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

[End Page 1674] Pre-1941: Gomel’, village, Vetrino raion, Vitebsk oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Gomel, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Homel’, Polatsk raen, Vitsebsk voblasts’, Republic of Belarus

In the village of Gomel’, located 21 kilometers (13 miles) south of Polotsk, the Jewish population in 1920 was 129 (out of a total population of 140).

The area was occupied by the German army in July 1941 and came under the administration of Rear Area, Army Group Center. In October 1941, 18 Jews, most or all of them men, were killed near the village of Sviatitsa, 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) south of Gomel’, by a German squad that had arrived from Vetrino. The victims were forced to dig their own grave. Zalman Kurman was forced to bury those killed, after which he was also killed. The rest of the Gomel’ Jews, 80 people, were assembled in three houses; they were killed in January 1942, most probably by the same unit that perpetrated the murder of the Jews in Voronichi, close to the nearby village Dvor-Gomel’ (1 kilometer [0.6 mile] north of Gomel’). The list of victims of the German occupiers in Gomel’ compiled by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) in 1945 contains the names of 93 Jews. One Jewish woman married to a non-Jew survived both massacres.