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

Pre-1941: Ukhvala, village, Krupki raion, Minsk oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Uchwala, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Ukhvala, Krupki raen, Minsk voblasts’, Republic of Belarus

Ukhvala is located 118 kilometers (73 miles) north-northeast of Minsk. German armed forces occupied Ukhvala in early July 1941, two weeks after their invasion of the USSR. During that time, some Jews were able to evacuate eastward, and men of suitable age were inducted into the Red Army. About 200 Jews remained in the town at the start of the German occupation.

Throughout the occupation up until June 1944, a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) was in charge of the village. The German military administration [End Page 1739] formed a village authority and police force (Ordnungsdienst) made up of local residents.

In about mid-July 1941, German security forces conducted a first Aktion in the village in which around 80 Jewish males were arrested and shot in the nearby forest. The women, children, and old people remaining in Ukhvala were forced to move into a ghetto, for which five houses were set aside; around 30 people lived in each house. All Jews from the age of seven up were required to wear a yellow armband. The women were forced to perform various types of work in support of the German garrison: they did the German soldiers’ laundry, washed the floors in the school used to house the German garrison, and peeled potatoes for the German soldiers. The Jews themselves lived on rotten potatoes, bran, and grass. On May 4, 1942, the ghetto in the village was liquidated, and all the Jews were shot.