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

Pre-1941: Rechitsa, town and raion center, Gomel’ oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Retschiza, Rayon and Gebiet center, Generalkommissariat Shitomir; post-1991: Rechytsa, raen center, Homel’ voblasts’, Republic of Belarus

Rechitsa is located 60 kilometers (37 miles) west-southwest of Gomel’. In 1939, the Jewish population of Rechitsa was 7,237 (27.3 percent of the total).

In July and August 1941, at least 4,000 Jews were evacuated from Rechitsa by rail and road, and in barges on the Dniepr River, before the Germans arrived.¹

German military forces occupied the city on August 23, 1941. Initially Rechitsa was administered by a local military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur). In October 1941, the town became the center of Gebiet Retschiza in Generalkommissariat Shitomir. Among the German units based in Rechitsa were detachments of the Sicherheitspolizei (initially Sonderkommando 7b), Geheime Feldpolizei, Feldgendarmerie, and Schutzpolizei. A detachment of Waffen-SS was also based there for a time.² The Germans established a local police station on Vokzal’naia Street, appointing Korzhevskii chief of police. A man named Chalovskii became assistant mayor.³ [End Page 1563]

For the first two months of the occupation, the Jews were allowed to live in their own houses. The former melamed (religious teacher) Malenkovich was ordered to compile a list of the remaining Jews in Rechitsa.⁴ Soon the Germans began taking people away for “work,” and they were never seen again. In September 1941, Sonderkommando 7b reported shooting 216 Jewish men in Rechitsa.⁵ Several individual killings of Jews also occurred during these first weeks.⁶

In November 1941, a new commandant arrived in Rechitsa and declared that he would not take over the town while “kikes and Communists remain alive.”⁷ Shortly after November 20, 1941, the Jews, obeying an order posted throughout the town, gathered at the cultural center, and from there they were sent to two two-story buildings on the grounds of a former prison in the factory area, on the corner of Frunze and Sovetskaia Streets. The Germans set up a prison-style ghetto there. The ghetto territory was surrounded with barbed wire about 2 meters (6.5 feet) high. There was a gate for entering and leaving the area. The prisoners were kept in unusually crowded quarters, with 40 people in each room; this meant that they were forced to stand. In the daytime, when the able-bodied were taken off to work, there was a bit more space available. The ghetto was closely guarded by police.⁸ Also placed in this ghetto were undesirable prisoners of war (POWs), Communists, and Soviet activists, including some non-Jews.⁹ Around 300 prisoners from the “ghetto” were taken away on trucks and shot on November 25.

Some details of this Aktion are known. The policemen told the Jews that they were being taken to pick cabbages and carrots at the kolkhoz. The trucks stopped at the edge of town in the area of the wine distillery, near an antitank ditch dug during the first weeks of the war. Three German officers were in charge of the operation. The Jews realized that they would be shot, and a few tried to run away but were killed by rifle fire. The guards stole whatever they could from the Jews, including earrings, rings, and bracelets. Boris Smilovitskii, before he died, shouted, “Bandits, fascists, you spill our blood now, but remember, the Red Army will win and avenge us!” According to eyewitnesses, the perpetrators were in “a drunken state.”¹⁰

Those Jews who did not appear in response to the order were rounded up by the Germans and the police and placed in the ghetto by December 12. At the same time, Jews from the surrounding villages were brought to Rechitsa. According to Iakov Gutarov, his grandparents were brought to Rechitsa along with other Jews from a nearby settlement and later shot there.¹¹

The details of subsequent mass shootings are unclear, but it appears that the Germans took out groups of Jews from the ghetto prison to be shot on several other occasions in December 1941.

According to the testimony of Il’ia Kolotsei, the occupying authorities ordered the Jews to sew white and yellow patches on their clothing and sent them out to work. Kolotsei saw how 10 Jews were mocked as they were used in place of draft animals to haul a wagon with a barrel of water out of the ghetto. A German soldier sat on the barrel and drove them forward with a stick. Around the same time, under police guard, Jews spent two weeks digging a large pit on the grounds of the ghetto, near the toilet.¹²

The last group of prisoners was not taken to the ditch on the edge of town but was lined up next to the pit dug in the ghetto area. The majority were women, children, and old people. Many of the mothers had infants in their arms. Then two Germans described as Gendarmes, with a metal chain on their chests (probably members of the Feldgendarmerie subordinated to the Wehrmacht), took the first person out of the line. One of the Feldgendarmes bludgeoned the man on the head, and the local policemen standing next to him threw the body into the ditch. This scene was repeated until all the Jews were killed. Then the policemen covered the corpses with dirt and dispersed.¹³

Accused of organizing and carrying out the murders of the Jews of Rechitsa and Rechitsa raion were Oberleutnant Fischer, the head of the Rechitsa Gendarmerie; Gebietskommissar Blüming; a colonel named Orlitschek; and others.¹⁴ According to one estimate, some 1,300 to 1,400 Jews died in Rechitsa at the hands of the Nazis during the occupation (around 18 percent of the pre-war population).¹⁵

During the years of Rechitsa’s occupation, only a few Jews escaped with their lives. On the eve of the Aktion on November 25, Larisa Borodich (born 1930) was brought to the assembly place with her mother Khaia and other members of her family.¹⁶ At night Khaia helped Larisa climb over the barbed wire and told her to go to Lidia Nazarova’s home. For a few months, she was hidden by the Bogdanov, Gorshkov, Ferentsov, Kozorev, and Stankevich families. On May 1, 1943, she joined the Soviet partisans.¹⁷

Ol’ga Anishchenko, a teacher at the Rechitsa Teacher Training Institute, managed to save Masha Raikhlina, a kindergarten teacher who had been one of her students. When neighbors found out that Ol’ga was sheltering a Jewish woman, she found Masha a new place to hide, then sent her to the Frunze partisan detachment of the Voroshilov partisan brigade. In 1997, Anishchenko was awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem.¹⁸ Girsh Slavin was protected by the entire village of Zhmurovka, in the Rechitsa raion. During the pogrom in the Rechitsa synagogue, a man named Atamanchuk managed to rescue the Torah scroll, and after the war he helped the victims’ relatives find and rebury the remains of their loved ones.¹⁹