GUDOGAJ
Pre-1939: Gudogaj, village, Wilno województwo, Poland; 1939–1941: Gudogai, Vileika oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Gudogaj, initially Rayon Aschmena, Gebiet Wilejka, Generalkommissariat Weissruthenien, then from April 1, 1942, Kreis Aschmena, Gebiet Wilna-Land, Generalkommissariat Litauen; post-1991: Gudagai, Astravets raen, Hrodno voblasts’, Republic of Belarus
Gudogaj is located about 45 kilometers (28 miles) east-southeast of Wilno. Very little information is available regarding the fate of the Jewish population in Gudogaj during the Holocaust. However, evidence of a ghetto there exists in the form of a census of Jews and Jewish laborers conducted by the Arbeitsamt (labor office) for Gebiet Wilna-Land in October 1942. According to this report, there were 104 Jewish men, women, and children at that time in the Gudogaj ghetto, of which 64 were deployed for labor tasks there.1 The nature of this small ghetto may have been such that it was more of a labor camp, like the remnant ghetto in nearby Ostrowiec, but it appears also to have included the families of the workers.
Jewish survivor Julius Bastowski also mentions the existence of a ghetto in Gudogaj. He reports that the Jews were required to perform forced labor and that he observed trains passing through Gudogaj, which had a small railway station. The trains were packed with people jammed tightly together. The trains came from the southeast and were headed for Wilno. People on the trains were dying, and corpses were thrown out from the trains. Bastowski and parts of his family were assisted in obtaining false papers, and he managed to survive until the arrival of the Red Army in 1944.2
In October 1942, the German authorities in Generalkommissariat Litauen ordered the liquidation of the small ghettos in the region to the east of Wilno, concentrating their inhabitants in four ghettos: Oszmiana, Święciany, Michaliszki, and Soly. According to the diary of Kazimierz Sakowicz, Hirsh Berkowski, a Jew from Gudogaj, was among those murdered at Paneriai in April 1943.3 Presumably some of the Jews from Gudogaj were transferred to Oszmiana in the fall of 1942 or thereafter and shared the fate of the Jews in the other ghettos of the region, some of whom were sent to Paneriai to be shot [End Page 1054] at the time of the Oszmiana ghetto’s liquidation in late March and early April 1943.4
SOURCES
The existence of a ghetto in Gudogaj is mentioned in the following publication: Wolfgang Curilla, Die deutsche Ordnungspolizei und der Holocaust im Baltikum und in Weissrussland 1941–1944 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2006), p. 325 (spelled here as Gugadei).
Relevant documentation can be found in the following archives: LCVA (R 626-1-211); and VHF (# 1804, Julius Bastowski).
NOTES
1. LCVA, R 626-1-211, p. 18, list of ghettos in Kreis Aschmena, October 1942.
2. VHF, # 1804, testimony of Julius Bastowski. Unfortunately this testimony is difficult to understand, so some reliance has been placed on the notes prepared by VHF indexers.
3. Kazimierz Sakowicz, Ponary Diary, 1941–1943: A Bystander’s Account of Mass Murder (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 79.
4. Yitzhak Arad, Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust (New York: Holocaust Library, 1982), pp. 359–362. Shalom Cholawsky, The Jews of Bielorussia during World War II (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1998), p. 231, also mentions the murder of the Jews from “Gudagei” together with those from the Oszmiana ghetto but dates this erroneously in May 1943.
