SIROTINO
Pre-1941: Sirotino, village, Sirotino raion, Vitebsk oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Rayon Sirotino, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwartiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Sirotsina, Shumilina raen, Vitsebsk voblasts’, Republic of Belarus
Sirotino is located about 45 kilometers (28 miles) northwest of Vitebsk. In 1939, the Jewish population of the Sirotino raion (without the town of Shumilino) consisted of 332 people, the bulk of whom lived in Sirotino.
On June 28, 1941, the Germans bombed Sirotino from the air. Nevertheless, there was no mass evacuation from the town. Units of the German 18th Motorized Division, 3rd Panzer Group, captured Sirotino after heavy fighting on July 10, 1941, on their advance from Polotsk to Gorodok. The town and its area were defended by the 19th Army of the Soviet Western Front. In the severe fighting, much of the town was burned.
Sirotino was included in the Rear Area, Army Group Center; it was situated in the realm of the 403rd Security Division, and Ortskommandantur 262 was established in nearby Shumilino.
Under the German occupation, the former technician Borodulin became the head of the Sirotino Rayon, and the former bookkeeper Koroshkov became Sirotino’s mayor.1
After taking over Sirotino, the Germans turned the local synagogue into a stable; they forced old Jews to burn the Torah scrolls and other religious literature in the presence of the rest of the Jews. The Jews were ordered to wear round yellow patches on their clothes.2 The Germans also introduced forced labor for Sirotino’s Jews. Some Jewish men did roadwork, including repaving a central road with cobblestones. Those Jews who were members of the former Jewish kolkhoz continued to work in the fields.
In September 1941, the Germans conducted the first Aktion in Sirotino. A unit of Einsatzkommando 9 arrived, arrested about 30 or 40 males, taking many of them from their work in the fields, and informed them that they would be sent immediately to Vitebsk for forced labor. Then the SS and the indigenous police loaded the Jewish men into two or three trucks and transported them in the direction of Vitebsk. All these men were shot; according to the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), the place of their murder was Gniloi Most, halfway between Sirotino and Shumilino.3
Most probably, it was after this first Aktion that a ghetto was established in Sirotino. The ghetto consisted of four or five ramshackle houses close to the Jewish cemetery. The Jews were densely packed into these houses. The ghetto was not surrounded with barbed wire.
The ghetto was liquidated late in the fall of 1941. On November 18, 1941 (the date is marked on the monument erected in Sirotino after the war), the Germans and indigenous police surrounded the ghetto and brought the Jews to the killing site, a ravine 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) outside the town, and shot them there. Rumors that the Jews of Sirotino would be killed began to spread in advance. Some young people, among them Ester Lupilova, managed to leave the ghetto a few days before the Aktion. Some others, among them Grigorii Skoblov, fled on the day of the massacre. According to the ChGK, the number of Jews killed in Sirotino in the two Aktions was 178.4
As evident from the survivors’ accounts, Jewish relations with non-Jews in wart ime Sirotino were rather bad. The survivor Skoblov claims that “all the people in Sirotino were traitors,” meaning that many local men volunteered to serve the Germans, and he ascribes that to the impact of collectivization: in 1930 the Jews had supported the kolkhoz, while the Belorussians had not. The survivor Lupilova, in her account, dwells on cases of robbery and abuse of Jews by local non-Jews.5
SOURCES
Sirotino ghetto survivor Grigorii Skoblov published a short article titled “Zabyt’ nel’zia” in Mishpokha 9 (2001). Another short article on the Holocaust in Sirotino by Klara Mindlina, “K istorii odnogo pamiatnika,” was published in Evrei Belarus 1 (1997). Relevant information can also be found in the book by G. Vinnitsa, Gorech’ i bol’ (Orsha, 1998).
The documents of the ChGK for the Sirotino raion can be found in GARF (7021-84-12) and in NARB (861-1-4). Survivor accounts can be found in YVA (O-3/4596 to O-3/4601).
NOTES
1. Mindlina, “K istorii odnogo pamiatnika,” p. 137.
2. Skoblov, “Zabyt’ nel’zia.”
3. YVA, O-3/4597 and O-3/4599. The Aktion is not mentioned in the Einsatzgruppen reports. Gniloi Most is mentioned as the place of the murder in the ChGK report; see GARF, 7021-84-12. No place with such a name can be found on a modern map. The same ChGK report dates the Aktion on September 24.
4. ChGK report of March 12, 1945, GARF, 7021-84-12. A similar estimate was given by Skoblov and other witnesses interviewed in 1985 (YVA, O-3/4597 and O-3/4598). The same Skoblov, in his essay “Zabyt’ nel’zia,” and Vinnitsa in Gorech’ i bol’ write about several hundred victims, an estimate that is probably too high.
5. YVA, O-3/4597 and O-3/4599. See also O-3/4596 (Beilinson).
