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

Pre-1941: Parichi, town and raion center, Poles’e oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Paritschi, Rayon center, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Parychy, Svetlahorsk raen, Homel’ voblasts’, Republic of Belarus

Parichi is located 115 kilometers (72 miles) west-northwest of Gomel’. In 1939, there were 1,881 Jews out of 3,736 inhabitants of Parichi (50.4 percent of the total) and another 1,750 Jews (3.29 percent of the rural population) living in the villages of the Parichi raion.

There was no organized evacuation from Parichi after the German invasion began on June 22, 1941. Attempting to leave the town on foot was a hazardous choice in view of the rapidly advancing German forces and the danger of punishment by the Soviet authorities. The only other option was to get a ride aboard a barge on the Berezina River, which would then proceed slowly down the Dnieper River towards Ukraine. Older people recalled the relatively good behavior of the Germans in 1918. Relying on this assessment, many people stayed in Parichi to protect their homes and property. It is estimated that more than half of the Jewish population remained in Parichi at the start of the German occupation.¹

By June 30, 1941, German tanks had forced their way across the Berezina to the north, and on July 5 they entered [End Page 1715] Parichi for the first time. Initially, the German forces were thrown back by Soviet resistance on July 11, but on July 21 the Germans occupied the town. Resistance within the Parichi raion continued a few days longer; the 4th Soviet Army abandoned the line of the Berezina only on August 13, 1941.

By mid-August, the Parichi raion was completely occupied by German forces. A German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) assumed control over the local administration (in the fall of 1941, it was OK I(V)324). Parichi lay within the jurisdiction of the 203rd Security Division based in Bobruisk. Military commandant’s offices were also established in the villages of Shatilki and Chernin. Officials of the Ortskommandantur in Parichi put those arrested into a local school building as a makeshift prison, and they requisitioned bread and other agricultural products for the German army.²

The mayor, Nekrashevich, was in charge of the local administration. The administration had separate departments for political affairs, agriculture, finance, commerce, industry, road construction and transportation, medicine, and veterinary matters. Yakov Mishutin headed the general administration in Parichi, while also taking charge of the department of commerce. The sel’sovets were transformed into military districts and governed by local village headmen (starshiny). Each headman had at his disposal a clerk and a police detachment of between 20 and 50 men. Village elders (starosty) were appointed in the villages, each with 2 to 5 policemen for assistance. Nekrashevich himself organized the police in Parichi, and in August 1941, there were 15 people who signed up as the first volunteers. Ivan Krik, a former accountant, became the chief of police. The policemen helped the Feldgendarmerie of the German army in searches for former Soviet activists, party workers, and members of the combat battalion. They also conducted the registration of the Jewish population.³

Among the policemen, there were former neighbors, acquaintances, and relatives of the Jews. These people did not always help the victims. Before he joined the police squad, for example, Ivan Ments killed his Jewish wife, Fridl Nisman, and their two children. Then there was the Jewish teacher Masha Papernaia and two of her children, who hid with relatives in the nearby village of Davydovka. She was denounced to the Germans by her own mother-in-law.⁴

Until September 1941, the Jews lived in their own homes and were required to perform labor, but there were no large-scale killings. According to the report of the investigative commission of the Red Army, “in order to separate the Jews from the rest of the population the Germans made them wear a six-pointed Star [of David].” At the end of September 1941, the Ortskommandantur ordered all the Jews to be resettled on Bobruiskaia Street, which was surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by local policemen. Estimates of the number of Jews confined within the ghetto range from 1,100 to 1,500.⁵

Jews were taken out each day for forced labor, and when there was no work to be done, the authorities made them move sand around on the bank of the Berezina River. The Germans did not feed the Jews, and according to survivor accounts, famine was an even greater torment than fear, because one could never get used to starvation. People dreamed of being able to eat. The most valuable products were flour and fat. There were no livestock, poultry, and other domesticated animals in the ghetto. No one ate meat or fruit; occasionally there were some carrots, potatoes, or cabbages, which enabled the ghetto prisoners to cook vegetable soup. Bones were warmed up after they had been salvaged from the trash in the German mess hall, and Jews extracted any fat they could find to prepare a jellied broth, which they ate or used for barter.⁶

According to a report by Ortskommandantur I(V)324: “on October 18, 1941, a security command of the SD in Bobruisk appeared in Parichi and liquidated the Jews living here.”⁷ The German security forces appeared in the streets, armed with rifles and whips and accompanied by the local police. They rounded up all the Jews in the ghetto and assembled them under close guard at the former hotel, where the Ortskommandantur was based. The chief of the local police Krik directed his men to “fish out” the Jews.⁸

The prisoners were then loaded onto trucks and transported in groups to the vicinity of Bol’shaia Luzha, 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from Parichi between the villages of Vysokii Polk and Belitsa. Some of the Jewish men were ordered to dig a ditch. When they had finished, they had to undress and climb down into the mass grave, where they were shot. After them came a line of women, children, and the elderly. At first, the murderers lined the people up in rows in the ditch and shot them using automatic fire. Then they put them on the ground and shot them, finishing off the wounded with shovels. The mass shooting began at 7:00 a.m. and continued until the evening. The report of Einsatzgruppe B stated that a “special Aktion” was conducted against the Jews of Parichi, as they displayed a hostile attitude towards the Germans and had close links to the partisans. In the course of the Aktion, 1,013 male and female Jews were shot.⁹

The Germans spared the boot maker M.V. Kaplan and his family from the mass shooting, as he was a master craftsman. He spoke fluent German and thus also functioned as a translator. The Germans shot him and his family in 1943. All the belongings of the Jews were confiscated. The Feldgendarmerie and officials from the Ortskommandantur searched the empty houses of the Jews and collected some 7,000 rubles in cash and more than 18,000 rubles in bonds, which were to be forwarded on to the Reich Treasury War Booty Office in Berlin.¹⁰ The department of commerce in the Parichi town administration assumed responsibility for the distribution of less valuable materials such as clothes, which were sold for the benefit of the Rayon Paritschi administration.¹¹

In February and March 1942, the 40 men of the punitive detachment shot Jews in the various settlements of Rayon Paritschi, principally: in Kovchitsy (318 people), Shatilki (351 people), Pechishche (82 people), and Davydovtsy (129 people). The remaining possessions of these Jews were also looted.¹² [End Page 1716]

In March 1944, the Germans attempted to cover up the crimes. They ordered the exhumation of the corpses, then poured tar and flammable material on them and burned them in bonfires.¹³

Only a handful of Parichi’s Jews were able to survive the German occupation. On October 18, 1941, as the Jews were being transported to the killing site, the neighboring Belorussians began shouting that 12-year-old Boris Gorelik was Russian, because his father was married to a non-Jewish woman. Availing herself of the opportunity, Musia Papernaia, the grandmother of Boris, snatched her grandson from the line. He then ran into the forest.¹⁴

Also on that day, 11-year-old Emma Igol’nikova and her mother could find no room in an overcrowded truck. The policemen ordered them to wait for the next convoy. The mother helped her daughter climb over a fence. At that moment, a submachine gun round was fired, killing the mother. Emma ran away and hid in the village with friends of her parents until January 1942. Then she encountered partisans who were foraging, and she joined the partisan detachment.¹⁵ In the Parichi raion, two families—those of N. Gaishun from the village of Kovchitsy and Mariia Chaplinskaia from Parichi—have been recognized by Yad Vashem for saving Jews.

Elka Steinbuk ended up in the last line of prisoners being taken to their deaths. At the pits, she was only lightly wounded in the arm and pretended to be dead. When the executioners left, she escaped from under the corpses and made her way to the hamlet of Sakirits. Then she lived with the peasants, passing as an “Aryan” until eventually she was denounced.¹⁶

The Soviet army liberated Parichi on June 26, 1944. The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) determined in April 1945 that during the occupation of Parichi and the Parichi raion (which included the towns Kopchitsy, Shatilki, Shchedrin, and Pechishche and the villages Krupki, Ala, Shupeika, and Malmony), there were 3,271 people murdered, including 1,728 women and 862 children.¹⁷ In the ChGK documents, the nationality of the victims was not specified.