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

[End Page 1730] Pre-1941: Shumilino, town and raion center, Sirotino raion, Vitebsk oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Schumulino, Rayon Sirotino, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Shumilina, raen center, Vitsebsk voblasts’, Republic of Belarus

Shumilino is located about 45 kilometers (28 miles) northwest of Vitebsk. In 1939, 376 Jews lived in the town, making up 16.4 percent of the population.

German armed forces of the 3rd Panzer Group captured Shumilino on or about July 10, 1941. Shumilino was included within the Rear Area, Army Group Center, in the realm of the 403rd Security Division, and its Ortskommandantur 262 was established in Shumilino. Only a few Jewish families succeeded in fleeing the advancing German forces.

Jews were ordered to wear yellow patches on their clothes. The ghetto was established on Pionerskaia Street sometime in August 1941. A Jewish survivor recalls:

During the first weeks [of the German occupation] nobody touched us…. After something like a month … they set aside about 10 houses inside the town limits, where there is a cemetery now, resettled the [Belo-]Russians out of the area, and drove all the town’s Jews together into this place. So a ghetto appeared. It was surrounded with barbed wire. Old cans and bottles were hung on the wire, and if somebody touched it, they rang. A guard with a machine gun sat on a watchtower, and he opened fire on everybody who came close to the wire.¹

Several Jewish families were settled into each house.

According to a commission report prepared by the Red Army, all the Jews of Shumilino were herded into a ghetto, which Russians were forbidden to enter and the Jews were forbidden to leave. The Jews were given nothing to eat. The Germans hanged the town elder and put a sign on his corpse, “This is how the Russian people treat saboteurs.”²

There was, however, a natural exchange through the barbed wire: Jews exchanged their belongings and valuables for bread and potatoes. The guards—local police—turned a blind eye to the exchanges but demanded their share of the valuables and items bartered. Some children succeeded in crawling under the wire and went to the villages to barter. Forced labor at the local railway station was imposed on the Jews.³ The survivor Yakov Magelnitzkii stated that there were Jewish policemen in the ghetto and that the Germans very rarely entered the ghetto.⁴

Forced labor was introduced for the Jewish men. According to the same witness, one day the men did not return from their work, so it was clear to the other ghetto inmates that they had been murdered by the Nazis.⁵ In November 1941, rumors spread that all the Jews would be killed. It was probably the local policemen (politsais) who started these rumors. Two old men hanged themselves in the ghetto.

The ghetto was liquidated on November 19, 1941. Germans and local police took the Jews from the ghetto to the site of the former peat-cutting facility “Dobeevskii Mokh” and shot them there. The number of people killed is unclear.⁶

The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) report of March 12, 1945, states that 493 “Soviet citizens, predominantly from the Jewish population,” were killed in the Sirotino raion.⁷ It is estimated that probably around 300 Jews were killed in Shumilino.

Yakov Magelnitzkii managed to escape at the time of the liquidation and wandered from one hiding place to another; though local inhabitants were generally helpful, they would not allow him to stay for long periods. After staying for a while with the Pyatnitskoye family, he joined the Soviet partisans in the fall of 1942.⁸