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

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

Gomel’ is located 300 kilometers (186 miles) southeast of Minsk. In 1939, Jews numbered 40,880 (27.3 percent of the city’s total population).

In the first weeks of the war, the population of Gomel’ benefited from the fact that German forces only occupied the city about two months after the start of the invasion, and many people managed to evacuate in the interim. By the time the Germans took the city on August 21, 1941, about 80,000 inhabitants had fled, but some 4,000 Jews remained (about 9 percent of the pre-war total).

After occupying Gomel’, the Germans set up a temporary military administration. During August and September 1941, they established branches of the Security Police in Gomel’ and other towns of the region. During the occupation, security forces in the city included units of the Secret Field Police (Geheime Feldpolizei, or GFP), the Field Gendarmerie (Feldgendarmerie), the Order Police (Schutzpolizei), a local police force, and a guard company subordinated to the military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur).¹

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Group portrait of 11 boys and girls from the Stalin School in Gomel’, 1941. Among those pictured is Sonya Lishansky, seated second from right in the first row, the only Jewish child in this photograph known to have survived the Holocaust in Gomel’.

USHMM WS #58242, COURTESY OF SONYA LISHANSKY

Local policemen, villagers, and city residents captured, handed over to the Germans, and often themselves killed Jewish soldiers in the Red Army who had avoided encirclement by the enemy or escaped from prisoner-of-war (POW) camps. In July 1941, David Komisarenko fled the POW camp in the Gomel’ area. He was subsequently detained by two policemen who identified him as a Jew. Some of the captured Jewish servicemen tried to hide their ethnicity. When they were identified as Jews, they died terrible deaths. In the winter of 1942–1943, the Germans discovered Jews among the POWs in Durchgangslager (Dulag) 121 in Gomel’. The policemen stripped them in the severe cold and poured water on them so that they would freeze to death.

After the German occupation of Gomel’, Jews were soon identified with the help of the local population and required to wear special yellow marks on their chests and backs. In September or October 1941, four separate ghettos were created in Gomel’. The resettlement of the Jews lasted about a week. On only half an hour’s notice, they were escorted away, carrying with them nothing but bed linen. Later, local policemen and Germans returned to Jewish houses and took everything of value; what remained was put in a warehouse.²

The main ghetto in Gomel’ was in the Monastyrek district. It housed some 800 Jews from the center of the city. The second ghetto was on Novo-Lubenskaia Street. It held about 500 people, including 97 Jews who were brought to Gomel’ from Loiev. The third ghetto was on Bikhovskaia Street. The Jews who lived in Novo-Belitsa, on the left bank of the [End Page 1672] Sozh River, were put into a separate ghetto. In September 1941, 200 ghetto inmates were moved from Novo-Belitsa to Monastyrek. They were tortured, and the beards of the religious Jews were cut off.³

Very cramped quarters, unsanitary conditions, no medical care, and a lack of rudimentary conveniences were typical of all four ghettos. A single room of 20 square meters (215 square feet) was usually shared by seven people or more. They had almost no belongings, making housing them easier. The number of ghetto inmates rapidly declined due to disease, transfers, and killings.

Before the war, the Monastyrek district of Gomel’ was populated by workers. It consisted mainly of one-room houses, with several families living in each. When the district became a ghetto, to accommodate more people, all the inner partitions in the houses were demolished, and three-tiered bunks were installed. All the inmates of the ghetto, including infants, were registered, and a list was compiled of specialists and intellectuals. The German authorities promised good jobs and meals, but in return the Jews were required to hand over all their money, furs, and gold and silver articles. After this initial demand was met, the Germans soon came back asking for more.

This procedure took place in all of Gomel’s ghettos. Threatening to shoot hostages, the Germans collected wedding rings, gold and silver articles, coins, laundry and toilet soap, bedding, linen, clothing, and other items. German soldiers in groups and individually would go on “excursions” to Jewish houses, where they took all they wanted. Belorussian policemen followed suit.

The food was bad. Ghetto inmates, as well as POWs, were given a gruel made of buckwheat skins, barley bran, or frozen potatoes mixed with water. Later the inmates were given 150 to 200 grams (5.3 to 7 ounces) daily of “ersatz bread” made of acorns—and not even that every day. Not everyone received the gruel because they did not have their own dishes. Sometimes the food was just dumped into hats or cupped hands.

A significant number of Jews in the ghetto had large families or were aged or sick. Most of the inmates were women and children. There were almost no adult men or youths of draft age. Few of the elderly retained their illusions of the Germans as “a cultured nation” that had left the Jews alone in 1918 and even protected them from Russian “pogromists.”

The ghettos were guarded vigilantly, and under threat of severe punishment, it was forbidden to leave them without special permission. Schwech, the military commandant of Gomel’, issued an order that “all contact with Jews, such as greetings, handshakes, or conversation, must be avoided.” It was prohibited to exchange goods and food, to communicate, or to pass on information. Those who violated the rules were beaten, deprived of food, and sent to penal jobs. Often such punishment was carried out in public as a lesson to others. Jews could be killed with impunity for any misdemeanor. Leaving the ghetto was allowed for only two reasons: going to work or transporting the dead to the cemetery. All inhabitants of the ghetto, including family members, were punished and could even be shot for leaving the ghetto without permission.⁴

Ghettos served as places where Jews were assembled and isolated for rapid extermination. Thus there were no long-term programs, health services, or sanitation measures. The inmates had to fend for themselves. Like the ghettos of the entire region, the ghettos in Gomel’ resembled concentration camps. Jews were seldom sent to do work vitally needed for the city, the region, or the Wehrmacht. More often they were assigned to odd jobs—cutting firewood, rooting out stumps, sweeping and cleaning streets, emptying garbage pits, burying corpses, and removing unexploded mines, shells, and bombs. At railroad stations, Jews cleaned and washed carriages, loaded and unloaded them, moved sleeping cars, and cleaned spur tracks, roads, and the aerodrome.⁵ At work, they were beaten with canes and whips, and the weak and the sick were shot. Refusal to go to work could end tragically. In Gomel’, in September 1941, it was decreed that every fifth inmate would be shot if someone did not report for labor.⁶

Jews were deliberately not assigned professional jobs. Instead, intellectuals, doctors, teachers, engineers, and other professionals were given hard manual labor. Often they were forced to perform deliberately senseless and humiliating tasks—to drag big carts with tubs of water; to carry bricks, firewood, and garbage from one place to another; to dig pits and then fill them up again. Only in dire need did the Germans fall back on the expertise of Jewish “specialists,” for whom temporary exceptions were made. An order of September 28, 1941, issued to the SS-Cavalry Brigade, which was operating in the region, read: “It is understood that craftsmen may be spared.”⁷

From August through December 1941, the German occupiers systematically carried out the extermination of the Jews in Gomel’. They killed the first group of 10 people on the pretext that they had participated in sabotage shortly after the Germans entered the city. In October 1941, 52 Jews “who had posed as Russians” were executed. On the orders of Kommandant Preis-Müller, Sonderführer Hartman and Kracht murdered more Jews in the woods near Davidovka village on October 7 and 22.⁸ Besides units of Einsatzgruppe B, SS units subordinated to the Reichsführer-SS headquarters staff, units of the Order Police, the Secret Field Police, the Gendarmerie, and other locally based units took part in the execution of Jews.⁹

Some of the Gomel’ Jews died in prison and labor camps in the city itself and elsewhere in the Gomel’ region. Hundreds of Jews died at the peat extraction site in Kabanovka and at other labor camps to which they had been moved from detention centers and ghettos. Executions were carried out in the prison yard, on the Gomel’-Chernigov highway, and at the third-, sixth-, and ninth-kilometer markers on the Rechitsa highway, among other sites. Most of those killed were shot at kilometer 3 (mile 1.9) of the Rechitsa highway, near the grounds of the machine-tractor repair shop and in the Leshchinets Forest area not far from Davidovka village.¹⁰

Burial of the dead was conducted with mockery. Excrement was dumped into the ditch with the bodies. Beginning in November 1941, crowds of German soldiers and officers would gather at the ditch with the bodies of those shot, laughing [End Page 1673] merrily and taking photographs. These activities took place almost daily as new German units arrived in the city.¹¹

Early in November 1941, a notice in big letters appeared on the wall of the timber mill. It said that on the following day, under pain of death, no inhabitants were allowed to leave home before 9:00 a.m. By 6:00 a.m. the next morning, all the policemen of the third police district in Gomel’ arrived at Monastyrek. Soon, about 100 men under the command of the Security Police showed up as well. Some of the policemen encircled the area of the ghetto. The others, together with the Germans, began driving Jews out of their homes by force. Inhabitants were not allowed to take anything with them. Several members of the eviction party put a bucket on the head of an old man and made him dance while they pounded on the bucket with sticks and laughed. Two mentally retarded youths were shot on the spot in their own house.¹²

By 10:00 a.m. the roundup was over. Six trucks were provided for those who could not walk on their own in the ragged column of those on foot. Children were tossed into the trucks “like heads of cabbage.” The column was halted near the machine-tractor repair shop, where there was an antitank ditch. The Jews were forced to lie down in the ditch and then were shot with submachine guns. Many of them were buried alive. Eyewitnesses recounted that “the earth was breathing and steaming.”¹³ According to a report of Einsatzgruppe B, 2,365 Jews were “executed” in Gomel’ in a special Aktion, which probably took place in November 1941.¹⁴

While Jews were being driven from the Monastyrek ghetto to the site of their execution, Vera Kozlova helped save Lazar Mill, from Gomel’, and his friend David, who was from Novo-Belitsa. The young woman hid the pair in the attic of her house and later provided them with women’s clothes that they used to escape safely from Gomel’ to Novo-Belitsa over the Sozh River bridge. Lazar and David managed to find local partisans and joined their unit.¹⁵

Khana Khoroshina had ended up in the ghetto with her parents and younger brother. In November 1941, she fooled the guards and found shelter with the family of her school friend Ania Dereviashkin. The Dereviashkins hid her in the daytime and at night took her to another friend, Lida Mikhalkina, who at dawn escorted her back to the Dereviashkins. This procedure continued until May 1942, when Khana got the chance to become a guide for a blind woman who was going to the Krasnogorsk raion in Briansk oblast’ of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Khana stayed there in a village until the Soviet army arrived.

In March 1942, a number of Jews were captured by the Gendarmerie in the countryside around Gomel’ and were taken to the Gomel’ prison, where they were subsequently shot by men of the Security Police.¹⁶

During 1942, Heinrich Himmler created special units known as Sonderkommando 1005, led by SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel. Their task was to reopen graves, exhume and burn the corpses, and take other steps to conceal mass burial sites.¹⁷ A detachment of Sonderkommando 1005 was active in Gomel’. Jews, POWs, and local inhabitants removed bodies from the pits and burned them in piles. Then tractors plowed up the ground, and it was sown with grass. The Red Army drove German forces out of Gomel’ on November 26, 1943, in the Gomel’-Rechitsa offensive. During the years of occupation, the population of Gomel’ had decreased from 145,217 in 1941 to 47,163 in May 1944, 32.5 percent of the pre-war level.¹⁸

When the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) arrived in Gomel’, it determined that during the occupation the Germans and their accomplices had exterminated tens of thousands of people in prisons, four ghettos, and five POW camps.¹⁹ Mass graves were discovered in the following locations: an antitank ditch on the grounds of Brilevsky Garden (2,500 victims); 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) from Gomel’ in the woods between the villages of Davidovka and Leshchinets (12,000 victims); in the woods at the 7 kilometer (4.4 mile) marker on the Rechitsa highway beyond Davidovka (1,080 victims); 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) from Gomel’ on the other side of Davidovka (5,000 victims); on the grounds of the city jail (126 victims); and on Plekhanov Street (160 victims). Many Jews were among those shot in the antitank ditch on the grounds of the machine-tractor repair shop (6,000 people).²⁰