews... These peoples were to be exterminated completely or partially. As is known, they started with the Jewish people.

By the end of July 1941, orders from the German occupiers appeared on the walls of houses in Gorki, according to which Jews were excluded from life. According to the “Temporary Directive on the Treatment of Jews in the Ostland Territory,” they were forbidden to walk on sidewalks, use public transport, attend schools, libraries, and engage in all kinds of professional activities; they had to surrender all valuables. On the left side of their clothing and in the middle of the back, they had to wear a six-pointed yellow star.

Because many residential houses where the Jewish population of Gorki lived burned down in the first days of occupation, Jews were gathered within the boundaries of Mstislavskaya Street and part of Internatsionalnaya Street, where a ghetto was created.

In this area of Gorki, now Yakubovsky and Sovetskaya streets, the ghetto was organized.

The ghetto was governed by the Judenrat, whose duty was to register Jews. In addition, the Judenrat handled work assignments. As Dina Rysina recalls: “There was some Jewish committee. One woman from the committee went to the commandant to ask permission to wash once in the bathhouse. The woman was not local and spoke German. The commandant explained: in the bathhouse where German soldiers bathe, Jews are not allowed to wash under any circumstances.”

The ghetto was “open type,” meaning it was not fenced or guarded. Prisoners of the Gorki ghetto lived in extreme overcrowding, 8-10 people per room. Often two or three families lived in one room. Jews had to obtain food at night, secretly sneaking out of the ghetto and exchanging goods for food.

As Dina Rysina recalls: “Those Jews who left their homes no longer had any property. They had nothing to exchange. Locals came from Sloboda and gave something—not in exchange, but just like that, usually beets.”

The ghetto inhabitants were forced to do hard physical labor. They were used for earthworks: digging trenches on the former territory of the agricultural academy and clearing houses burned after the bombing of Gorki. Witnesses recall abuses when Nazis and policemen harnessed Jews in horse harnesses and drove them around with garbage.

In the first days, the Germans forbade Jews from practicing medicine. Then they allocated a barrack-type room near the district hospital in Soldatskaya Slobodka. There worked therapist Rodina and dentist Mnukhina. They treated only ghetto prisoners.

Dina Rysina recalled: “...An order was announced for all Jews to appear at the square at the academy for inspection. A German officer with a large whip lined everyone up to stand straight. My daughter did not stand properly, and he hit her with the whip. Then there was a ‘meeting’ for about fifteen minutes, where they told what rights Jews had and did not have—and then everyone was sent home.”

Despite the abuse, people lived with hope that the fascists would not touch them and would leave them alive. They did not know that long before the war, the Hitlerites had developed a plan to exterminate the Jews of the entire world.

...October 7, 1941, arrived. A tragic day in the history of Gorki. On October 6, the fascists took sixteen men and led them to the district of the village of Zadorozhye (also called Bely Ruchey), where two silage pits remained, and ordered them to dig and expand them.

Early in the morning, policemen and German soldiers drove Jews out of their homes. They were beaten with rifle butts and whips and led to the former club of the agricultural institute, and those who could not walk were loaded into trucks and taken to the Bely Ruchey ravine. The Jews were first stripped of clothes and shoes, then killed in groups of 100 by machine guns and submachine guns.

According to the witness Valentina Sorokina: “It was a very windy day. However, despite this, I was sent to relatives in the village of Zadorozhye. On the way, policemen on horseback caught up with me and demanded that I not approach the pit where the men were digging. After a while, we heard machine gun and submachine gun fire. From the village, it was visible how naked people were brought to the pits and shot. By evening, some villagers approached the graves. The earth was still moving; moans of the wounded were heard. The graves were guarded by policemen who did not allow anyone to come close.”

Anna Smolnitskaya lost her mother, sister, and relatives during the shooting. In 1946, she came to Gorki and found a witness to those events who told her: “From the morning of October 7, Nazis and policemen walked around the city gathering Jews. They were ordered to gather near the former institute club, taking valuables. More than 2,500 people were gathered, who were brought in groups of 100 to the pits, ordered to undress, then placed on the edge of the pit and shot with machine guns, and if anyone remained alive, they were finished off with submachine guns. Meanwhile, all the others stood and waited their turn. Many women turned gray, cried, screamed...”

There were mixed families in Gorki. For example, Nizovtsov, who worked as a land surveyor in RAYZO, had a Jewish wife, Elizaveta, and two daughters: Vera (6 years old) and Ella (3 years old). During the shooting, the fascists offered him to leave his family, but he refused, saying: “Where my family goes, I go.”

On October 7, 1941, more than 2,500 Jews were killed. The number of victims exceeds the number of Jews living in Gorki before the Great Patriotic War. As noted above, about one thousand Jews evacuated from the western regions of Belarus and Poland were in Gorki.

Understanding the inevitable death ahead, many Jewish families tried to hide or escape. Immediately after the war, former Gorki resident Mikhail Tseitlin learned that his relative Sheveleva, together with her daughter, managed to escape to one of the villages in the Gorki district a day before the shooting. However, they were betrayed by a policeman. Both were severely beaten, tied to a horse, and dragged on the ground to the execution site.

Raisa Shvartsman tried to save her children by telling her sons Karl and Vladimir to run. Policemen saw this and shot the boys. One form of passive resistance was suicide, which was committed by Grigory Tatarsky. Before the war, he worked as a doctor at the Gorki city polyclinic. Busy evacuating the wounded and sick, he did not manage to leave Gorki. When the Jewish population was driven into the ghetto, he treated people there. A day before the shooting, he slit his veins and died.

It is known that Olga hid the Jew Chernyak in the basement of their house throughout the war. Nikolai Okunevich hid his Jewish wife Elena throughout the war. Neighbors knew about this but did not betray them.

Vladimir Kudryachyov survived. His Belarusian aunt Kudryachyova, learning early in the morning that Jews would be shot, came to Vladimir’s mother, took him, and took him to another district (in Gorki, it was known that she had no children). Thus, Vladimir survived, and after the war, she adopted him.

Lyuba Lukashinskaya’s father was Jewish. Her mother, a Belarusian, decided to hide her daughter, but both were arrested and ended up in the Wittenberg concentration camp a few months later. They were lucky; in May 1945, they were liberated by Soviet troops.

Fira Levina managed to escape. Her son Ilya Ostrover recalled that his grandfather Solomon Levin was evacuated with an enterprise from Gorki in the first days of the war. And grandmother Rysya refused to evacuate, stating that “...the Germans are a cultured nation, and they will not harm us.” When the fascists, together with policemen, led Rysya and her young son Ilya and daughter Fira to the shooting on October 7, 1941, Fira managed to escape and survive.

Dina Rysina and her sister Tamarkina managed to escape with their children: “In the spring of 1941, I sent my children to Gorki. The war caught me in Minsk. With great difficulty, I managed to get out of the burning city and went to the children. Echelons of evacuees were sent from Gorki, and we were offered to go, but the children got sick, and we did not evacuate. Shortly before the arrival of the Germans, my mother took our suitcases to Andreev—the secretary of the city council—because he had a ready horse (he lived on Stolyarnaya Street). We did not find Andreev and had to flee along the road to Lenino.

It was hot. We walked among the rye. German planes flew over us and shot. We fell into the rye. Got up—did not find mother. Probably, she fell under machine gun fire. We reached the town of Kadino. There was nothing to eat. Refugees began to smash cellars with Dutch cheese. The authorities began to issue a head of cheese per family. We went further. Father walked with a stick and led my eldest five-year-old daughter. Professor Nikolaev from the institute offered father to sit in a cart. Father refused—not convenient in front of the family. My sister, the wife of Tamarkin—the assistant prosecutor of the republic for civil affairs—with a one-year-old child was with us. Suddenly, the refugee column was again fired upon, and German planes attacked. Everyone hid in the rye. Refugees wanted to enter the village, but peasants did not let them in. They said refugees were a good target for planes.

At that time, we learned that the Germans were already ahead and decided to return to Gorki. Then a man arrived on a cart and told father: ‘Your wife was found killed on the road. Two women buried her, and by that time, everything had already been taken from her body.’ The man offered to take us to Gorki. Father then had one goal: to find out where mother was buried and reburied her in the Jewish cemetery. We got in and went back. We arrived in Gorki and learned that our house had burned down. The entire Internatsionalnaya Street (formerly Orshanskaya) burned down. Apparently, someone deliberately set fire to the houses and began to loot them. Only a few houses near the bathhouse survived. We went to the last house, where many people were: Gorfinkels—father and mother, Genya Dvoskina, and many others...

Those Jews who left their homes (lived on Mstislavskaya Street but in their own houses) no longer had any property...

...At dawn on October 7, a tall officer burst into our house with a briefcase under his arm, and a terry towel stuck out of the briefcase. Father was taken to the other half of the house. He came to us. My girl—lying on the bed—saw the whip and screamed; he threatened her with the whip. He undressed me, searched for gold. He overturned everything in the room, turned out the nightstand. Father was already taken away, and in general, all the walking ones were taken away. He led us out; we barely had time to dress. I saw a whole crowd coming from Mstislavskaya Hill. Apparently, father was there too.

And they led us to a car standing at the corner of Internatsionalnaya and Malaya Internatsionalnaya streets. A policeman with a white armband guarded us. The fascist went further after his victims. My sister said: what are we going to do, a bullet in the back or in the forehead anyway. There was no one else in the car besides us. We got out of the car; the policeman did not detain us, maybe he felt sorry? We went down to the bathhouse—and suddenly saw that officer again and got scared. But he went into some house, and we headed to our house.

Where to go? We crossed the river and entered the bathhouse guard’s house. His wife was grateful to us for curing her daughter. The old woman said: you cannot stay here; they will shoot us. We went out; there was nowhere to go. We entered a shed. The children squealed—hungry, cold. I went to my house and took things for the children. I brought them—the sister sent me away again. I approached the house and saw that Jews were being beaten in the shoemaker Eyla Minin’s yard. It was dangerous to approach the house, and I returned empty-handed. Then the old woman found us in the shed and raised a fuss: ‘What are you doing to us? They will shoot us!’ We went out. We saw a small bathhouse by the road and decided to hide there. But the bathhouse was locked—we climbed through the window.

The children saw us on the street and shouted: ‘Jude! Jude!’ No one let us into any house. A tail of children followed us, shouting: ‘Jude!’

Classmate Zina Protasova met us.

– “Are you here?” she said. “They will shoot you. You won’t get anywhere. We already knew this yesterday. My husband works at the printing house; they printed posters yesterday.”

She took us to Zarechye, brought us to her home (on Vokzalnaya Street), fed us, gave tea, gave sugar to the children, and led us through the gardens to Mstislavskaya Road. And we went with the children in our arms...”

The shootings were carried out by fascists and local policemen. E. Shapiro, a participant in the Great Patriotic War and brother of writer L. Razgon, was told by witnesses when he arrived in Gorki immediately after the war that among the policemen who participated in the shooting were brothers Boris and Gleb Seleznev, whose father was a doctor in Gorki.

He told L. Razgon that what struck him was that Boris was his close friend, he spent a lot of time in their family, was friends with his sisters, and his mother fed him and repaired his clothes. And yet it was Boris who led and drove them to the shooting.

“Well, can you explain to me why?” he asked the writer. Lev Razgon could not explain why friends turned into sworn enemies in a few months. The author of this article also has no explanation.

It is clear that they were not friends but “befriended” this Jewish family because it was somehow beneficial. And the seeds of anti-Semitism did not manifest until a favorable environment was created.

In general, it should be said that a significant part of the local population of Gorki and the district was indifferent to the death of those who had lived nearby for centuries. We know only a few facts of help to Jewish families in the Gorki district. Although many sympathized with the doomed, they apparently feared helping them, as they well knew that the fascists could shoot anyone who helped Jews.

It is distressing to hear the story of an elderly woman from a nearby village. Talking about the shooting of the Jewish population, she expressed no sympathy but only deeply regretted that when the shooting took place, her daughter was ill, and she could not go to Gorki and take something from the abandoned Jewish houses, which the fascists, after taking valuables, handed over to the local population for looting. Well, there were such people!

Sources:

https://berkovich-zametki.com/2013/Starina/Nomer1/VLivshic1.php

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghetto_in_Gorki_(Goretsky_district)