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

Pre-1941: Elizovo, town, Osipo vichi raion, Mogilev oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Elisowo, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Elizava, Asipovichy raen, Mahiliou voblasts’, Republic of Belarus

Elizovo is located about 40 kilometers (25 miles) to the northwest of Bobruisk. According to the 1939 census, there were 303 Jews living in Elizovo, accounting for 6.7 percent of the total population. Following the occupation of Poland in September 1939 by German and Soviet forces, a number of Jewish refugees settled in Elizovo, bringing with them information about the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

German armed forces of Army Group Center occupied the town on July 1, 1941, just over a week after their invasion of the USSR on June 22. During this intervening period, the Germans bombed the town, and a few Jews managed to flee eastward or were conscripted into the Red Army. Probably about two thirds of the pre-war Jewish population remained in Elizovo at the start of the German occupation.

On the first day of the occupation, the Germans collected about 100 people, Jews and non-Jews, and murdered them in an Aktion in reprisal for the killing of a German soldier in the vicinity.¹ Throughout the occupation period (from July 1941 to February 1944), a German military commandant’s office was in charge of Elizovo. The German military administration established a town council and a local police force (Ordnungsdienst) recruited from local residents.

The German authorities soon introduced a series of anti-Jewish measures. For example, Jews were forced to wear yellow circular patches on the back and front of their clothes; they were forbidden to have contact with non-Jews; they were forbidden to keep pets; and young Jewish men and women were taken for forced labor, building a road between Elizovo and Svisloch’.²

A few weeks into the occupation, probably in August 1941, the remaining Jews in the town were herded into a ghetto, for which a few buildings were allocated. According to Jewish survivors, the ghetto was not fenced in.³ Some Jews gave their property to non-Jews for safekeeping, but in one instance the peasant Kabanov subsequently handed the items to the German authorities, who demanded the surrender of all Jewish property.

On October 8, 1941, the Germans conducted a second Aktion in Elizovo, in which a dozen or so Jews who had been sent to work on the road were taken to the forest and murdered. On October 14, the Germans conducted a brutal Aktion in the nearby village of Svisloch’, in which a number of Jews were killed. Then in the winter of 1941–1942, probably in early November 1941, the Germans rounded up the Jews of Elizovo, humiliated them by making them sing, and forced them to surrender their warm clothing for the German armed forces before releasing them again.⁴

On January 21 or 22, 1942, Soviet partisans attacked the glass factory building in the town and set it on fire. Then the next day an SS squad arrived and conducted a reprisal Aktion in which they shot most of the remaining Jewish men, about 28 people. Before burying the bodies in two large [End Page 1669] graves, the Germans removed any gold teeth from the corpses’ mouths.⁵

The Germans liquidated the ghetto on April 5, 1942, shooting all the remaining Jews. A few Jews managed to evade the roundup and hide in the surrounding countryside or make their way to join the Soviet partisans. In total, at least 100 Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators in and around Elizovo in 1941–1942.