CHASHNIKI
Pre-1941: Chashniki, town and raion center, Vitebsk oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Tschaschniki, Rayon center, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwartiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Chashniki, raen center, Vitsebsk voblasts’, Republic of Belarus [End Page 1657]
Chashniki is located 75 kilometers (47 miles) southwest of Vitebsk. In 1939, 1,109 Jews lived in the town, making up 31.6 percent of the population. The Jewish population of the Chashniki raion (without the town of Chashniki) constituted 867 people, the bulk of whom lived in the small towns of Chereia and Lukoml’.
Owing to Chashniki’s location far from major highways and with no easily accessible railway station, only a few Jews were able to leave the town in 1941 before the Germans captured it.
The German forces (XXXII Army Corps of the 3rd Panzer Group) entered Chashniki on July 4, 1941. From August 1941 onward, Chashniki was under the authority of Rear Area, Army Group Center. This area was the realm of the 403rd Security Division; Chashniki was under the control of Feldkommandantur 181.
The Germans put together an indigenous local administration in Chashniki, including a local police force. The mayor of the town was Kalina, a former construction engineer who had worked for the town’s health administration (gorzdrav); the head of the Belorussian police was Tislenok;1 but it was his deputy Mikhail Pakhomov who was known for his hatred and atrocities towards the Jews. At the same time, a Jew named Chereiskii was appointed the elder of the community. According to witnesses, Chereiskii’s only function was to appoint Jews to do forced labor, in accordance with German instructions issued to him. The witnesses do not refer to a Jewish Council (Judenrat) in Chashniki, nor do they refer to a Jewish police force.
The Germans did not establish an enclosed ghetto in Chashniki, possibly because the whole Jewish population lived in the central part of the town. Some Jews were resettled from their houses, and their houses were turned over to non-Jews. The Germans gave instructions to mark all Jewish houses with plywood Stars of David; all Jews were ordered to wear a patch with a Star of David on their clothes. The Jews were forbidden to leave the town and to communicate with non-Jews. Witnesses do not mention any large-scale resettlement of Jews from other places to Chashniki in the period from July 1941 to January 1942.
The Germans did not supply the Jews with food. However, the survivors’ accounts make no mention of starving. Most of the town’s Jews had plots of land and could sustain themselves with what they grew on them. The day before the German entry into Chashniki, the town dwellers, including Jews, pilfered barley from the stores of the alcohol factory abandoned by the authorities, and this helped them to survive.
From the very beginning the Germans imposed compulsory labor on the Jews. Young people were sent to work at the railway station (quite far from the town center) and the fuel depot nearby, as well as at the officers’ mess.
At the end of September 1941, a group of Jewish young people (according to various estimates, about 50 to 100 people, mainly males but also some females) were sent to a nearby peat farm to cut peat and load it onto carts. The work lasted until November. These laborers did not receive any food, but they were allowed to return home on Sundays in order “to collect some food for the next week.” In fact, the young workers had to leave the labor camp at night and go to the villages to exchange clothes, utensils, and other items for food.
Witnesses make both positive and negative comments about the attitude of the surrounding non-Jewish population. Some locals maintained contacts and trade with their Jewish neighbors. On the other hand, the survivors say that it was not only Germans and members of the Belorussian police who robbed the Jews—many other people took food, clothes, and other items. Attempts to stop the robbers or to complain to the Germans sometimes ended with the one making the complaint getting a beating instead.
On September 13, 1941, the Germans murdered all the Jews of the small town of Lukoml’, in the Chashniki raion, purportedly in reprisal after a Soviet straggler (presumed to be a local Jew) killed a German officer there.2 It is unclear exactly who carried out the killings, although one witness mentions the participation of the Belorussian police. Local informants speak of some 300 victims.3 The news of this Aktion and subsequent rumors of other mass killings in nearby towns unsettled the Jews of Chashniki, but they were unable to gain much information about them.
The Jews of Chashniki were murdered on February 14–15, 1942. On the morning of February 14, about 100 young people were sent out of the town to clear snow from nearby roads. Thus the most youthful part of the Jewish population was moved away from the place of the future Aktion. At about 1:00 p.m., a detachment of Einsatzkommando 9 (commanded by Oswald Schäfer) entered Chashniki on horse-drawn sledges, coming from the direction of Beshenkovichi.4 From the morning of the same day, the Belorussian police began to assemble the Jews in the building of a former church, which had been turned into a “House of Culture” during the Soviet period. According to eyewitnesses, many Jews refused to go to the church, and towards dusk the area resembled a battlefield: there was shooting, and the police stormed some houses. Some Jews tried to flee and were killed on the run, some of them quite far from the town center. A group of policemen intercepted the young people who were returning to the town after clearing the snow and escorted them to the church.
About 1,000 Jews of Chashniki spent the night in the church, closely guarded by the Belorussian police. On the morning of February 15, at around 10:00 a.m., the police drove the Jews to some pits near the village of Trilesino. After a delay during which the Germans deepened the pits, the mass shooting began. The killers, both Germans and local police, took several people (probably an entire family) in turn, made them undress, placed them on the edge of the pit, and shot them with machine guns. Before the shooting, the Secret Field Police (GFP) unit that was responsible for rounding up the Jews (together with two volunteers from a local Luftwaffe unit) searched them for any valuables. The Aktion lasted all day. Over the following days the police combed the town and its vicinity and found some Jews who were trying to hide.5
After the Aktion, the belongings of the murdered Jews were collected, sorted, and under the auspices of the SD, handed [End Page 1658] over to the mayor to be sold to the Belorussian population. The proceeds were credited to the town’s account.6
About a dozen mainly younger people, who had left the town some days before the shooting or succeeded in running away, survived the mass murder. Of those who survived, Zalman Solomonov, Fira Kharkevich (née Kaplan), Semen Shapiro, Arkadii (Abram) Pukhovitskii, Roza Topash (née Pukhovitskii), and Boris Plavnik were interviewed in 1985–1987.7
The murderers themselves estimated the number of those killed at 1,180.8 The list (probably incomplete) compiled by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) report in 1944 indicates 700 Jewish victims. Of them, 321 (45.9 percent) were born in 1924 and later and thus were under draft age; 103 were born in 1901–1923 (draft age, 14.7 percent); and 276 (39.4 percent) were born in 1900 and before. The second group breaks down to 34 men and 69 women; the third group, to 125 men and 151 women.9 The disproportionately large number of children in this sample may be ascribed to the fact that among them there were children from large cities who were staying with their grandparents in Chashniki for the summer and that families with many children were less inclined to flee from the Germans.
The mass shooting of the Jews of Chereia, also in the Chashniki raion, took place on March 5, 1942. There may have been a similar form of “open ghetto” there prior to the shooting, as in Chashniki. The murderers shot the Jews at two locations: one was near the school, and the second was outside the town. It is unclear who the murderers were. The Germans spared some “specialists” for a while, but several days later they were also finished off together with the Jews who were found hiding in the vicinity after the first Aktion. The last mass shooting took place near the Khalnevichi road, west of the town. The ChGK report lists 201 Jews killed in Chereia.10
SOURCES
The author has published a more detailed account of the fate of Chashniki’s Jews in Vestnik Evreiskogo Universiteta v Moskve 1 (1992): 157–199. That essay also includes published versions of the main eyewitness accounts now located in YVA. The other major published source is G. Linkov, Voina v tylu vraga (1st ed., Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1947; 2nd enlarg. ed., Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1959).
The documents of the ChGK for the Chashniki raion can be found in GARF (7021-84-15). Relevant German documentation is located in the following archives: RGVA (500-1-770) and BA-MA (RH 26-201/17). Witness statements and copies of some of the German documents can be found in YVA (O-3/4690–4706, O-51.Ossobi/43 and M.29.FR/208).
NOTES
1. The eyewitnesses call him Chislenok; the difference can be attributed to the Belorussian pronunciation.
2. See YVA, O-3/4706; there are some discrepancies with the version published in Linkov, Voina v tyla vraga.
3. The list of victims compiled by the ChGK contains 131 names of Jews; the informants were Nadezhda (an eyewitness, non-Jewish) and Yefim Rutman (not a witness).
4. YVA, O-3/4692.
5. Tätigkeits-und Lagebericht der Einsatzgruppe B von 16. bis 28. Februar 1942, in RGVA, 500-1-770; also YVA, O-3/4698, O-3/4699, O-3/4702, O-3/4703.
6. BA-MA, RH 26-201/17, p. 4, report of Sicherungsbrigade 201, Abt. VII, March 15, 1942.
7. Their interviews are now located in YVA as O-3/4690–O-3/4695.
8. Tätigkeits-u. Lagebericht der Einsatzgruppe B von 16. bis 28. Februar 1942.
9. GARF, 7021-84-15.
10. Ibid.
