BEREZINO
Pre-1941: Berezino, town and raion center, Mogilev oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Beresino, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Berazino, raen center, Minsk voblasts’, Republic of Belarus
Berezino is located just over 100 kilometers (62 miles) east of Minsk. According to the 1939 census, 1,536 Jews (31.8 percent of the total) lived in Berezino. An additional 786 Jews lived in the villages of the raion, bringing the total Jewish population to 2,322.
German military forces had occupied the town by early July 1941, just over a week after the start of the German invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941. During this period, several hundred Jews were able to evacuate to the east. Men of eligible age were conscripted into the Red Army or enlisted voluntarily. More than two thirds of the pre-war Jewish population remained in the town.
During the entire occupation period, a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) administered the town. The Germans created a local authority and recruited a police force (Ordnungsdienst) from among the local residents.
Shortly after the start of the occupation, the local authority organized the registration and marking of the Jewish population. By the end of July, some Jews of the Rayon from outside the town were also concentrated in Berezino. Jews were forced to perform various forms of heavy labor, including [End Page 1646] carpentry work. In August or September 1941, German security forces arrested and shot 150 Jews from the town.
In the summer or fall of 1941, a ghetto was created on Internatsional’naia Street in Berezino, which after a few weeks was surrounded by barbed wire. Some Jews were also brought into the ghetto from other villages nearby. Jews were prohibited from bringing food products into the ghetto from the villages and were beaten by the local police when caught. Nevertheless, Jews continued to sneak out to beg for food, as some Jews were dying of hunger. Those who died were buried in the Jewish cemetery.1
The ghetto was liquidated on January 31 and February 1, 1942. Einsatzkommando 8, a 20-man detachment of the Security Police and SD subordinated to Einsatzgruppe B, shot 962 Jews, including the elderly, women, and children.2 According to the evidence of a former member, the 1st Company of the 12th Lithuanian Schutzmannschaft Battalion, commanded by Zenonas Kemzura, also participated in the Aktion.3
The killing site was cordoned off by members of German Landesschützenbataillon 452. According to the diary entry of one member of this unit, the ghetto was only 500 meters (547 yards) from his window; he could hear the screams and shouts as the houses were cleared systematically, and any Jews trying to flee were shot on the spot. The Jews were escorted in a column to two wooden huts near the ditches, where they put their valuables into the first and their outer clothing into the second hut. Then they were escorted on a path through the snow to the grave. They got down into the grave and were killed by two SS men, who took turns shooting. Some children later were found hiding in the ghetto and were also murdered.4
The local Belorussian police took part in the Aktion. One well-dressed local policeman from Berezino boasted shortly afterwards: “We finished off the kikes, all of them. In the end of December and beginning of January [sic] we liquidated the kike ghetto. We shot a thousand of them. Children were taken to the river and drowned in ice holes.”5 Sometime after the Aktion, the Ortskommandantur in Berezino sent to Berlin $273 in U.S. currency, which had been confiscated from the Jews who were shot.6
Liza Aizendorf was hidden inside the ghetto with her other siblings by her grandmother, who gave herself up, as an empty house was likely to be searched thoroughly. Liza managed to escape with her sister three days after the Aktion. She survived the German occupation despite being denounced by local people on more than one occasion and eventually joined a Soviet partisan unit. After the Germans fled, she also participated in reprisals taken against local collaborators.7
Jews were also murdered in the villages of Rayon Beresino. In December 1941, German forces shot 380 Jews in the village of Bogushevichi. Sometime in early 1942, 200 Jews were shot in the village of Pogost.8
SOURCES
Published sources on the fate of the Jews of Berezino during the Holocaust include the following: Shmuel Spector and Geoffrey Wigoder, eds., The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before and during the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem;
New York: New York University Press, 2001), p. 114; and Leonid Smilovitskii, Katastrofa evreev v Belorussii 1941–1944 (Tel Aviv: Biblioteka Matveia Chernogo, 2000), pp. 197–198.
Documents and testimonies on the persecution and elimination of the Jews of Berezino can be found in the following archives: BA-BL (R 2104); GAMINO; GARF (7021-87-2); NARB (861-1-8); VHF (# 7691); YVA (Oral History of Zinaida Krasner); and ZSSta-D (45 Js 35/64).
NOTES
1. GARF, 7021-87-2, p. 1; testimony of Liza Aizendorf (Zorina), in Smilovitskii, Katastrofa evreev v Belorussii, pp. 197–198; and VHF, # 7691, testimony of Elizaveta Aizendorf (née Zorina).
2. Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: HIS, 2000), p. 684. According to the materials of the ChGK, the Germans shot around 1,000 Jews in Berezino at the end of December 1941; see GARF, 7021-87-2, p. 1; and NARB, 861-1-8, p. 113.
3. See the trial proceedings against Antanas Impulevicius, Zenonas Kemzura, and others, in Vilnius, October 10–20, 1962, statement of the accused Juozas Knyrimas. Kemzura was sentenced to death, as was the commander of the battalion, Major Impulevicius (in absentia, as he was living in the United States).
4. ZSSta-D, 45 Js 35/64, pp. 22–24, diary of P.H. (transcript), cited by Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, p. 684 n. 983.
5. Unfortunately for this local policeman, his interlocutors were Soviet partisans in disguise, and they shot him shortly after these incautious words, as he had boasted also of having personally murdered two children. See David Meltser and Vladimir Levin, The Black Book with Red Pages (Tragedy and Heroism of Belorussian Jews) (Cockeysville, MD: VIA Press, 2005), p. 431 (Isaak Moiseyevich Gershovich [New York], Commissar of the 277th Partisan Regiment, 2nd Klichev Partisan Brigade, recollections from his wartime diary).
6. BA-BL, R2104/Beutebuch Russland VI, no. 9584, pp. 30–31, report dated April 29, 1942.
7. Testimony of Liza Aizendorf (Zorina), in Smilovitskii, Katastrofa evreev v Belorussii, pp. 197–198.
8. GARF, 7021-87-2, pp. 6 (Bogushevichi) and 16 (Pogost).
