The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945

Pre-1939: Oszmiana (Yiddish: Oshmene), town, Wilno województwo, Poland; 1939–1941: Oshmiany, raion center, Vileika oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Aschmena, initially Rayon center, Gebiet Wilejka, Generalkommissariat Weissruthenien, then from April 1, 1942, Kreis center, Gebiet Wilna-Land, Generalkommissariat Litauen; post-1991: Ashmiany, Hrodna voblasts’, Republic of Belarus

Oszmiana is located about 56 kilometers (35 miles) southeast of Wilno. On the eve of World War II, there were about 3,000 Jews living in Oszmiana.

German armed forces occupied the town on June 25, 1941. Because the town was captured so quickly, most Jews were unable to evacuate, and almost all remained in Oszmiana under the occupation.

After about two weeks, the new authorities rounded up about 40 people, both Jews and Poles, accused of having collaborated with the Soviet authorities, and shot them.¹ On July 25, 1941, the Jewish Council (Judenrat) was ordered to supply a list of all male Jews aged between 17 and 65. The next day, on the basis of this list, a detachment of Einsatzkommando 9 rounded up almost all the adult male Jews in Oszmiana. According to the relevant Einsatzgruppen report, 527 people were shot. The victims were buried in the nearby village of Bartel.²

In the summer of 1941, the town was run by a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur). In September 1941, authority was transferred to a German civil administration. Oszmiana initially was part of Gebiet Wilejka in Generalkommissariat Weissruthenien. The German authorities introduced a series of anti-Jewish measures in Oszmiana, including the appointment of a Jewish Council, with eight [End Page 1098] members; the marking of Jews by requiring yellow Stars of David on their outer clothing; and the use of Jews for forced labor. Jews were forbidden to leave the town limits or to have any dealings with non-Jews.

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Exterior of the Oszmiana synagogue, photographed in the mid-1990s.

USHMM WS #97259, COURTESY OF JACK KAGAN

In early October (or, according to one source, early September) 1941, on German orders, all the town’s Jews were moved into a ghetto, along with those from the surrounding villages. The Jews were able to move their property into the ghetto in an orderly fashion, but some chose to give items to non-Jewish acquaintances for safekeeping. Those Jews already living inside the designated ghetto area had to take in those forced to move in from outside. The ghetto was fenced and guarded by the local police. Jews working outside the ghetto required permits in order to leave.³ On one occasion the Germans demanded that the holy books be burned, and a few old books were burned to satisfy them. In the ghetto, a number of newborn boys were circumcised by a mohel, who came from Wilno to perform the service.⁴

Living conditions in the ghetto were overcrowded, and there was a shortage of food. Jews leaving the ghetto on work details were able to barter clothing and other items of property with non-Jews and smuggle the food back into the ghetto. Some Jews, especially youths, also climbed over the ghetto fence at night to obtain food.⁵

In the fall of 1941, the German commandant arrested and shot two Jewish women, alleged to have participated in Soviet activities before the German invasion, and a girl caught not wearing her armband. Another woman was arrested for trading illegally with a non-Jew, and the commandant had her shot.⁶ The German authorities imposed repeated “contributions” on the Judenrat, including one demand for 200,000 rubles, of which only 64,000 were collected. Other demands were for soap, perfumes, fur clothing, and textiles. The Jews were also forced to surrender their cows and other livestock, apart from 10 cows needed to provide milk for the sick and children. Jews who entered the ghetto illegally from other places were also shot upon capture. However, with the help of a bribe to the Polish mayor (at that time, Skrzat), the Judenrat managed to prepare a new list of residents when the German commandant was replaced, which served to legitimize around 200 Lithuanian refugees.⁷

From April 1, 1942, Oszmiana became part of Gebiet Wilna-Land, now in Generalkommissariat Litauen. At this time new Lithuanian officials were appointed to take over, including Jonas Valys as head of the administration in Oszmiana and Vincas Tiknys as head of police.⁸ Just before the handover, around 120 Jews took the opportunity to be transferred to a labor camp at Mołodeczno (in Generalkommissariat Weissruthenien). They, like others, were anxious about what would happen once the Lithuanians took over, as almost all the provincial Jews in Generalkommissariat Litauen had already been killed. The new Gebietskommissar, Horst Wulff, in Wilno ordered the surrender of precious metals and other valuables, which had raised the sum of 26,546 Reichsmark by April 20.⁹

At the end of May, 1,849 Jews were registered in the Oszmiana ghetto.¹⁰ In August 1942, 80 Jewish men and 200

Jewish women were sent to a labor camp in Lithuania.¹¹ In the late summer or fall of 1942, there were 1,649 Jews reported to be in the Oszmiana ghetto, of which 702 were deployed for labor. By mid-October most of the remaining Jews from Holszany, Smorgonie, Krewo, Żuprany, and Soly had been resettled into the Oszmiana ghetto, increasing the total number of Jews there to around 4,000. This influx exacerbated overcrowding, such that about 20 people had to share a single house.¹²

The German Security Police, believing there were too many Jews in the ghetto, instructed the Jewish Police from the Wilno ghetto to select 1,500 people for liquidation, including women whose husbands had been shot in 1941 and women who had four or five children. They sent the chief of the Jewish Police, Dessler, to Oszmiana, and he determined that, first, the women who had lost their husbands in 1941 were working and therefore could not be liquidated and that, second, there were no families with four or five children; at most there were two children in a family. Therefore, after Dessler’s return to Wilno, the number of Jews subject to liquidation was decreased to 800, and when Jakob Gens, head of the Judenrat in the Wilno ghetto, and SS-Hauptscharführer Martin Weiss from the SD Wilna arrived in Oszmiana, the number of Jewish victims was further reduced to 600. As a result, on October 23, 1942, with the participation of the Jewish Police from Wilno, 406 elderly people were rounded up and shot.¹³

In the following five months, life in the ghetto of Oszmiana was comparatively uneventful. The Jewish administration managed to organize the work of the craftsmen, a clinic, and a small hospital; ensured that the ghetto inhabitants had a regular supply of food; and set up a library, a club, a bath, and a boarding house for Jewish workers whose health had deteriorated.¹⁴

The situation altered sharply in late March 1943, when the decision was made to liquidate the ghetto. During its liquidation in late March and early April 1943, some of the Jews were sent to labor camps in Lithuania and to the ghetto in Wilno, if they had relatives there, and 713 Jews, together with Jews from other liquidated ghettos (around 4,000 in total), were taken to Ponary, near Wilno, and shot there.¹⁵

According to Shalom Cholawsky, there was an underground organization in Oszmiana that received a warning from the resistance movement in Wilno about the upcoming liquidation. As a result a group of about 50 Jewish youths, armed with two rifles and two grenades, managed to escape from the ghetto on the eve of the Aktion. Of this group, about 40 people subsequently joined up with partisan units to the east in the Belorussian forests.