Ghetto in Gorki

According to the 1939 census, 12,475 people lived in Gorki, Jews (2,031 people) made up about 16% of the total population ^[1] .

After the invasion of fascist Germany’s troops on the territory of the USSR, some Jews from Gorki managed to evacuate to the east of the country, some Jewish men were drafted into the Red Army , but the exact number of Jews remaining in the city by the day of the occupation was not established, since in June-July In 1941, there were also several dozen Jewish families from the western regions of Belarus.

On July 12, 1941, Gorki was occupied by German troops , and the occupation lasted almost 3 years - until June 26, 1944 ^[2] .

Already at the end of July 1941 in Gorki, the orders of the German occupiers appeared on the walls of houses, according to which Jews were excluded from life.

They were forbidden to walk on the sidewalks, ride public transport, attend schools, libraries, and engage in all types of professional activities; all values ​​were required to be passed. A six-pointed yellow star had to be worn on the left side of the clothes and in the middle of the back.

The ghetto was created in early August 1941 within the borders of the streets of Mstislavskaya and part of the International. The ghetto was led by a Judenrat , whose duty was to register Jews - one of the activities of the invaders, which provided complete information about the Jews of Gorki. In addition, Judenrat was engaged in the distribution of work. As witness Dina Rysina recalls: “There was a Jewish committee. One woman from the committee went to the commandant to be allowed to wash herself in the bathhouse once. The woman was not local, she spoke German. The commandant explained: in a bathhouse where German soldiers wash themselves, Jews have no right to wash themselves in any case. ”

The ghetto was "open type", that is, it was not fenced and not guarded.

The prisoners of the Goretsky ghetto lived in extreme crowding, 8-10 people in a room. Often in one room lived two or three families. Jews had to get food at night, secretly getting out of the ghetto and exchanging things for food.

As Dina Rysina recalls: “Those Jews who left their homes no longer had any property. There was nothing to exchange them for. "Local residents came from Sloboda, they gave something - not in exchange, but rather, usually beets . "

Ghetto dwellers were forced into hard physical labor. They were used in earthworks. Witnesses recall bullying when the Nazis and police harnessed the Jews to a horse harness and drove garbage on them.

In the early days, the Germans banned Jews from practicing medicine except among Jews and allocated a barracks type room near the district hospital in Soldatskaya Slobodka. There worked a therapist Rodina and a dentist Mnukhina.

The ghetto was completely destroyed on October 7, 1941. In the early morning, Belarusian policemen and German soldiers drove the 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 go were driven into cars and taken to the White Stream tract. Two former silos were previously expanded here. Jews were first taken off their clothes and shoes, and then in groups of 100 people were killed with machine guns and machine guns.

According to the memoirs of Valentina Sorokina:

“It was a very windy day. However, despite this, they sent me to my relatives in the village of Zaporozhye. On the way, the policemen caught up on a horse and demanded that I not go up to the pit that the men were digging. After some time, we heard how we fired machine guns and machine guns. From the village it was seen how naked people were brought to the pits and shot them. In the evening, some of the villagers approached the graves. The earth was still moving, moans of the wounded were heard. The graves were guarded by the police and were not allowed to come close. ”

Anna Smolnitskaya during the execution killed her mother, sister and relatives. In 1946, she came to Gorki and found a witness to those events, who told her:

“In the morning of October 7, Nazis and policemen walked around the city to collect Jews. They were ordered to gather in the area of ​​the former club of the institute, taking valuable things. More than 2500 people were gathered, who were brought in groups of 100 to the pits, ordered to undress, and then put on the edge of the pit and fired from machine guns, and if someone remained alive, they were finished with machine guns. Meanwhile, everyone else stood and waited for their turn. Many women turned gray, cried, shouted ... "

On October 7, 1941, more than 2,500 Jews were killed.

Realizing that imminent death was ahead, many Jewish families attempted to hide or flee. Immediately after the war, Mikhail Tseytin, a former resident of Gorok, found out that his relative Sheveleva, together with her daughter, had managed to escape one day before the execution to one of the villages of the Goretsky district. However, they were issued by a policeman. Both were severely beaten, tied to a horse and dragged along the ground by drag and drop to the place of execution.

She made an attempt to save her sons, Raisa Schwartzman, who told her sons Karl and Vladimir to flee. The police saw this and shot the boys.

One type of passive confrontation was the suicide committed by Gregory of Tatar. Before the war, he worked as a doctor in a city clinic. Busy in the evacuation of the wounded and sick, he himself did not have time to leave Gorki. When the Jewish population was driven into the ghetto, he treated people there. The day before the execution, he opened his veins and died.

After the execution on October 7, 1941, the Nazis declared that the territory of Gorki was “ Judenfrey ” - “free from the Jews.” At first, the houses of the murdered Jews were robbed by policemen , and then by local residents. Many even came for this from nearby villages.

At the end of October 1941, the Nazis shot Jews in the village of Vereshchaki and in the town of Lenino, on October 19, 1941 - in the town of Gory, on March 22, 1942 - in the village of Naprasnovka and on March 12, 1943 - in the village of Rudkovschina, Goretsky district.

It is known that the Jew Chernyak spent the whole war in Gorki his wife Olga in the basement of the house. The nearest neighbors knew about it, but did not betray.

Nikolai Okunevich hid his Jewish wife Helen throughout the war.

Survived Vladimir Kudryachev. His aunt Belorussian N.N. Kudryacheva, finding out early in the morning that they would shoot the Jews, came to Vladimir’s mother, took him and took him to another district (they knew in Gorki that she had no children). So Vladimir remained alive, and after the war she adopted him.

Lyubov Lukashinsky’s father was a Jew. The mother, a Belarusian, decided to hide her daughter, but they were both arrested, and a few months later they ended up in the Wittenberg concentration camp . They were lucky, in May 1945, Soviet troops liberated them.

Fira Levina managed to escape. Her son, Ilya Ostrover, recalled that his grandfather, Solomon Levin, was evacuated from the Gorki enterprise in the early days of the war. And grandmother Lynx refused to evacuate and stated that "... the Germans are a cultural nation, and they will not offend us." When the Nazis on October 7, 1941, together with the police, led Rysu to her infant son Ilya and daughter Fira to be shot, Fira managed to escape and escape.

Dina Rysina and her sister Tamarkina managed to escape with the children.

In the early 1960s, at the site of the execution of members of the Jewish community on October 7, 1941, a monument was erected in the tract of the White Stream. In 1995 and 2005 major repairs were made at the memorial.

The names of the deceased are stamped on commemorative plaques installed on the monument “The Grieving Mother” ^[3] , are placed in the book “Pamyat. Gistoryka-dakumentalnaya chronika Goratskaga rayona. "

In Jerusalem, at the Yad Vashem Memorial Museum in the “Valley of Communities,” among the stone-carved names of cities in which Jews were exterminated during the Holocaust , one can read in two languages, Hebrew and English, “Gorki” and “Mountains”.

• Adamushko V.I., Biryukova O.V., Kryuk V.P., Kudryakova G.A. Directory of places of forced detention of civilians in the occupied territory of Belarus 1941-1944. - Mn. : National Archive of the Republic of Belarus, State Committee for Archives and Record Keeping of the Republic of Belarus, 2001. - 158 p. - 2000 copies. - ISBN 985-6372-19-4 .
• “Memory. Gistoryka-dakumentalnaya chronika Goratskaga rayona “. Minsk. 1996.- ISBN 985-06-0180-9
• U. M. Liўshyts, "It Was ў Byasmertse Goratska Ghetta ..." Gorki: Adzel Culture Goratskaga Rayvikankama, 1995. - ISBN 985-6120-06-3
• U. M. Liўshyts, Gorki: Staronkі gіstoryі. Minsk: “Krasiko-print”, 2007. - ISBN 985-405-384-9
• V. M. Livshits Goretskaya Jewish community: pages of history. Nazareth Illit - Hills: 2009
• National Archives of the Republic of Belarus (NARB). - fund 845, inventory 1, d. 56, sheets 230-232 ^[4] ;
• Livshits, Vladimir. Dying, they sang "The International" ... [Text]: (about the Holocaust in the village of Rudkovschina) / V. Livshits // Goratsky Vesnіk. - 2018. - No. 71. 8 season. - S. 7

• L. Smilovitsky . The catastrophe of the Jews in Belarus, 1941-1944. ", Tel Aviv, 2000
• Chernoglazova R. A., Kheer H. The tragedy of the Jews of Belarus in 1941-1944: a collection of materials and documents - Ed. 2nd, rev. and add. - Minsk, 1997 ISBN 985-6279-02-X
• Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before and During the Holocaust. In 3 vol. Volome 1. Washinqton Square. New York, 2000

• V.M. Livshits. People will not come to this ghetto
• V.M. Livshits. Goretsky ghetto has gone into immortality
• V.M. Livshits. Black date in the history of Gorki
• V.M. Livshits. A Short History of the Goretsky Ghetto
• V.M. Ghetto Livshits in the Mountains
• V. M. Livshits "https://horki.info/navina/8832.htmlthe Jewish Jewish community - pages of history"
• Livshits Vladimir Holocaust in Rudkovschina: on the 70th anniversary of the tragic date // http://old.horki.info/content/view/3063/59/
  • Lists of the dead that have been identified