KOSTIUKOVICHI
Pre-1941: Kostiukovichi, town and raion center, Mogilev oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Kostjukowitschi, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post 1991: Kas’tsiukovichy, raen center, Mahiliou voblasts’, Republic of Belarus
Kostiukovichi is located about 130 kilometers (81 miles) east-southeast of Mogilev. According to the 1939 census, there were 1,134 Jews living in Kostiukovichi, comprising 18.6 percent of the total population.
German armed forces occupied the town on August 13, 1941, approximately seven weeks after the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22. In the interim, a large part of the Jewish population was able to evacuate to the east. Men of eligible age were called up to the Red Army.
During the occupation, which lasted until September 28, 1943, a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) was established to control the town. On the orders of the German military administration, Jews were required to wear distinguishing marks and were forced to perform heavy physical labor. The Ortskommandantur set up a town administration and a police force (Ordnungsdienst) composed of local residents. The mayor of the town was Mikhail Grigorevich Borisevich, and the chief of police was Nikolay Ivanovich Roslavtsev. The town mayor registered the Jews of the town and handed over the list to the German Security Police. For his collaboration with the Germans, including his participation in the murder of the Jews, Borisevich was sentenced to death by hanging by a Soviet military tribunal at the end of the occupation.1
Very little information is available regarding the living conditions of those Jews who remained in Kostiukovichi under the German occupation. In November 1941, the director of the bank, a Jew, was shot for alleged connections with the partisans. According to two secondary sources, The Black Book with Red Pages and Pamiatniki genotsida evreev Belarusi, a ghetto existed there from the fall of 1941 until September 1942. It is likely that the Jews lived in some form of open ghetto until the mass shooting of the Jews, dated by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) in September 1942.2
On September 3, 1942, all the Jews were told that they would be traveling to Palestine and were ordered to gather on the road. They were all a short distance outside the town on the way to the Kommunary railway station when the Germans and their collaborators shot them in groups of 50 in pits prepared beforehand. Before being shot, the Jews were forced to undress down to their underwear, and policemen and Germans collected their valuables.3 According to some sources, in March 1943, another 161 Jews were shot near the rope factory. On April 14 and 15, 1943, policemen from Kostiukovichi shot another 14 Jews.
A forensic examination of the two main grave sites, conducted by the ChGK in December 1943, revealed that out of 536 corpses examined, 128 were adult males, 265 were adult females, and 143 were infants and children up to the age of 15. The investigation demonstrated that 253 victims had gunfire wounds to the head, chest, or abdomen; 23 had skull injuries made by blunt objects; 87 had wounds in their extremities; and no injuries were found on 173 corpses. These injuries indicated that many people had been killed by shooting from firearms at close distance, but others had been buried alive.4
SOURCES
Mention of a “ghetto” in Kostiukovichi can be found in the following publications: David Meltser and Vladimir Levin, eds., The Black Book with Red Pages (Tragedy and Heroism of Belorussian Jews) (Cockeysville, MD: VIA Press, 2005), pp. 267–268; and Marat Botvinnik, Pamiatniki genotsida evreev Belarusi (Minsk: Belaruskaia Navuka, 2000), pp. 292, 300, 310. Additional information on the murder of the Jews in Kostiukovichi can be found in the following publications: I.M. Shenderovich and Aleksandr Litin, Gibel’ mestechek Mogilevshchiny: Kholokost v Mogilevskoi oblasti v vospominaniiakh i dokumentakh (Mogilev: MGU im. A.A. Kuleshova, 2005); Rossiiskaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia (Moscow: Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Jewish Encyclopedia Research Center, “Epos,” 2004), 5:171–172; and Shmuel Spector and Geoffrey Wigoder, eds., The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before and during the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem; New York: New York University Press, 2001), p. 665.
Documentation on the murder of the Jews of Kostiukovichi can be found in the following archives: GARF (7021-88-39); and USHMM (RG-22.002M, reel 8).
NOTES
1. Meltser and Levin, The Black Book with Red Pages, p. 267.
2. GARF, 7021-88-39, p. 1.
3. Ibid.; Pamiats’: Belarus’ (Minsk: Resp. Kniha, 1995), p. 431. According to another source, the shooting of the Jews took place in November 1941. The perpetrators were from Einsatzkommando 8.
4. Meltser and Levin, The Black Book with Red Pages, pp. 267–268.
