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

Pre-1941: Bobynichi, village, Vetrino raion, Vitebsk oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Bobynitschi, Vetrino Rayon, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Babynichy, Polatsk raen, Vitsebsk voblasts’, Republic of Belarus

Bobynichi is located 32 kilometers (20 miles) southwest of Polotsk. In 1920, there were 170 Jews living in the village out of a total population of 219. German forces of Army Group Center occupied the town in early July 1941.

A ghetto was established only one month before the final murder of the local Jews; it consisted of a single house, the former kolkhoz management building. The building was guarded. On January 15, 1942, a Belorussian squad headed by two Germans, most probably the same unit that conducted Aktions in the nearby villages of Voronichi and Gomel’, appeared in Bobynichi; to judge from some of the names, they were probably Belorussian policemen from Polotsk. These men assembled 106 (108, according to one account) Jews (53 of them women), tied the hands of the young people, put the children, the old, and the sick onto horse carts, and led them to a nearby Belorussian cemetery. A pit had been dug beforehand. On the spot, the members of the squad shot the adult Jews and threw the children into the pit alive. A Jew named Isaak Ioffe was only wounded and went to a local hospital in search of assistance. At the hospital, Dr. Butko, however, betrayed him to the punitive squad, which shot Ioffe near the hospital and brought his body to the pit at the main killing site. The pit was filled in three days later on the orders of the mayor, Filipp A. Spasibeko. Of those killed in Bobynichi, 14 were not local Jews; they were probably refugees from the “western regions.”¹