TRUDY
[End Page 1738] Pre-1941: Trudy, village, Polotsk raion, Vitebsk oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Rayon Polozk, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Polatsk raen, Vitsebsk voblasts’, Republic of Belarus
Trudy is located about 40 kilometers (25 miles) east-northeast of Polotsk. In 1926, the Jewish population was 126 (out of a total of 1,463).
Nine Jewish families were living in the village prior to the war; and in the summer and fall of 1941, 46 refugees, most probably all of them Jewish, arrived in Trudy from Polotsk. The Germans occupied the village in July. The village was run by a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur), which introduced forced labor for the Jews but did not provide them with any food. The military commandant recruited a local police force (Ordnungsdienst) made up of volunteers recruited from the local population. Yuhan Ivanovich Leiburg (an Estonian) became the head of the police in Trudy, and his deputy was Stepan Lopukhov. The local police took an active part in the persecution and murder of the Jews.
In November 1941, the Germans established a kind of ghetto in three houses.1 A non-Jewish witness Z. states that in November the mayor of the local volostnaia uprava (village authority), Kirill Kosoryga, and two leaders of the local police, Leiburg and Lopukhov, came to his house and demanded that he abandon it because Jews were to be settled there; 17 Jews were moved into Z.’s house. The witnesses interviewed by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) state that on February 4, 1942, the Germans (according to some accounts, local Kommandant Ernst Schuldes) assembled all the Jews in one house and demanded that they surrender all their valuables, promising that in return they would receive food—according to some accounts, that they would also be set free. The Jews gave up the valuables they had and received some bread from the Germans, but on February 6 they were assembled in this house again. A punitive squad, most probably not German but either local or manned by some other collaborators, arrived from Polotsk in the night, and its members got drunk in Trudy. The next morning they brought the Jews to the Riabinovka Forest, 700 meters (766 yards) south of the village of Zheltsy, and shot 76 Jews. Four non-Jews were murdered at the same time. The shooting Aktion lasted two or three hours, because the men of the squad were armed only with rifles. According to the witnesses, the perpetrators killed small children by hitting them with rifle butts or tossed them up and tried to hit them while in the air. In the evening of that day, the Germans sent local peasants to bury the bodies.2
In December 1943, the local Investigation Commission exhumed 60 corpses (of 80 buried) from the pit in the Riabinovka Forest, including the bodies of 19 children, 27 women, and 14 men.
SOURCES
The existence of an informal ghetto in Trudy is mentioned in Vladimir Adamushko et al., eds., Spravochnik o mestakh prinuditel’nogo soderzhaniia grazhdanskogo naseleniia na okkupirovannoi territorii BSSR 1941–1944 gg. (Minsk: State Committee for Archives and Documentary Collections of the Republic of Belarus, 2001), p. 101; and in Shmuel Spector and Geoffrey Wigoder, eds., The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before and during the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem; New York: New York University Press, 2001), p. 1336.
The documents of the ChGK for the Polotsk raion can be found in GARF (7021-92-221).
