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

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

[End Page 1676] Gorodok is located 38 kilometers (24 miles) north-northwest of Vitebsk. In 1939, 1,584 Jews lived in the town, making up 21.7 percent of the population. The Jewish population of the Gorodok raion (without the town of Gorodok) constituted 136 people.

German forces (18th Motorized Division of the LVII Army Corps of the 3rd Panzer Group) occupied Gorodok on July 11, 1941.¹ Before its capture, the Luftwaffe bombed the town heavily on July 4. This early air raid, as well as the fact that Gorodok was situated on a railway, precipitated the evacuation and mass flight of much of the town’s population, including many Jews. After the war, Gorodok had a comparatively large Jewish population,² which probably indicates that quite a number of Jews successfully left the town.

Gorodok was administered by Rear Area, Army Group Center; it was situated in the realm of the 403rd Security Division and Ortskommandantur 763, which was subordinated to Feldkommandantur 815. The names of the local collaborators of the Nazis are not well documented. A survivor stated that the registration of the Jews in Gorodok was carried out by someone called Binya Shklyar; it is unclear whether he was the chairman of the Jewish Council (Judenrat).

Shortly after the beginning of the occupation, the German authorities registered all the Jews, and then they introduced the wearing of yellow patches on their clothes and forced labor. Eyewitnesses recollect that some labor tasks were of a purely humiliating character. For example, one day the Jews of Gorodok were forced to pull up grass in the town using their bare hands. On another occasion, according to an eyewitness account, the Germans organized the systematic robbery of the Jews. A witness recalls: “Germans, together with local policemen [politsais] entered the more affluent Jewish houses, dragged out their property, showed the [Belo-] Russians the Jewish belongings, and suggested that people take some of it; but the best things were taken by [the Germans] themselves.” According to the witness, some Belorussians took Jewish possessions, but others refused.³ The same witness recalls a pogrom that took place in the town: “A real pogrom, I knew about such things only from books!” ⁴ At the same time, according to another witness, the Germans did not close the synagogue in Gorodok initially, and some Jews gathered for prayer there; some others, however, feared that the Germans would take them from the synagogue and gathered for a minyan in a private house on Karl-Marx Street.⁵

From July 20 to the middle of August 1941, a subunit (Teilkommando) of Sonderkommando 7a was based in Gorodok. In charge of the Teilkommando was Obersturmführer Richard Foltis of the SD. During this period the Jewish Council was established. Sonderkommando 7a, under the command of Dr. Walter Blume, organized the first, “partial” shooting of Jews in the town in the first half of August. On the day of the Aktion, the Teilkommando, reinforced by other men from Sonderkommando 7a, assembled 120 to 200 people, healthy men and several young and healthy women, under the pretext of assigning them to construction work. The people were told to report to the assembly place with shovels. The order did not alarm the Jews (since forced labor was a routine occurrence). Once the people had assembled, the Germans escorted them to the village of Berezovka (1.5 kilometers [about 1 mile] south of the town) and shot them there. During the Aktion, a Jewish man was shot while trying to escape.⁶ Only after this first shooting did the Germans establish a ghetto in Gorodok for the remaining Jewish population.

The ghetto was situated in the center of town, on a slope, a steep bank of the Gorozhanka River. It was fenced on three sides with barbed wire, and on the fourth side, the river formed its boundary. According to witnesses, the fence was erected within two weeks of the Jews being resettled into the ghetto area. At the highest point of the ghetto fence, a watchtower was built, and a guard watched over the ghetto. The ghetto consisted of a building belonging to a former technical college (tekhnikum) and several houses. The tekhnikum building was in poor condition: its windowpanes were broken, as were the stoves.

The ghetto prisoners did not receive any food. Some children managed to get through the barbed wire and bring some food into the ghetto. However, contagious diseases soon spread among the ghetto population. Thus there was a high rate of mortality inside the ghetto. The corpses were taken from the rooms to a corridor. From time to time, the Germans took out small groups of Jews and murdered them. For example, several days after the ghetto was established, on one morning, the Germans took 20 Jews out of the ghetto and shot them.

At some stage, the ghetto prisoner Sonya Dobromyslova, “Di Sheine,” in an attempt to stop the epidemics, succeeded in persuading the town’s authorities to permit the ghetto’s Jews to wash themselves in the public bath adjacent to the ghetto perimeter and to cleanse themselves of lice. The Jews washed themselves, but after a few days, local policemen entered the ghetto and took a rather large group of Jews to be shot.

On October 14, 1941, the Gorodok ghetto was liquidated; its remaining 394 inhabitants were shot on the pretext of the danger of epidemics spreading to the non-Jewish population.⁷ On that day at 4:00 a.m., the Germans and the local police escorted the remaining Jews through the Volkov Posad area of the town to the forest at the Vorob’evy Hills. The route was exhausting (the path went uphill), and many ghetto inmates were old, and all were emaciated, so the guards shot some Jews on the way. At the Vorob’evy Hills, members of the SS shot the Jews in pits that had been dug beforehand. After the mass shooting, the ghetto was burned down.