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

Pre-1941: Shchedrin (Yiddish: Seliba), town, Poles’e oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Schtschedrin, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Shchadryn, Zhlobin raen, Homel’ voblasts’, Republic of Belarus

Shchedrin is located 48 kilometers (30 miles) west of Zhlobin. In 1926, there were 1,759 Jews living in Shchedrin.

After the German invasion on June 22, 1941, most men of military age in Shchedrin were mobilized for service in the Red Army. As the town was some distance from the railroad, it did not suffer from aerial bombardment, and because there was no organized evacuation, only a small part of the population managed to leave the town. Those who left expected to return soon. A number of Communists and sel’sovet activists stayed behind to conduct underground work in Shchedrin.

German armed forces occupied Shchedrin in July 1941, and within 10 days a local police force was recruited, made up of Belorussians and Poles who were natives of Shchedrin and the neighboring villages. Adam Rudinskii became the town’s mayor, and his deputy was a man named Kuchinskii. The senior police officials were Vladislav Semashko and Antanas Trizno. The local administration helped the Germans search for Communists and Jews and also registered the Jews.

Relations between the Jews and the Belorussians changed with the arrival of the Germans. The Jews lost their civil rights, and anyone could take their property with impunity. The keeper of the kolkhoz granary, a man named Rubinshtein, was shot for refusing to give a policeman his leather [End Page 1726] boots. Zimel’ Kimmel’man, his wife Malka, and his young daughter were hidden in the village of Solotin in the home of a peasant they knew, a man named Anan, in return for a sum of money. Anan took the money, but then at night he informed the Germans, who shot the Jews.

The Jews, 1,560 in total, remained in their homes in Shchedrin until early August 1941, when the Germans forced them all to move onto two small streets, “Sair gas” and “Bod gas,” where a ghetto was created. It was partially enclosed by barbed wire, and policemen were posted at the ghetto gates. The Germans appointed Antanas Trizno to be in charge of the ghetto. The Jews were strictly forbidden to go into the center of Shchedrin without special permission. When the blacksmith Berl inadvertently violated this ban, he was shot on the spot.¹ Several families had to share each apartment. There was no synagogue within the ghetto, so the Jews would gather to pray in their apartments.²

The most attractive girls were rounded up and taken to a brothel for the German soldiers. The Jews were ordered to wear yellow six-pointed stars on the front and back of their clothing. Not everyone had fabric of that color, and feverish searching began because the Nazis threatened to kill anyone who failed to comply with the order by a certain date. The police forced those who had committed offenses to eat sand.

The Jews had to organize their own supplies of food. They bartered with the local residents for potatoes and vegetables, and some received help from relatives and Belorussian neighbors. Each day, under escort, the Jews were led out of the ghetto to perform forced labor from dawn until dusk. They were made to work in workshops, in the gristmill, and in the sawmill; to clean cesspools and toilets; to repair roads; and to collect garbage. For performing work, a Jew received a daily ration of only 100 grams (3.5 ounces) of bread, in contrast to 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of bread for a non-Jew, even though the output quota for Jews was three times greater.³

Jews were among the Nazis’ first victims in Shchedrin, well before a large-scale Aktion took place. In July 1941, the Germans shot two men named Pishchalo and Khort, who had secretly taken cheese and dairy products from the Shchedrin creamery to the village of Shatilki, where there were still Soviet troops. Pishchalo was killed in the yard of the Kommandantur in Shchedrin, and he left behind five orphaned children. Khort was taken into a tea shop and severely lashed; then he was blindfolded and taken to the Jewish cemetery, where he was made to dig his own grave and then shot. After this, Trizno drove two Germans to the village of Uspalishche, where they murdered Khort’s wife and raped his 15-year-old daughter Sasha. Sonia Asovskaia was hanged in the yard of the creamery just after her 5-year-old son was shot before her eyes. Permission to remove her body was denied for a long time, as the authorities wanted to remind the Jews daily of the severe punishments they faced. Before the arrival of fall in Shchedrin, 17 Communists had been shot.

The son of Boris Porton came to Shchedrin in the summer of 1941 on vacation from Vitebsk, where he was studying. He was among 11 Jewish men who were forced into a shop that sold kerosene and were beaten there. Porton’s son and the shop manager, a man named Zverev, were the first to be handed spades and taken to the cemetery. When Boris Porton was told that his son had been taken away to be shot, he ran after them, crying, “Spare my son, kill me!” The Nazis killed Boris, and next they shot his son and Zverev.

Iosel’ Samardin took two grandchildren to the village of Kitin, 7 kilometers (4.4 miles) from Shchedrin, and asked friends to hide them. After the ghetto was established, the Germans announced that they would kill anyone found to be hiding Jews. Acting on a report to the authorities, the policeman Semashko discovered Samardin’s grandchildren and shot them.⁴

In December 1941, there were rumors that a German punitive detachment would be sent to Shchedrin, and people began to go into hiding. The cobbler Wol’fson was found in a haystack and stabbed with bayonets. The pharmacy manager Arkadii Kheifets, who had leg problems, was taken to the fire station and harnessed to a wagon with a barrel of water. When Kheifets fainted, they sent for his wife Sonia. She grabbed a vial of liquid and ran to her husband. They both poisoned themselves and died on the spot.⁵

The Germans planned the destruction of the ghetto for March 8, 1942. In the days before the mass shooting, the police surrounded the ghetto and began to force the Jews out of the houses. According to the testimony of eyewitnesses, the prisoners were beaten with whips, people were screaming and sobbing, and parents shielded their children with their own bodies to protect them from the blows. The Jews were herded into groups, and then, under the guard of policemen on horse back and Germans on motorcycles, they were driven into the school building. Many mothers carried their children in their arms. The cemetery grounds were cordoned off, and no Belorussians were allowed to enter.⁶ The chief of police, Mikhail Govor, and three Germans met the prisoners at the school gates and questioned them.⁷

Simultaneously, the German authorities mobilized peasants from the neighboring villages, who were ordered to dig a pit in the Jewish cemetery about 30 meters long and 5 meters wide (98 by 16 feet). On the morning of March 8, 1942, the Jews were taken in groups of 90 to 100 from the school to the cemetery, guarded by local policemen and four German soldiers.⁸ They were led to the edge of the pit, then had to undress and lie facedown in the pit in groups of 10. A German officer then killed the people with a submachine gun, firing single shots. Policemen from Parichi also participated in shooting the Jews. The Aktion ended late in the evening.

Estimates of the total number of Jewish victims murdered in Shchedrin on March 8, 1942, range from around 1,000 up to 2,000.⁹ Among the victims were a number of Jews brought to Shchedrin from neighboring villages and some refugees. After the mass shooting, the Nazis checked the registration lists of the Jews and found that 17 were missing, including Girsh and Tsilia Erenburg, Grigorii Ol’shanskii, and Sara Livshits. After two or three days, the German security forces that conducted the Aktion left Shchedrin and went to the village of Kitin. For a week, with local assistance, the police continued [End Page 1727] to hunt for escaped Jews in hiding. Tolik and Tsezik Kuchinskii rode on horseback from village to village, looking for Jews in exchange for a reward. The police arrested about 10 people, whom they killed in a common grave.¹⁰ The Germans gave most of the Jews’ clothing to Rudinskii, the town’s mayor, who sold some of the things and distributed the rest to the local policemen.¹¹

Not all of the survivors of the Aktion on March 8, 1942, escaped with their lives. Two Jewish girls froze to death near the village of Pekalichi, 7 kilometers (4.4 miles) from Shchedrin, after local residents denied them shelter. Luba was caught by 20-year-old Pavlik Prokopo vich, who had been a school classmate of hers in Shchedrin and who served in the local police in Parichi. Prokopo vich also killed the physics teacher from his school, Isaak Galerkin. (After the arrival of the Red Army, Prokopo vich was sentenced to 20 years in corrective labor camps.) Only a few Jews who escaped from the ghetto managed to join Soviet partisan units and take part in the resistance against the Germans.

Soviet forces recaptured Shchedrin in the second half of June 1944. The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) of the USSR uncovered, at a distance of 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) from Shchedrin, a mass burial site measuring 20 by 10 meters and 1.2 meters deep (66 by 33 by 4 feet). There they discovered 1,100 corpses, arranged haphazardly. On most of the victims, there was no clothing of any kind.¹² The ChGK established that in all more than 9,000 civilians, including more than 1,000 Jews, had died at the hands of the Nazis in Shchedrin and the surrounding villages during the years of German occupation.¹³