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

Pre-1941: Vetrino, village and raion center, Vitebsk oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Wetrino, Rayon center, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Vetryna, Polatsk raen, Vitsebsk voblasts’, Republic of Belarus

Vetrino is located about 24 kilometers (15 miles) southwest of Polotsk. Neither the 1926 population census nor that of 1939 provided a separate listing for the population of the town of Vetrino. According to the census of 1926, 737 Jews lived in the Vetrino “agricultural raion” (not congruent with the Vetrino raion of 1938). According to the 1939 census, the Jewish population of the Vetrino raion was 395 people.

Before World War II, Vetrino (with its railway station on the Polotsk-Grodno line) was a border checkpoint on the frontier with Poland. The area was well fortified. These circumstances made Vetrino a point where many refugees from the “western regions,” the areas annexed by the USSR from Poland in 1939, assembled. Judging from the partial list of victims compiled by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) in 1945, the town’s Jewish population had almost doubled, owing to the influx of refugees from the western regions before the Wehrmacht captured Vetrino.

The western part of the Vetrino raion, including the village of Vetrino, was captured by the Germans in the course of their operation to seize Polotsk between July 6 and July 11, 1941; the village of Vetrino was taken over on July 11, 1941. It was the LVII Corps of the 3rd Panzer Group that captured the area: the same corps that entered Polotsk at this time. The eastern part of the raion was captured by July 15, after the fall of Vitebsk.

Vetrino was heavily bombed from the air, mainly on June 26 and 27, 1941. However, the evacuation of the population from Vetrino failed: most of those Jews who left the village were forced to return.

Like nearby Polotsk, the Vetrino raion was in the rear area of the German 9th Army; later in the summer of 1941 it came under the authority of Rear Area, Army Group Center. It was under the authority of the Feldkommandantur 815 of the 403rd Security Division.

[End Page 1744] The ChGK names the German commandant of Vetrino as Geiger; according to this source, he was responsible for ordering the mass killing of the Jews in the village.

In the first days of the occupation, the Germans registered the Jews in Vetrino and confiscated their property, including food supplies. Forced labor was introduced for the Jews. Two weeks after the Germans arrived in Vetrino, the local mayor, Sinkevich, issued an order for the resettlement of the Jews to Polotsk. After staying in Polotsk for three days, the Jews from Vetrino were allowed to return to their homes. Most probably, the German authorities had planned to resettle the Vetrino Jews in the Polotsk ghetto, but they then abandoned this plan.

In September 1941, the Vetrino Jews were resettled into a ghetto in Vetrino, which consisted of three houses on Chkalova Street. The ghetto was surrounded with barbed wire and guarded. Locals were prohibited from having any contacts with the Jews and from giving any parcels to them, on pain of death.

On January 11, 1942, a German punitive squad came from Polotsk in two cars. The Germans and the local police formed the ghetto Jews into a column of about 30 people, escorted them to a nearby boggy area, and shot them. The pits had been dug beforehand; the bodies were buried three days later. A group of 13 Jews (the Kantor and Rabinovich families, and two unmarried women) hid in a potato cellar. They were found after the massacre of the ghetto inmates, interned in a local prison, and some days later killed in a nearby forest. According to one account given to the ChGK, it was Mayor Petrov who found and interned them.¹

In 1945, the ChGK opened the mass grave; 59 names are recorded on the list of those killed compiled by the commission, among them 14 children aged 1 to 14. Among the 59 Jews killed in 1941–1942 in Vetrino, 27 were refugees from the western regions.