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

Pre-1941: Liady, town, Dubrovno raion, Vitebsk oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Ljady, Dubrowno Rayon, Rear Area, [End Page 1697] Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Liady, Dobrouna raen, Vitsebsk voblasts’, Republic of Belarus

Liady is located 50 kilometers (31 miles) east-northeast of Orsha. In 1939, 897 Jews lived in Liady, making up 39.2 percent of the population.

Liady was captured by the Germans on July 18, 1941. According to the survivor Vyacheslav (Betsalel) Tamarkin, an evacuation from the town, started by the local authorities on July 14, failed because the Germans advanced rapidly, and the evacuees found themselves caught in the Germans’ rear area.¹

Liady suffered greatly in the fighting, and most of its houses were destroyed. The Nazis resettled most of the Jews into a special quarter of the town (a form of “open ghetto”), which was not fenced in; the houses of the area were crammed full of people. A Jewish Council was established. The mayor of the volost’ (administrative district) of Liady was Ostapenko.

The occupiers did not disband the “Jewish” kolkhoz, and in the words of Tamarkin, a survivor and a former kolkhoznik, “[f]ormer members of the kolkhoz ‘Nayer Lebn’ toiled now as slaves for the [German] police chief.”² Moreover, the Nazis did not force the Jewish kolkhozniks to wear the patch in the form of the Star of David on the chest and on the back, which they forced on the rest of the Liady Jews. Thus the Jewish kolkhozniks were perceived as “privileged” Jews, and it was rumored that all the Jews of Liady would be killed, but the agricultural workers would be spared.³ Sometime later, at the end of the summer, however, the Jewish kolkhozniks were also resettled into the Jewish area of the town.

There was a flour mill in Liady, and the Germans let the old Jewish millers stay there. The millers, Bogorad and Minkin, were allowed to ask the Jewish Council for whatever number of Jewish workers they “needed” to load the flour for the Germans. Although the Jews were forbidden to mill rye for themselves, and the Belorussian police and narodniki (Russian National People’s Army [RNNA] men) kept an eye on this, the mill workers managed to provide the Jews of Liady with grain.⁴

Later in the fall of 1941, the Germans drove groups of Jews, including former kolkhozniks, to forced labor: cobbling the main street of Liady with bricks. During this work, the Jews were forbidden to carry bricks in barrows; to work in gloves; to use such tools as picks, shovels, and crowbars; or even to stand up straight.⁵

Sometime in the fall of 1941, the Germans carried out their first killing Aktion; the survivor Faina Kogan (née Velikovskaia) dates it on September 27, 1941. Some days prior to this, they caught several Jewish youths (Sara Malkina, Tanya Kalner, Isaak Kuznetsov, Izya Yukhvich, and three people who were not from Liady) who had left the ghetto and gone east—according to one version, to form a partisan unit, according to another, to cross the front line. The Germans gathered the young Jewish people of the town and abused them. They forced a group of young men to crawl along the main street without using their arms and legs. Another group was sent to a nearby hollow to dig a pit there. Then they gathered all the Jews of Liady at this hollow and brought the seven Jews who had been arrested and publicly shot them in the pit.

The next morning, the Germans once more assembled all the Jews at the local Jewish cemetery. Tamarkin writes:

[T]he Nazis started sorting out people into women, men, and children. They separated the young boys from the girls, forming two columns, and brought them to the benches. They would put a girl on one bench and a boy on the other one; then they whipped them with rods. After the whipping they threw everyone into a barn…. The men of the punitive squad announced that they would free the youngsters if the Jews collected a certain amount of gold and silver valuables by the morning. They picked 29 “intellectuals” from the men’s group, took them away and shot them behind the new Jewish cemetery.⁶

In March 1942 the local police and narodniki resettled the Jews of Liady into a school building that had been prepared in advance: the windows were boarded up with planks, and the building was surrounded with barbed wire; in the corners of this fence, watchtowers were erected. The prisoners of this new “ghetto” received neither food nor water; according to an eyewitness, the people were crammed together so densely inside the building that it was impossible to lie down. Sometimes the Nazis took some people from the ghetto for work; this allowed the Jews to get some food. Typhus epidemics broke out in the ghetto, and many prisoners died.⁷

At the end of March, it was rumored in the ghetto that the Germans had driven local peasants to deepen antitank ditches on the eastern, Russian side of the Mereia River. This rumor compelled some people to flee the ghetto. On April 2, 1942, the Jews of the Liady ghetto were brought across the Mereia to the Russian side and shot there.⁸

According to the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), 1,860 Jews were killed in Liady; this is probably an exaggeration, even taking into account that some Jews were brought to Liady or came there by themselves from nearby villages and that some Jewish refugees from Poland remained in the town under the occupation.

The village of Baevo is situated 28 kilometers (17.4 miles) southeast of Dubrovno, or 13 kilometers (8.1 miles) south of Liady at the border with Russia. No ghetto was established there; the local Jews were mainly agricultural workers. In early October 1941 a “punitive squad” arrived in Baevo from Gorki (Mogilev oblast’). The squad assembled all the Jews from the village, escorted them to the Mereia River (the border with Russia), and shot them in an antitank ditch near the village of Pakhomovo.⁹ According to the ChGK, 115 Jews were killed here. The ChGK compiled a list of 34 Jewish households annihilated by the Nazis in Baevo.

A mixed Russian-Jewish family, the Bruevs, was hidden in the village. In March 1942, the Jewish mother and her three daughters of mixed parentage were transferred to the ghetto [End Page 1698] of Liady; the Russian father was left behind. Remarkably, the latter, Boris Mefodievich Bruev, managed to ransom his daughters from the Liady police and bring them back to Baevo. In another mixed family, the punitive squad murdered the Jewish mother in October 1941, but her fair-haired children were spared. In March 1942 they were also transferred to Liady.¹⁰

In Rossasno, the Jews were first assembled in the building of a local school, which was guarded by the indigenous police. On April 2, 1942, they were brought in horse-drawn sledges to Liady and killed together with the local Jews.¹¹ According to the records compiled by the ChGK, 74 Jews were killed.