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

Pre-1941: Zhlobin, town and raion center, Gomel’ oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Shlobin, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Zhlobin, raen center, Homel’ voblasts’, Republic of Belarus

Zhlobin is located 83 kilometers (52 miles) northwest of Gomel’. In 1939, 3,709 Jews (19.2 percent of the total) resided in Zhlobin.

When the war began, several hundred men eligible for military service were conscripted into the Red Army. Due to German air raids, few people managed to evacuate by train, but more than half of Zhlobin’s Jews escaped on foot towards Gomel’ before Soviet troops blew up the bridges over the Dnieper River on August 13, 1941.¹

A combat detachment of 500 men, including many Jews, defended Zhlobin tenaciously. German forces captured the town on July 3, 1941, but were driven out again 10 days later by the Soviet 63rd Infantry Corps. Only on August 14, 1941, did the Germans secure Zhlobin.²

Under German occupation, the mayor was Nikolai Zabelin, and Ivan Dombrovskii volunteered to head the town guard, selecting his 30 subordinates. Chernousov was head of the town police; Turchanovich headed the Secret Field Police (GFP); Stolypko was head of the Po liti cal Section; and Kozhemiakin headed the Investigation Section. The Shlobin Rayon police was headed by Mikhail Kashin, who commanded 150 men.³

The murder of Jews in Zhlobin began in the late summer or fall of 1941. A detachment of Einsatzgruppe B shot 31 Jews in the town in September 1941, as alleged saboteurs or plunderers.⁴

At first the Jews lived in their own homes, but they were forbidden to go to public places, use the main streets in the town, and associate with non-Jews. Ol’ga Sorkina was arrested for speaking with Russians. In October 1941, two [End Page 1750] ghettos were set up on the southern outskirts of town. The first was in the dormitory of a school for training factory and mill workers. The second was in three converted huts on the other side of the railway and a hut near the bakery. The elder of the first ghetto was an old man named Zalman; the elder of the second ghetto was Bizur, assisted by a man named Samchen. Dombrovskii registered a total of 1,145 Jews. Adults able to work were used for forced labor.⁵

Jews from surrounding towns and villages also were brought to Zhlobin. Ermolenko, the assistant mayor of Zhlobin, ordered the Rayon police under Kashin to round up the 300 Jews of Karpilovka. Initially, the Jews could take their property with them (cattle, food, and clothing), but later the cattle were taken away. The local police guarded the ghetto around the clock, in shifts.⁶

The food that people brought with them, obtained by barter or given by Belorussians, was their only means of subsistence. Generally the local population helped, without payment, “their own” Jews who were married to Belorussians, and village Jews were helped by former neighbors, but people in these categories formed only a small part of the ghetto population. Most people had to rely on illegal barter, which required great organization and trust. Sometimes it was necessary to bribe the police to turn a blind eye.⁷

The guards beat the Jews with rubber batons. It was impossible to escape from the ghetto, and sometimes the Germans and policemen beat Jews for “amusement.” During the night of December 31, 1941, and January 1, 1942, Kashin publicly shot two Jews, Ginzburg and Garelik, for attempting to escape.⁸ On February 10, 1942, Feldkommandantur 581 in Bobruisk reported that 739 Jews were residing in the Shlobin Rayon.⁹

The plan to liquidate the ghetto of Zhlobin was kept secret. There were rumors about a mass shooting, but not everybody believed them. The evening before April 11, 1942, policeman Trofim Tomkov and police chief Kashin, on the pretext of road repair work, assembled about 40 men from the village of Lebedevka with shovels. But the peasants were sent into a field, to an old antitank ditch, and ordered to dig pits. On April 12, 1941, Kashin ordered Zhlobin policemen to go at 7:00 a.m. in trucks to the ghetto, where German forces were already at work.¹⁰

Germans and local police herded the Jews out of their houses, counted them, and then “loaded” them into 30 closed trucks, 40 persons per vehicle. The column left the town and came to a halt 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) from the village of Lebedevka. The Jews were herded out of the trucks and led to the killing site, the antitank ditch. Then 20 meters (66 feet) from the ditch, the Jews were ordered to undress. Some 20 policemen cordoned off the area, while the others forced the people to remove their clothing. The shooting was directed by the assistant mayor, Ermolenko, and the chief of police, Kashin. The first to be shot were the 30 most able-bodied Jewish men. The police brought the victims to the edge of the pit, where a plank lay. The adults had to stand on the plank, and Mikhailovskii hit them with a stick on the back of the neck; as each one fell forward, the other policemen opened fire with submachine guns. The last to be killed were small children.¹¹

By 3:00 p.m. the massacre was over, and it was “suggested” that the peasants of Lebedevka cover the pit (containing around 800 corpses).¹²

The killing of the Jews of Zhlobin continued from April 12 to April 15, 1942. In the field between Zhlobin and Lebedevka, it is estimated that at least 1,200 people were shot, primarily elderly people, women, and children. According to the statement of Artem Vasil’chenkov, as the burial was in progress, a 10- to 12-year-old girl raised herself from the pit, resting on her arms, and screamed, “Finish me off or let me go!” A German noticed this, took his pistol from its holster, and killed the child with two shots. On April 14, 1942, the Jews of the village of Streshin (480 people) were killed at the same location.¹³

During the occupation, the Nazis and their collaborators killed more than 10 Jewish mothers with children from mixed marriages whose non-Jewish husbands were serving at the front. Nikolai Makei, a Belorussian, chose to die with his Jewish wife, Sara Nekhamkina, and their children, seven-year-old Vladimir and six-year-old Tamara. The Babitskii brothers and their young sister were killed, though their Jewish origin was three generations in the past.¹⁴

Quite probably, the pits near Lebedevka contain, along with the inmates of the Zhlobin and Streshin ghettos, some Jews from the neighboring villages of Krasnyi Bereg, Pirevichi, Dobrogoshcha, Staraia Rudnia, and Kazimirovo.

Few survived the liquidation of the Zhlobin ghetto. The witness Basia Palei (born 1906) was searching for food in the countryside during the shooting. When she returned, her husband and three children had been killed. El’ka Sorkina (born 1925) jumped from a truck on the way to the killing site, hid, and managed to find the partisans.¹⁵ Aleksandra Kushner helped save Nadezhda Gorevaia and her son by her Jewish husband, who was in the Red Army. She hid them in her home and later helped them reach the partisans. Boris Glakovskii (born 1941) was saved by Tina Makovskaia and her mother, Aleksandra Reviakova. The father of Boris, Semen Isaakovich, a militia officer, perished in the defense of Zhlobin in 1941. Semen’s wife, Tsilia Shaevna, and their four children (ages 1, 4, 6, and 10) were put into the ghetto. On April 12, 1942, during transport to the execution site, Tsilia managed to hand Boris to Tina, who saved him.¹⁶

On June 26, 1944, Zhlobin was liberated by troops of the 1st Belorussian Front. At the end of the occupation of Zhlobin, only about 20 percent of the pre-war population of 20,909 people remained.¹⁷ Representatives of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), visiting Zhlobin, ascertained that a total of 3,091 people were murdered in Zhlobin and the Zhlobin raion by the Nazis, without specifying whether they were Jews or non-Jews. The ChGK established 548 names of the murdered Jews from Zhlobin.¹⁸