OSVEIA
[End Page 1713] Pre-1941: Osveia, town and raion center, Vitebsk oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Osweja, Rayon center, Rear Area, Army Groups North, then Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Nord/Mitte); post-1991: Asveia, Verkhniadzvinsk raen, Vitsebsk voblasts’, Republic of Belarus
Osveia is located 75 kilometers (47 miles) northwest of Polotsk. In 1939, 350 Jews lived in the town, making up 15.1 percent of the population. The Jewish population of the Osveia raion (without the town of Osveia) was fewer than 100 people.
The Osveia raion, including the town of Osveia, was taken over by the forces of Army Group North (not Army Group Center, like the rest of the Vitebsk region). On July 5, 1941, the Red Army abandoned all the area west of the Sarianka River. The forces of the II Army Corps of the 16th Army took over the area to the north of the Zapadnaia Dvina bend, including the town of Osveia, mainly on July 12, 1941.
From August until December 1941, the Osveia raion was under the authority of Rear Area, Army Group North; it was within the area controlled by the 281st Security Division, stationed mainly in Latvia. At the beginning of December 1941, the raion was transferred to the authority of Rear Area, Army Group Center, and became part of the realm of the 403rd Security Division.
At the start of the occupation, the German authorities did not resettle the Jews into a ghetto. They introduced the wearing of yellow Magen Davids (Jewish Stars) and forced labor, initially making the Jews clear the debris that remained after the heavy bombing and conduct repair work on the roads.1
According to the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), in February or March 1942 the Germans assembled the Jews of Osveia in a “camp” (ghetto), and five days later they shot them in pits that had been dug in a town park. According to one survivor, a Belorussian policeman whose mother worked at the Kommandantur warned him and some other Jews about the impending Aktion, and several young people succeeded in fleeing from the ghetto.2
The witnesses interrogated by the ChGK give the number of Jews killed as 650, which seems to be an exaggeration. A list of the victims compiled by the ChGK contains the names of 149 Jews.3 The book Pamiats’: Verkhniadzvinski raion, volume 1, gives a different number of Jews killed in the Osveia park: 459. A list of the victims of the Osveia ghetto given in the book contains 178 names, “assembled from all extant documents”;4 25 of them share the surname of Gelfand.
Elsewhere in the raion, no fewer than 37 Jews, members of the Karl Marx kolkhoz, were killed in Kokhanovichi, 16 kilometers (10 miles) south of Osveia (or 16 kilometers [10 miles] northeast of Drissa).5
SOURCES
The ghetto in Osveia is mentioned in V.I. Adamushko et al., eds., Handbuch der Haftstätten für Zivilbevölkerung auf dem besetzten Territorium von Belarus 1941–1944 (Minsk: State Committee for Archives and Documentary Collections of the Republic of Belarus, 2001), p. 99.
Documentation on the fate of the Jews of Osveia under German occupation can be found in the following archives: GARF (7021-92-218); and YVA (O-3/6907).
