LIPEN’
[End Page 1700] Pre-1941: Lipen’ (formerly Kholui), village, Osipo vichi raion, Mogilev oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Lipen, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Lipen’, Asipovichy raen, Mahiliou voblasts’, Republic of Belarus
Lipen’ is located 40 kilometers (25 miles) northwest of Bobruisk. According to the 1926 census, Lipen’ had a Jewish population of 441. By 1941, migration had slightly reduced that number.
Units of Army Group Center captured the village in early July 1941, two weeks after Germany’s invasion of the USSR. During this intervening period, some of the Jews managed to evacuate to the east, while men eligible for military service were drafted into the Red Army. Slightly more than 200 Jews remained in the village at the start of the German occupation.
During the entire occupation period, from July 1941 to June 1944, a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) governed the village. The German military administration appointed a village head and a police force (Ordnungsdienst) recruited from among local residents.
Soon after the occupation of Lipen’, the Ortskommandantur ordered the registration of the Jews, who were made to wear yellow stars. They were also required to perform various kinds of forced labor. In August 1941, all the Jews in the village were moved into a ghetto consisting of several houses.
Descriptions of the ghetto by two Jewish survivors present certain inconsistencies. According to Vladimir Kasperskii, the ghetto was on one street that ran from the club to the river. It was surrounded by a fence and guarded by the local police.1 Sarra Kossperskaia, on the other hand, who was married to a Russian with whom she continued to live, maintains that the whole village was a ghetto and that it was not fenced in. She states that there was no heat, little food, and no ration cards. There were also a few Jewish refugees in the ghetto from places farther to the west. Local policemen entered the ghetto and robbed the Jews.2
The ghetto in Lipen’ existed for about two months. German forces liquidated the ghetto in October 1941 by shooting all the Jews, a total of more than 200 people. Some Jews tried to hide at the time of the roundup, but most were uncovered with the help of the local police. The Jews were shot close to the Svisloch’ River.
SOURCES
Publications regarding the fate of the Jews of Lipen’ during the Holocaust include the following: Shmuel Spec-tor 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. 734; Marat Botvinnik, Pamiatniki genotsida evreev Belarusi (Minsk: Belaruskaia Navuka, 2000), p. 304; “Lipen’,” in Rossiiskaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia, vol. 5 (Moscow: Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Jewish Encyclopedia Research Center, “Epos,” 2004).
Documentation on the persecution and murder of the Jews of Lipen’ can be found in these archives: GAMO; GARF (7021-82-5); NARB; RTKIDNI (69-9-14); USHMM (RG-22.002M, reel 24); and VHF (# 32020 and 44150).
