ROSSASNO
[End Page 1723] Pre-1941: Rossasno, village, Dubrovno raion, Vitebsk oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Rayon Dubrowno, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Rossasna, Dubrouna raen, Vitsebsk voblasts’, Republic of Belarus
Rossasno is located a few kilometers to the northeast of Dubrovno on the southern bank of the Dnieper River. In 1939, the Jewish population of the Dubrovno raion (without the town of Dubrovno) consisted of 222 people, most of whom lived in the villages of Baevo and Rossasno. There were probably around 100 Jews living in Rossasno at the beginning of June 1941. Only part of the Jewish population remained in Rossasno at the start of the German occupation in mid-July 1941.
At first the German occupiers did not resettle the Jews into a ghetto, and the Jews continued to live in their own homes. They were forbidden to leave the limits of the village, and for this reason at least one person, a woman named Khaia, was shot by the local police in the village of Goncharovo.1
Approximately one month before the murder of the Jews of Rossasno, in early March 1942, the Jews were gathered together in the local school building, where they were held until the start of April. These were predominantly children, old people, and women. Few details are available about this confinement, but historian Gennadii Vinnitsa conjectures that the school served as a form of ghetto, as they were held there for almost one month and during that period they were guarded by the local police. Thus the ghetto served as a collection point until the Germans were ready to consign them to their deaths. On April 2, 1942, the inmates of the small ghetto in Rossasno were loaded onto sleighs and taken to Liady.2 On that day, the Jews of the Liady ghetto together with those from Rossasno were brought across the Mereia River to the Russian side, where the Germans shot them and buried them in a mass grave.3
Information from the Zonal State Archive (ZGAGO) in Orsha reveals the names of 58 of the Jews from Rossasno who were murdered. It is likely that the number of Jews killed was higher than this. The Rossiiskaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia indicates that 74 Jews from Rossasno were murdered in total.
SOURCES
A short section on the Rossasno ghetto, including the 58 victims’ names, can be found in the work by Gennadii Vinnitsa: Gorech’ i bol’ (Orsha, 1998), pp. 28–31. Of use also is the entry for “Rossasno” in Rossiiskaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia (Moscow: Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Jewish Encyclopedia Research Center, “Epos,” 2007), 6:376–377.
