PROPOISK (SLAVGOROD)
Pre-1941: Propoisk, town and raion center, Mogilev oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Propoisk, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); 1945: renamed Slavgorod; post-1991: Slauharad, raen center, Mahiliou voblasts’, Republic of Belarus
Propoisk is located about 112 kilometers (70 miles) north of Gomel’. According to the 1939 census, 1,038 Jews were living in Propoisk (22 percent of the total population).1
German armed forces occupied the town on July 30, 1941, approximately five weeks after their invasion of the USSR on June 22. During this period, part of the Jewish population was able to evacuate to the east, and men of eligible age were [End Page 1719] called up to the Red Army. Around 150 Jews remained in the town at the start of the occupation.
During the entire occupation, the town was controlled by a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur). The Ortskommandantur set up a town authority and a police force consisting of local residents.
Shortly after the start of the occupation, the town authority, on the orders of the Ortskommandantur, organized the registration and marking of the Jewish population. Jews were also forced to perform various kinds of heavy labor.
In August 1941, Sonderkommando 7b arrived in the town and carried out the first anti-Jewish Aktion. The Security Police officers arrested 19 Jews accused of being “instigators and Communist agitators” and shot them.2
In August 1941, an open ghetto was established in the town. German security forces and local police collaborators liquidated the ghetto in November 1941. First, on November 5, the Germans gathered all the Jewish men, took them out of town, and shot them. Then on November 14, they assembled all the Jewish women, on the pretense that they would harvest potatoes, but again they shot them all, close to the pit in which the men were buried. After this, only the children remained in the ghetto. On November 28, 1941, a woman warned the remaining children that the execution squad was on its way, but most were unable to escape or hide. Policemen rounded up the children and threw them onto a truck. Reportedly the children were then drowned in the lake.3 One source estimates the total number of Jewish victims in November as 117.4 The killings were apparently carried out by the SD, probably assisted by men of the 1st Company, 317th Police Battalion, which was stationed in Propoisk from November 1941 to March 1942.5
During the roundup, 11-year-old Vladimir Smolitskii managed to hide and subsequently survived by wandering among the villages, where various people gave him temporary food and shelter, probably assisted by the circumstance that he did not appear to be Jewish. In the fall of 1943, he was liberated by the Red Army, and despite his youth, he became the “son of a field-engineer battalion,” serving as a messenger with the troops in Romania, Hungary, and Czech o slo vaki a.6
SOURCES
Publications on the ghetto in Propoisk include the following: David Meltser and Vladimir Levin, eds., The Black Book with Red Pages (Tragedy and Heroism of Belorussian Jews) (Cockeysville, MD: VIA Press, 2005), pp. 244–245; Pamiats’: Belarus’ (Minsk: Respublikanskaia Kniha, 1995), p. 466; and Marat Botvinnik, Pamiatniki genotsida evreev Belarusi (Minsk: Belaruskaia Navuka, 2000), pp. 293, 304–305, and 312.
Relevant archival documentation can be found in the following archives: GARF (7021-88-532, pp. 4–6); and SHLA (Abt. 352 Lübeck Nr. 1.645, pp. 44–56).
NOTES
1. Mordechai Altshuler, ed., Distribution of the Jewish Population of the USSR 1939 (Jerusalem, 1993), p. 39.
2. See the report of Einsatzgruppe B on police actions from August 24 to 30, 1941. Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen DDR, Zentralarchiv, ZUV 9, vol. 31, p. 47.
3. Meltser and Levin, The Black Book with Red Pages, pp. 244–245.
4. Pamiats’ Belarus’, p. 466. GARF, 7021-88-532, pp. 4–6, gives the number of 115 Jews shot, including women, the elderly, and children.
5. Wolfgang Curilla, Die deutsche Ordnungspolizei und der Holocaust im Baltikum und in Weissrussland 1941–1944 (Ferdinand Schöningh, 2006), p. 698, citing SHLA, Abt. 352 Lübeck Nr. 1.645, pp. 44–56, statement of J.B.
6. Meltser and Levin, The Black Book with Red Pages, pp. 244–245.
