LENINO
Pre-1941: Lenino (until 1918, Romanovo), village, Gorki raion, Mogilev oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Rayon Gorki, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Lenina, Horki raen, Mahiliou voblasts’, Republic of Belarus
Lenino is located about 75 kilometers (47 miles) to the northeast of Mogilev. In 1923, under the Soviets, the Jewish population of Lenino was 498, of whom 41 worked as artisans, while most others were engaged in agriculture.
German forces of Army Group Center captured the village in the second week of July 1941. According to one witness, about 70 Jews were murdered by the Germans and the politsais (local police) shortly after the arrival of German forces. The Jews who managed to flee from Lenino, as well as some who lived in nearby villages, were then assembled in Lenino (about 60 Jews altogether) and confined in two houses, as a form of small ghetto; they were subsequently transferred to Gorki, probably in the fall of 1941, and murdered there together with the local Jews. Three Jewish “specialists” continued to work for the Germans in Lenino until the summer of 1942, when they were also killed.1 During the occupation, probably about 140 Jews from Lenino and the surrounding villages were murdered by the German occupying forces and their collaborators.
SOURCES
Information on Lenino can be found in 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. 722; and in Uladzimir M. Liushyts, Ishlo u byassmertse Haradotskae Heta (Orsha, 1995) pp. 7–8.
There is a testimony regarding the fate of the Jews in Lenino at YVA (O-3/4666).
NOTES
1. Stefan Yevmenenko, YVA, O-3/4666.
