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

Pre-1941: Tal’ka, village, Pukhovichi raion, Minsk oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Talka, Rayon Marina Gorka, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Tal’ka, Pukhavichy raen, Minsk voblasts’, Republic of Belarus

Tal’ka is located about 75 kilometers (47 miles) southeast of Minsk. According to the 1939 census, there were 976 Jews living in the Pukhovichi raion (without the raion center, Mar’ina Gorka). Most of these Jews lived in Pukhovichi, but about 200 lived in Tal’ka, to the southeast, and a few more lived in other neighboring villages.

Units of German Army Group Center occupied the village in early July 1941. In early September, several hundred Jews from Tal’ka and the surrounding villages were concentrated in a former Soviet pioneer camp about 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) outside the village, forming a makeshift ghetto. Those who were too slow in moving into the ghetto were beaten. No food was provided to the Jews, and they were made to perform forced labor, such as road construction, tasks sometimes beyond their physical capacity. The local police who guarded the ghetto cursed the Jews. When Jewish elder Meyer Rabinovich protested about the treatment of his community, he was shot together with two other Jews.¹

In mid-September 1941, units of the German Gendarmerie arrived in Tal’ka and together with the local police surrounded the ghetto. They escorted all the Jews into a forest about 500 meters (547 yards) away and shot them into a ditch in groups of about 15. Before the shooting, the German officer made a speech condemning the Jewish population and praising the German race.

[End Page 1737] During the shooting, Raisa Surbayeva pleaded for the life of her infant, but a German Gendarme shot both her and her child. Another woman attempted to bribe the head of the local police, Kulobizian, with 300 rubles, but he took the money and shot her anyway. The property of the Jews was taken to Pukhovichi by the Gendarmerie, but the local police also stole part of it.²

According to a German Einsatzgruppen report, 222 Jews were “liquidated” in Tal’ka for “persistently spreading anti-German propaganda and terrorizing the local inhabitants with price gouging.” From Tal’ka, the same German police force went on to carry out a similar mass shooting of the Jews from the neighboring Mar’ina Gorka and Pukhovichi ghettos.³

In the records examined for this article, no mention of Jewish survivors of Tal’ka could be found.