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

Pre-1939: Pińsk, city and powiat capital, województwo poleskie, Poland; 1939–1941: Pinsk, oblast’ capital, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Rayon and Gebiet center, Generalkommissariat Wolhynien und Podolien; post-1991: raen center, Beras’tse voblasts’, Republic of Belarus

Pińsk is located at the confluence of the Pina and Pripet Rivers, 222 kilometers (138 miles) south-southwest of Minsk.

The Soviet army occupied Pińsk on September 20, 1939, in accordance with the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

On Friday, July 4, 1941, 13 days after Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, the first advance units entered Pińsk. According to German estimates, Pińsk had around 80,000 inhabitants, of whom 35,000 to 40,000 were Jews.¹ This estimate is probably too high, however. The historian Tikva Fatal-Knaani suggests a lower figure of about 26,000 Jews.

Immediately upon the German arrival, Jewish men were seized in the streets and arrested as “Bolshevists,” “looters,” and “partisans,” including 16 young men who were taken out of their houses on Listovskaia Street under false pretenses and subsequently shot and buried. Only 1 of them survived by hiding, wounded, under a pile of dead bodies, and reported the events to town leaders. Antisemitic decrees made normal life impossible. On the second day of the occupation, Jewish bakeries were required to supply bread for the German army under threat of the execution of 10 Jews for each missing loaf of bread. Survivors testified that Jews were forbidden to leave the city or to be seen on the streets after 6:00 p.m. or to shop in the marketplace. All Jewish men, women, and children were ordered to wear a white armband with a Star of David on their left arm; noncompliance was punishable by death. German soldiers entered homes at will and engaged in spontaneous looting. Later, there were frequent official demands for items such as radios, clothing, fur coats, fabric, gold, and china. Each requisition order carried threats of reprisal. Men were often abducted for labor details and hence avoided the streets. Those abducted returned starving after a long hard day, often bruised from beatings. Jews were afraid to go to synagogues. The streets emptied, and shops, offices, and schools closed. The Tarbut High School was used to accommodate German staff. Those working in free professions lost their livelihood, and only factory and some workshop workers received work permits.²

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A view of Pińsk during World War I; the photo caption reads, “Russian Jews fish on the frozen Pina.”

USHMM WS #48262, COURTESY OF TOMASZ WISNIEWSKI,

Christian inhabitants welcomed the end of Soviet rule and greeted the Germans with bread, salt, and flowers, while Jews watched in fear behind closed shutters. Many in the non-Jewish population collaborated with the occupation forces and observed the altered status of their Jewish neighbors with glee. Non-Jews in Pińsk did their share of looting. Soon the Nazis forbade all contacts between Jewish and Christian residents of Pińsk.

On July 30, 1941, the Ortskommandant issued an order to establish a Jewish Council (Judenrat) consisting of 24 Jews, whose chairman was personally responsible for receiving orders and guaranteeing their “conscientious and timely implementation.”³ David Alper, principal of Tarbut High School, was chosen as first chairman of the Judenrat. He resigned two days later, realizing the nature of his task, and was killed along with 20 other Judenrat members during the first Aktion. The remaining 8 members of the Judenrat continued in this capacity until the end. Vice-chairman Motl Minsky served as acting chair because of his fluent German. Benjamin Bokshtansky was nominal chairman; Efraim Feinbron was responsible for finance; Menahem Goldman, for legal affairs; Mendl Cooper, for labor; and Moshel Aizenberg, Jechiel Zilverblat, and Meir Greenstein, for supplies. The Judenrat was organized into departments providing basic services, such as labor, sanitation, health, judiciary, supplies, and welfare. After the establishment of the ghetto, the Judenrat operated a soup kitchen and the Chevra Kadisha burial society. The Judenrat’s main source of income was a bread tax, used to comply with German demands, pay salaries of employees, and provide social services. Many documents in the State Archives of the Brest Oblast’ (GABO) record the Judenrat’s per sis tent negotiations to establish bakeries, increase the flour supply, and secure bread for the orphanage and hospital.

The Jewish Police maintained order, especially around the Tarbut school, where the Judenrat offices were located and thousands of people converged to arrange their affairs. The chief of police (Asher Feldlait, later replaced by Goldberg) and 12 policemen were paid by the Judenrat. After the establishment of the ghetto, the number of policemen grew to 50. On the whole, witnesses did not recall them as cruel or abusive.

On the night of August 4, 300 men were detained as hostages to force the Judenrat to comply with the order to assemble all men between 16 and 60 for a three-day work detail. Thousands of men were herded to the railway station, robbed [End Page 1442] of their belongings, and arranged in two long columns of 5 abreast. They were forced almost to run to Posenichi, an hour march outside Pińsk. Photos of this Aktion taken by a German soldier show the bodies fully dressed in open pits.⁴ A small number escaped after being wounded and buried alive under dead bodies in the pits. One survivor, Arye Dolinko, informed the Judenrat, but this information was kept quiet to avoid endangering escapees and living witnesses.⁵ During the next two days, the Nazis rounded up more Jews, including younger boys and older men as well as some women. On August 7, 2,500 more people were shot in the village of Kozliekovich. By Thursday, August 8, at least 8,000 people had been murdered, and the community’s leadership was especially hard-hit. Most cultural, educational, and religious activities came to a halt. The vast majority of the survivors were women and children. Abruptly, the 2nd SS-Cavalry Regiment left Pińsk on August 9.⁶

On August 11, the Ortskommandant decreed forced labor (“without wages … food may be given”)⁷ for all men between 14 and 60 and all women between 15 and 50. The German civil administration arrived in Pińsk during September 1941. The first Gebietskommissar was Römpler. Upon his death in late 1941, he was replaced by Paul Gerhard Klein; the deputy Gebietskommissar was Alfred Ebner. During the winter of 1941–1942, the community’s members suffered from hunger, looting, and summary murders, but remained in their homes.

The German authorities did not establish a ghetto in Pińsk until relatively late, that is, on May 1, 1942.⁸ On April 30, the Jews were ordered to move to the ghetto within 24 hours. Few belongings were permitted, although people brought more than was officially permitted. Non-Jewish neighbors took advantage of this sudden evacuation to steal and loot. The assigned area was the poorest and most crowded part of town, shaped roughly like a rectangle. It was enclosed by a barbed-wire fence measuring 2,345 meters (1.5 miles) in length and had three gates.⁹ The ghetto contained 240 wooden, one-story houses on 23 streets, with only two water pumps. The allocation of living space per person was about 1.2 square meters (almost 13 square feet), and each room was occupied by at least 10 people.¹⁰ Health conditions deteriorated drastically, and documents from the Jewish clinic and the Gebietskommissariat health department record dysentery, typhus, and starvation-related illnesses.¹¹

A list of ghetto inhabitants compiled by German authorities registered nearly 18,300 people by surname, given name, date of birth, street address, and occupation. Statistical analysis shows that men over the age of 15 made up 14 percent of the ghetto population; women over 15, 50 percent; and children, 36 percent. A total of 5,112 people were listed with workplaces: of these, 1,944 were men, and 3,168 (62 percent) were women. There were 44 distinct places of employment for ghetto workers. The Judenrat employed 1,175 people in its diverse departments. There were 999 workers who provided services to the Germans, while another 1,284 supplied the city’s residents with goods and services; among them, 364 women worked in Christian households. Another 859 people labored in factories and lumber mills, and 795 in various workshops.¹²

The Judenrat offices moved to the ghetto and operated several stores to distribute daily food rations. Judenrat workers on payroll raised vegetables in a lot near the Judenrat building. Bakers were allowed a weekly excursion to bring in flour, and they often smuggled in an extra quantity, to be sold as black market bread.¹³

Some people from Pińsk joined the partisans; however, no significant military resistance is recorded for Pińsk itself. The Judenrat’s members discouraged young people from fighting for fear of reprisals and because they believed German reassurances that work performed in the ghetto was essential and would ensure survival. Although some young people had managed with great difficulty to collect weapons, their plans were postponed until it was too late.¹⁴ Some residents escaped into the swamps of Polesia and tried to join the partisans before the destruction of the ghetto, but many died in the attempt. There was very little assistance from non-Jews in Pińsk, and after the war only 17 Jews are recorded as emerging from hiding in and around Pińsk. A few righ teous non-Jews had risked their own lives to save them.¹⁵

On October 27, 1942, Heinrich Himmler gave the order to “liquidate and destroy the ghetto of Pińsk immediately.”¹⁶ The ghetto in Pińsk was one of the last to be destroyed in Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Preparations, including the digging of pits, had been under way. According to Himmler’s order, 1,000 men were to be kept alive as laborers, but in the end only 60 to 70 men and women survived the massacres between October 29 and November 1, 1942.

The killings are described in Captain Helmut Saur’s “Experience Report.”¹⁷ On October 29, SS and police units arrived in Pińsk at 4:00 a.m. and sealed off the ghetto by 4:13 a.m. Many Jews gathered voluntarily in the streets, still believing that reporting for work might spare their lives. Others tried to break out of the ghetto but were shot trying. Alfred Ebner had prepared a list of 400 workers for the plywood and match factories who would be spared. Captain Saur reports that nearly 10,000 Jews were killed on that first day, but his numbers are ambiguous and can be read as referring to either 16,200 or 26,200 victims. Given the list of residents dated January 1942, a total death toll of 20,000 people by November 1 appears probable.¹⁸ The ghetto was searched four times, and many sick and elderly were killed inside the ghetto. Patients and preselected skilled workers, temporarily housed on hospital grounds, were shot in the hospital yard. All the others were marched to Dobrovalia, a village 5 kilometers (3 miles) outside the ghetto, where a pit 40 meters long, 4 meters deep, and 3 meters wide (131 by 13 by 10 feet) had been dug by local peasants. People were ordered to strip, walk into the pit, and lie facedown on top of the previously murdered; then they were shot in the head.

Those selected for work were held in jail for 11 days and then moved to a new “small ghetto” near the former Karlin Yeshiva building. Approximately 140 people lived there, including some who had survived the massacres in hiding. The medical doctors among this group were selected and killed after being denounced by local non-Jewish doctors. [End Page 1443] People knew their end had come when tailor Leibl Sherman’s workshop stopped receiving new work orders and customers came to pick up their unfinished clothing. On December 23, 1942, the remaining Jews were murdered in the Karlin cemetery.¹⁹

Franz Magill was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for his role in the first killing wave (2 Ks 1/63, LG-Braun).²⁰ Gebietskommissar Paul Gerhard Klein died in 1945. The trial of Kuhr et al. (4 Ks 1/71, LG-Frank) resulted in short prison sentences for members of Police Battalion 306, engaged in the second killing wave, but for medical reasons there was no conviction of deputy Gebietskommissar Alfred Ebner.²¹