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

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

Dobrush is located 25 kilometers (16 miles) east of Gomel’ on the Iput’ River. The town has a railway station on the Gomel’-Unecha line. In 1926, there were 372 Jewish inhabitants (2.7 percent of the total population of 13,800).

Following the German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, many refugees arrived in Dobrush. Dobrush was strategically significant, as it lay on the main rail line through Briansk to Moscow, so the Luftwaffe bombed the town. More than two thirds of the Jews in Dobrush managed to leave the town, either as staff of a factory or government organization or indepen dently on foot towards Gomel’.¹

German forces occupied Dobrush on August 22, 1941. During the German occupation, Dobrush was subordinated to Rear Area, Army Group Center. The Germans appointed M.G. Sobolev to be the mayor and Karp Amel’chenko as his deputy. The former examining magistrate of the Dobrush raion, Fedosii Semenchik, became chief of police, and Anufii Klimenkov was the prison warden.² The police, the jail, local authorities, elders of the volost’, and local communities were all subordinated to the German military command and the mayor.

No anti-Jewish Aktions took place in Dobrush during the first two months of the occupation. Jews were allowed to live in their own homes but were forbidden to visit public places, to go onto the main streets of the town, or to maintain contacts with Belorussians and Russians. Jewish children above age 10 and all Jewish adults were required to wear yellow patches on their outer garments.³ At the end of October 1941, the Gestapo ordered Mayor Sobolev to evict the Jewish population from within the town limits of Dobrush. In the municipal records Vasilii Zheldakov recorded the names of the 106 Jews who were displaced. To calm them, the police informed the Jews that this was in preparation for their deportation to Palestine. On the appointed day, the authorities ordered the Jews to assemble at the town police station, from which they were escorted 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) south of the town to two outbuildings of the Machine Tractor Station (MTS). The police categorically forbade the Jews to enter the town limits. The guards starved the prisoners and escorted them to perform the hardest and dirtiest labor. Jews had to drag logs out of the river, clean streets, and unload freight cars. The local police and the Germans humiliated the Jews.

The liquidation of the ghetto was planned to take place at the same time as the execution of Communists and Soviet activists. The arrests of 19 Communists (18 men and 1 woman) took place on November 17, 1941. In the last days before the Aktion, the external perimeter of the ghetto was tightly guarded. On November 20, Gansevskii and Morozov made Jews dig a large ditch, 10 meters long, 2 meters wide, and 2 meters deep (about 33 by 6.6 by 6.6 feet).⁴ On the morning of November 21, at 10:00 a.m., eight policemen escorted the Communists in closed motor vehicles from the Dobrush jail to the MTS. The police took the Jews in a column of fours to within 50 meters (164 feet) of the ditch and made them kneel down. The police formed a cordon to prevent escape. Three officers of the Security Police, from the detachment in Gomel’ (commanded by Wilhelm Schulz) of Einsatzkommando 8, directed the Aktion, assisted by 25 local policemen and 10 Germans.⁵ Among the local policemen present were Semenchik, Gansevskii, Sukalin, Lapunov, Khatskov, Kachanov, Kachalin, and Davydulin. A number of local residents, including many relatives and friends of the non-Jewish victims, came to the killing site, although Sobolev had instructed the policemen to keep observers at a distance.

First to be shot were the Communists; then it was the turn of the Jews. The policemen searched them, making them remove their clothing. Sukalin, Kachalin, and Lapunov undressed and searched the women. Khaia Kosolapova, in her early twenties, a Soviet clerk, tried to run away, but the policemen Sukalin and Kachalin caught her and dragged her back to be shot. As she was killed, Kosolapova shouted, “Goodbye, comrades, you who know me. I am dying for my homeland, for Stalin. Long live our Red Army!”⁶

The Germans went about their gruesome task as if they were slaughtering livestock. They would bring two or three victims to the ditch, where the German executioner stabbed the children with a knife and threw them, still alive, into the ditch. Police officer Khatskov was especially active in shoving people into the ditch. Among the first victims were members of the Aronchik family: the wife, husband, and four children. The mother, Basia Aronchik, 32 years old, held her 2-year-old son in her arms; the next-oldest child clung to her skirt, and the two older children followed behind. One of the older children appealed to Semenchik, begging him, “Dear Uncle, you know me. Dear Uncle, spare me, I want to live! I sat at the same desk as your boy in school, and I never did anything bad to anyone! Save me!” Whereupon a policeman grabbed him and threw him into the ditch, then shots rang out. The women and children sobbed so loudly that their wailing and moaning could be heard at a distance. Those only wounded were buried alive.⁷

The killing went on from 10:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m. In total, 125 people were killed: 19 Communists and 106 Jews. After [End Page 1665] the mass shooting, the search began for those who had escaped by hiding. A week later, a 13-year-old girl named Ishevskaia, who had miraculously survived in Dobrush, sought out Amel’chenko to request some of the belongings of her parents, who had been killed. Amel’chenko arrested her and turned her over to the German commandant’s office to be shot.⁸

The German occupiers used Jewish property to reward collaborators and as an incentive to the local population to be cooperative. Most of the property was distributed after the resettlement of the Jews into the MTS barracks, where the ghetto was established. The authorities took some of the Jewish belongings as fines or “contributions” in place of money: ornaments, gold and silver, and personal items. Finally, they took clothing, undergarments, and footwear removed from victims before the executions on November 21. After the mass shooting, the victims’ belongings were hauled away in eight carts to the authorities’ headquarters. German members of the punitive expedition and the police took some of the loot; whatever remained that was still usable was sold off to local inhabitants or distributed among those who worked for the authorities.

According to German investigative sources, a detachment of Security Police from Sonderkommando 7a based in Klintsy arrived in Dobrush at the end of March or the beginning of April 1942 and murdered another 70 Jews, who were being held in three to five houses in a wooded area to the north of Dobrush. The Security Police, assisted by the local police (Ordnungsdienst), shot the Jews into a ditch.⁹ These were presumably Jews who survived the first Aktion or were captured in the area subsequently and held until a second Aktion could be organized.

Units of the Red Army liberated Dobrush on October 10, 1943. On the same day, the 48th Army counterintelligence unit “Smersh” arrested a group of active collaborators with the German occupiers who had committed crimes against local civilians. The collaborators were tried by a military tribunal.¹⁰

During the years of occupation, the population of the Dobrush raion declined by about 30 percent, from 31,244 inhabitants in 1941 to 21,791 in May 1944. In the town of Dobrush itself, the population fell almost 40 percent, from 13,815 to 8,399.¹¹ The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), which arrived in the town on December 16, 1943, established that 576 civilians (including 199 persons in the town of Dobrush) and 18 prisoners of war (POWs) perished in the Dobrush raion during the German occupation. Opening the mass grave near the MTS revealed 124 bodies buried there: 70 of them had bullet wounds; 10 showed signs of having been struck with a blunt object; and 44 had no visible injury, which suggested that they were buried alive.¹² Of the 124 bodies, 67 were women, 57 were men, 32 were children up to 10 years old, and 49 were elderly persons. Most of the bodies were found in awkward positions, which indicated an agonizing death.¹³

So far, of the 106 ghetto inmates, it has only been possible to establish the family names of 53 victims: 22 men and 31 women.¹⁴