ŻABINKA
Pre-1939: Żabinka, village, województwo poleskie, Poland; 1939–1941 and 1944–1990: Zhabinka, raion center, Brest oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Shabinka, Rayon center, Gebiet Brest-Litowsk, Generalkommissariat Wolhynien und Podolien; post-1991: Zhabinka, Beras’tse voblasts’, Republic of Belarus
Żabinka is located about 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) east-northeast of Brześć. According to the 1921 population census, [End Page 1502] 445 Jews were living in Żabinka (73 percent of the total population). In the middle of 1941, allowing for an annual growth rate of around 0.9 percent per year, there were probably just over 500 Jews in Żabinka.
German forces occupied Żabinka on June 23, 1941. Shortly after their arrival, according to witnesses, a German tank destroyed the synagogue.1
In the period from late June until August 1941, a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) ran the village. In September 1941, authority passed to a German civil administration. Rayon Shabinka was initially incorporated into Gebiet Kobryn; then as of December 1, 1941, it became a Rayon center within Gebiet Brest-Litowsk, in Generalkommissariat Wolhynien und Podolien.
In the summer and fall of 1941, the German authorities introduced a series of anti-Jewish measures in Żabinka. Jews were ordered to mark their clothes with the Star of David and later with yellow circles. They were forced to perform forced labor, forbidden to leave the limits of the village, and subjected to systematic robbery and beatings by the local police.
No eyewitness accounts by Jewish survivors from Żabinka are available, but according to the book Pamiatniki genotsida evreev Belarusi by Marat Botvinnik, a ghetto was established in Żabinka before the end of 1941. The local history work Pamiats’. Zhabinkausky raen indicates that the enclosure of the ghetto “only with gates” meant that the Jews were able to exchange their possessions for food with local inhabitants across the boundary of the ghetto. The German administration also forced the Jews to pay heavy “contributions” in the form of gold and jewels, promising them in exchange that they would be able to live.2
In March 1942, the occupying authorities conducted a census in Gebiet Brest-Litowsk. According to the results, reported by the Gebietskommissar in Brześć, there were 26,465 people living in Rayon Shabinka, including 676 Jews. The same report noted that in the Gebiet, Jews had been collected into ghettos and that the Jews from the villages had been resettled into the larger places.3
Responsible for security in Żabinka was a Gendarmerie post consisting of four Gendarmes, subordinated to the Gendarmerie Gebietsführer in Brześć, Bezirks-Leutnant der Gendarmerie Ernst Deuerlein. The Gendarmerie in turn was in charge of a local police unit (Schutzmannschaft), which in September 1942 consisted of 56 men.4
Conflicting accounts are available on the fate of the Jews of Żabinka. According to the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), the ghetto was liquidated in July 1942, when 339 Jews were transported to Małoryta and killed there together with the Jews of the Małoryta ghetto.5 The book by Marat Botvinnik, however, indicates that on September 27, 1942, the Germans and local police rounded up several hundred Jews from the ghetto in Żabinka, mostly women, children, and the elderly. The Jews were escorted to a ditch at the Jewish cemetery, where they had to remove their clothing and shoes, and then were shot. In total, about 360 people were killed on that day. According to Pinkas ha-kehilot, on the other hand, the Jews of Żabinka were conveyed by rail to the Nazi mass killing site at Bronna Góra, where the Jews from Brześć and several other towns in the region were murdered in the fall of 1942 (Żabinka lies directly on the rail line from Brześć to Bronna Góra).
Following the liquidation of the ghetto, a Jewish labor camp containing about 100 Jews was set up in Żabinka. It was liquidated on October 21, 1942, when German police of the 10th Company of Police Regiment 15 shot all the remaining Jews.6
Some of the Jews were saved owing to the help of local residents. A Polish woman named Floria Budishevskaia hid a 12-year-old boy named Roma Levin and his friend Sonia Fefer in her own home. In June 1944, the local police arrested and killed Fefer. Levin was able to escape. Budishevskaia herself was arrested and shot in Brześć for hiding Jews.7
SOURCES
Sparse information on the fate of the Jewish community of Żabinka during World War II can be found in the following publications: Shmuel Spector, ed., Pinkas ha-kehilot. Encyclopaedia of Jewish Communities: Poland, vol. 5, Volhynia and Polesie (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1990), pp. 250–251; Marat Botvinnik, Pamiatniki genotsida evreev Belarusi (Minsk: Belaruskaia Navuka, 2000), pp. 114, 125; Rossiiskaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia (Moscow: Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Jewish Encyclopedia Research Center, “Epos,” 2000), 4:435; Pamiats’. Zhabinkausky raen (Minsk, 1999), p. 238.
Documents about the persecution and murder of the Jews in Żabinka can be found in the following archives: AUKGBRBBO; BA-BL (R 94/7); GARF (7021-83-15); NARA; NARB; and YVA.
NOTES
1. Pamiats’. Zhabinkausky raen, p. 238.
2. Ibid.
3. BA-BL, R 94/7, report of Gebietskommissar Brest-Litowsk, March 24, 1942; also available at NARA, RG-242, T-454, reel 102.
4. BA-BL, R 94/7, report of Gendarmerie Gebietsführer Brest-Litowsk, September 5, 1942.
5. GARF, 7021-83-15, p. 6.
6. Ibid., 7021-148-2, report of the 10th Company of Police Regiment 15, October 26, 1942. The company shot 461 Jews on that day at the Organisation Todt (OT) camp on the Brześć-Kobryń road, on the “state properties” of Zaderz and Petrowicze, and also in Żabinka. The OT camp apparently was located in the village of Chodosy (on the Brześć-Kobryń road to the southeast of Żabinka). In this camp, 196 Jews were killed. In October 2004, a monument was placed at the grave site.
7. I. Al’tman, Zhertvy nenavisti: Kholokost SSSR 1941–1945 gg. (Moscow, 2002), p. 443.
