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

Pre-1941: Kolyshki, village, Liozno raion, Vitebsk oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Kolischki, Rayon Liosno, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Kalyshki, Liozna raen, Vitsebsk voblasts’, Republic of Belarus

Kolyshki is located about 50 kilometers (31 miles) east of Vitebsk. Estimating from available census data for 1939, there were roughly 420 Jews living in Kolyshki on the eve of the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

Units of the German V Army Corps, 9th Infantry Army, occupied the Liozno area in mid-July 1941. Rayon Liosno became part of Rear Area, Army Group Center. There was no significant evacuation from Kolyshki, but some Jews managed to leave; at the same time, some refugees from other places, including Vitebsk and Ianovichi, were stranded in the village just at the moment the Germans arrived.

There was no formal ghetto in Kolyshki. Many Jewish houses were burned down during the fighting, and the small Jewish population of the village gathered together in a few intact Jewish houses. According to survivors, the Germans knew which houses were Jewish because non-Jewish boys showed them; Jewish houses were marked with distinctive symbols. The Germans ordered the Jews to wear yellow patches on their clothes; some witnesses state that the order was issued the day after the Germans entered the village,¹ while others date this order in August.² The Germans also confiscated all the cattle from the Jews.

Witnesses recollect the first months of the German occupation as a period of incessant robbery. Both the Germans and the local police (politsais) robbed the Jews. Everything could be taken away: food, clothes, matzot that remained after Passover, even Soviet state loan bonds.³ It was hard to distinguish organized confiscation from primitive robbery.

Some Jews were killed in the first months of the occupation. According to a survivor’s account, a rather aged Jew was killed during the first days on the pretext that he was an arsonist who had set some houses in Kolyshki on fire. He was killed in the morning; the Germans who came to his home waited for him to finish his morning prayer, then took him out and killed him. (The witness Sofya Gorelik calls him [End Page 1684] Daniil Pudovik; according to her, they forced him to dig a pit, then stunned him with a shovel and buried him alive.)⁴ The survivor Raisa Khamaida’s father, Abram, was also killed by the Germans. Raisa recollects: “They came to our home and said: ‘Give us some tobacco.’ … B ut did we have tobacco? They brought my father to the courtyard—it was December 1941—and forced him to run around the house, and they beat him with rifle butts until he dropped dead.” The Nazis also killed the mentally ill daughter of the teacher Lazar Shnol, as well as a certain Velvele Merzlyak.⁵ In October, six Jews (according to other versions, four or five) made expeditions from Kolyshki into the countryside to barter items for food and were killed by some Germans they met.⁶

On February 9, 1942, a Soviet reconnaissance unit appeared in Kolyshki, and some days later some of the Jews left Kolyshki. The survivor Sofya Gorelik says: “After several days the reconnaissance men gathered us and said: ‘We shall be triumphant, but there will be fighting here.’ We asked: ‘May we leave with you?’ The commander said: ‘That is the reason why I called you here.’ And he explained that everyone must get packed and leave for Ponizov’e immediately.” The majority of Jews left for the Ponizov’e village, which was 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) northeast, in Russia. Those evacuated stayed in Ponizov’e until March and then were evacuated farther to the rear. The same witness said: “We lived several days in Ponizov’e, and the district party committee instructor, or somebody else, gathered us and told us the same things that the scouts in Kolyshki had said: ‘We shall be triumphant, but there will be fighting here, and nobody knows who will be here tomorrow,’ and so on. ‘You must go, and especially persons of Jewish extraction; go, we shall give you transportation.’ ”⁷

Not all the Jews left with the Red Army in February 1942; unfortunately, some remained in Kolyshki (even Sofya Gorelik recollects that she, her aunt, and her cousin required considerable effort to convince her mother to leave Kolyshki). On March 17, 1942, a mixed German-Belorussian squad appeared in Kolyshki. The men were dressed in white camouflage cloaks; thus they managed to surround the village and enter it unnoticed. The men drove the Jews out of their houses and set the houses on fire. Some Jews were killed during the roundup; according to a survivor, the Nazis burned children of the Rabinovich family alive in a bonfire in the center of the village. The rest were escorted in the direction of Liozno and killed, most probably in the Adamenki Ravine. The number of victims is unclear; the list compiled by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) gives 148 names of Jews killed; it is unclear whether the list is complete. The roundup in Kolyshki was carried out hastily, and some Jews managed to evade it. Thus, the survivor Olga Notkina says that the politsais saw them but did not touch them because, most probably, they took them for non-Jewish marauders.⁸

Before the war, in 1938, Kolyshki was the site of one of the most infamous antisemitic incidents in the Belorussian SSR (documents from a journalistic investigation of the incident can be found in the archive of the Belorussian Yiddish newspaper Oktiabr). Nevertheless, some Kolyshki survivors attest that they were rescued by their non-Jewish neighbors. For example, Raisa Khamaida and her mother survived because their neighbors told the Germans that they were not Jews but Russian refugees. There were also other cases of Jews being rescued by local inhabitants.⁹