OZARICHI
Pre-1941: Ozarichi, town, Domanovichi raion, Poles’e oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Osaritschi, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Azarychy, Kalinkavichy raen, Homel’ voblasts’, Republic of Belarus
Ozarichi is located 120 kilometers (75 miles) west of Gomel’. The 1939 census indicated that 1,059 Jews lived in Ozarichi, or 46.9 percent of the total population.
German armed forces occupied the settlement in the second half of August 1941. In the weeks following the German invasion on June 22, part of the Jewish population was able to evacuate to the east. Men of eligible age were called into the Red Army or enlisted voluntarily. Probably around one third of the pre-war Jewish population remained in Ozarichi at the start of the German occupation.
During the entire course of the occupation, a German military administration was in charge of the settlement. The local commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) created a local administration and an auxiliary police force recruited from local residents. In the summer and fall of 1941, the German military administration imposed a series of anti-Jewish measures in Ozarichi. Jews were forced to wear yellow patches in the shape of a star, they were obliged to perform forced labor, and they were forbidden to trade or speak with non-Jews.
By October 1941, the German authorities had established a ghetto on a part of one street in Ozarichi, which (according [End Page 1714] to historian Marat Botvinnik) was surrounded with barbed wire. The Jews in the ghetto were unable to buy food and suffered from hunger. Belorussians sometimes came at night and brought food, such as potatoes or bread, for the Jews. Some Jews from other places were also incarcerated in the Ozarichi ghetto. Forced labor included cleaning the Germans’ vehicles; if they were not spotless, some of the workers might be shot immediately. Some children from the ghetto were taken to a nearby hospital in order to give blood for use, presumably, by the German army. Jews in the ghetto tried to help each other as best they could, and some of those who died were buried secretly according to Jewish ritual.1
In the winter of 1941–1942, the Jews suffered from the cold. By this time, Jews were aware of the mass shootings in other places, and some planned to escape. Jewish survivors recall that the local policemen were brutal, robbing them and beating anyone who tried to escape. The cruelest policeman was known as Senka. “He was ready to kill anybody for moonshine and tried to gain as much favor with the Germans as he could.”2 In February 1942, Abram Volfson and his sister fled the ghetto, encouraged by a resistance fighter named Taras, who came periodically to the ghetto. Efim Golod, who was nearly blown up by a mine when collecting weapons for the local police, managed to escape by running away as he was being escorted to the site of the mass shooting in March 1942.3
The Germans liquidated the ghetto on March 3, 1942, when all the Jewish inmates were shot near the Jewish cemetery.4 The shooting was apparently carried out by a detachment of Einsatzkommando 8. The precise number of Jewish victims is unknown, but it was probably several hundred. Based on the list of names prepared by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), at least 263 people were murdered.5 In February 1942, there were also shootings of Jews in nearby villages. In the village of Davydovka, 74 Jews were shot, and 12 Jews were shot in the village of Semenovichi.6 Another source indicates that some Jews from Ozarichi were among 133 Jews murdered in Karpilovka in late March or early April 1942 by members of Infantry Regiment 727, following an antipartisan sweep through the region.7
Estimates of the number of Jewish victims in Ozarichi may have been complicated by the existence of three Wehrmacht internment camps for evacuated civilians there in March 1944, in which the appalling conditions resulted in the rapid deaths of several thousand people, including many women and children.
SOURCES
Information about the ghetto in Ozarichi 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. 258–261; V. Smoliar, “Zhizn’ i smert’ Beni Matiuka,” Mishpokha (Minsk), no. 2 (1996): 79–80; 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. 958; and Marat Botvinnik, Pamiatniki genotsida evreev Belarusi (Minsk: Belaruskaia Navuka, 2000), p. 220.
On the Wehrmacht camp established in 1944, see, for example, Nicholas Terry, “The German Army Group Center and the Soviet Civilian Population, 1942–1944: Forced Labor, Hunger, and Population Displacement on the Eastern Front” (Ph.D diss., King’s College, University of London, 2005), pp. 247–257; and Vladimir Adamushko et al., eds., Handbuch der Haftstätten für die Zivilbevölkerung auf dem besetzten Territorium von Belarus 1941–1944 (Minsk: State Committee for Archives and Documentary Collections of the Republic of Belarus, 2001), p. 111.
Relevant documentation can be found in the following archives: BA-MA (RH 26-707/5); GARF (7021-91-12); NARA; USHMM; and VHF (# 312 and 51237).
NOTES
1. VHF, # 312, testimony of Abram Volfson, and # 51237, testimony of Efim Golod.
2. “Efim Golod, Ozarichi Ghetto Prisoner,” in Meltser and Levin, The Black Book with Red Pages, pp. 258–261.
3. VHF, # 312 and 51237.
4. Meltser and Levin, The Black Book with Red Pages, p. 261; Botvinnik, Pamiatniki genotsida evreev Belarusi, dates the ghetto liquidation in February 1942. At the end of October 1943, the corpses were burned. This source gives the figure of 6,000 Jews in the ghetto, which is clearly too high.
5. GARF, 7021-91-12, pp. 98–100.
6. Ibid., pp. 32–33 and reverse side.
7. BA-MA, RH 26-707/5.
