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

1938–1941: Buda-Koshelevo, town and raion center, Gomel’ oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Buda-Koschelewo, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Buda-Kashaleva, raen center, Homel’ voblasts’, Republic of Belarus

Buda-Koshelevo is located 48 kilometers (30 miles) northwest of Gomel’. A Jewish kolkhoz with 11 families was established there in 1924. From 1925 to 1928, three more kolkhozy were created on the outskirts of the township. Their population consisted of 49 Jewish families. The 1939 census showed that there were 496 Jews living in Buda-Koshelevo (14.7 percent of the total population).

Towards the end of June 1941, war refugees from western Belorussia began to arrive, and their numbers quickly swelled. The Red Army called up able-bodied men, forming a combat battalion of 310 soldiers under the command of Dovolev to defend the town and deal with deserters.¹ The population largely believed Soviet propaganda asserting that the Red Army’s setbacks were temporary and that soon the enemy would be crushed.

Buda-Koshelevo had a railway station, but the authorities used all available rolling stock to evacuate state property rather than local inhabitants. German planes pounded the town from the air. Most of the population either lacked the means to flee or feared they would perish on the road. The memory of decent treatment of the Jews by the German army in 1918 still deceived some people. Only a few Jews were fortunate enough to escape to the east.²

Buda-Koshelevo was occupied by German forces on August 14, 1941. They rapidly imposed their authority, placing the town under military command, with a garrison of around 50 men. Sonderführer Albrecht was the commandant; Bühlheim was chief of the punitive detachment; Hoffmann and Neidicke served as deputies. The chief of the local police was Marchenko.³ He was replaced in November 1941 by Vasilii Mikhalenko.⁴

Buda-Koshelevo was administered by Rear Area, Army Group Center. Geographically, the Zhlobin-Gomel’ railway line split the entire area in two. There were eight subdistrict regions (volosti) in the northern part. The five volosti in the south lay along the left bank of the Dnieper River.

Police posts and garrisons were established in the villages of Rogin’, Merkulovichi, Gubichi, Zabab’e, Chabotovichi, and Pirevichi, among others. District and subdistrict authorities opened police stations and selected between 7 and 10 policemen from among the local residents. In Buda-Koshelevo, initially there were 15 policemen, a chief of police, and a police investigator, Voititskii.⁵ The German authorities set up a prison on Sovietskaia Street for Soviet prisoners of war (POWs), who worked at the railway station and on other town infrastructure. Subsequently they were transferred to Gomel’ and Rogachev.⁶

No anti-Jewish Aktions were carried out in the town during the first two months of the German occupation, but relations between Jews and Belorussians changed for the worse. More than 400 Jews still remained within the town. At first, Jews were allowed to live in their own homes, monitored by the local police, but they were obliged to carry out German orders without question. On October 26, 1941, the Germans established a ghetto. All Jews had to resettle into the two-story stone school building. Buda-Koshelevo Chief of Police Marchenko organized the roundup.

The overcrowding was excessive: 50 or 60 people were crammed into each of the building’s six rooms in an area no larger than 40 square meters (431 square feet). The overflow [End Page 1654] lived in the corridors. The prisoners suffered terribly from hunger, and there was no heat. The windows lacked glass panes and were boarded up. Cold and exhaustion brought on disease and then the first deaths.⁷

The authorities did not feed the Jews, who were living on their own scanty reserves or on whatever was passed on to them by acquaintances among the Belorussian or Russian population. Some of the inmates bartered personal belongings for food. Such trafficking was forbidden, and it had to be done discreetly. Daily, Jews were led off to perform forced labor for up to 14 or 16 hours. Under the pretext of security searches, the Germans seized the Jews’ most valuable personal belongings. They also raped girls and young women.

The guards periodically beat up the prisoners, insulting and abusing them “for fun.” On November 23, 1941, police officer Kukharenko wounded Dania and Khaia Khankin, Lev Vilenskii, Gurar’e, Estin, and Epstein with a rifle. The situation of the Jews became worse when Mikhalenko replaced Marchenko as chief of police. Under Marchenko, Jews were sometimes able to barter items for bread and potatoes or to receive things from acquaintances and neighbors. When Mikhalenko took over, all these practices were stopped, and conditions became unbearable. Everything worsened for the ghetto inmates. Verbal abuse and beatings were routine. The wounding and murder of prisoners by the police became more frequent.⁸

The Buda-Koshelevo ghetto did not exist for long. On December 27, 1941, two vehicles arrived in Buda-Koshelevo with policemen from Gomel’. Chief of Police Mikhalenko ordered increased vigilance and doubled the number of guards assigned to the ghetto from 6 to 12 men to prevent any chance of escape. The police separated the men from the women. Then they began to lead the prisoners, 2 at a time, into a separate room where Mikhalenko and the German officers sat. The Jews were strip-searched, and money, documents, and usable clothing were all seized. The occupiers and their collaborators placed the Jewish men—some 170 of them—in a room where all the windows were tightly sealed, and no water was available. A stove burning continuously filled the room with stuffy heat; breathing became difficult. The inmates were so tightly packed that they could not even turn around or sit down. In this state they spent the night; then at 5:00 a.m., on December 28, 1941, police officers began to lead the Jews out to be shot. Mikhalenko stood on the stairwell between floors in the school and checked them off. First they took the men into the courtyard, then the women.⁹ The police lined up the prisoners in a column and herded them to an antitank ditch in the village of Krasnyi Kurgan behind the Machine Tractor Station (MTS). Mayor Prusov and Chief of Police Mikhalenko supervised the Aktion.

They ordered the men to undress and began to lead them down into the ditch in groups. Three or four Germans made them lie facedown. Then the German marksman approached and killed each one with a single shot from his submachine gun. They laid the second group of men on top of the bodies of the first. About an hour after the start of the Aktion, police officers Kosmilo, Kabaev, Filip Oleinikov, and Dmitrii Kuzikov led the women to the antitank ditch. Mothers held infants in their arms. The police hauled older children and elderly men to the site in carts. All of the prisoners were made to undress. Then the police brought them to the ditch and shot them. Infants were killed with their mothers, older children along with the adults.¹⁰

The slaughter was accompanied by continuous cries of pain and grief. People begged for mercy, wept, and cried out. The killings went on from 8:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m. On that day, 485 people were murdered. The murder squad only covered the bodies with snow; in the spring they were buried in the ground. Personal belongings of the Jews were given to a store in Buda-Koshelevo, which sold them.¹¹

The police had arrested a Belorussian, Evgenii Venglinskii, who, together with his Jewish wife and their child, was confined in the ghetto, where they all lived until the ghetto liquidation Aktion. The Venglinskii family escaped the fate of the others under lucky circumstances. They were able to convince one of the policemen who understood Russian that they had ended up in the ghetto “by mistake” and were not in fact Jews. Evgenii gave the policeman his leather coat. In exchange, the policeman put the family into a separate room. From the window, the Venglinskiis saw the Jewish inmates marched off to the antitank ditch. They hastily fled Buda-Koshelevo and wandered the countryside of the Zhlobin raion until they met up with Soviet partisans in May 1942.¹²

On the eve of the mass shooting, the police summoned inmate Hirsh Shvets to see the chief of the punitive detachment, whom they had told that Shvets was an especially skilled shoemaker. Shvets was put to work by the police and subsequently transferred to Gomel’. For the next two years, he was obliged to work for the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). When the Germans retreated from Gomel’, they took Shvets away to Germany, where he was eventually liberated by the Red Army.¹³

Red Army units of the 4th Infantry Division and the 231st Armored Regiment of the Belorussian 48th Army liberated Buda-Koshelevo on November 27, 1943. The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), which arrived in the town in November 1944, found that 1,287 civilians and 282 POWs had died at the hands of the Germans during the occupation of the town. Of the 485 Jews who were murdered on December 28, 1941, only 120 family names could be determined.¹⁴

During the German occupation, the population of the Buda-Koshelevo raion decreased from 41,459 in 1941 to 23,595 in May 1944, 57 percent of the pre-war figure. In the town, the population decreased from 3,371 in 1941 to 2,886 in 1944, or 86 percent of the pre-war figure.¹⁵ However, the general information collected by the ChGK does not specify the ethnicity of the victims.