KRASNYI
Pre-1941: Krasnyi, town and raion center, Smolensk oblast’, RSFSR; 1941–1943: Krasnij, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Krasnyi, Russian Federation
Krasnyi is located about 50 kilometers (31 miles) southwest of Smolensk. In 1939, there were about 100 Jews living in Krasnyi.
Units of German Army Group Center occupied Krasnyi on July 13, 1941. The office of a German military commandant (Ortskommandantur) administered the town. The commandant appointed a Russian mayor and a local Russian police force (Ordnungsdienst), which was designated by armbands and armed with rifles.
On July 26, 1941, the commandant called the residents of the town to a meeting and announced that anyone who wanted to could move into a house belonging to a Jew and that all Jews had to obey the orders issued by the German Army. Soon after this German forces entered Jewish apartments, beating the inhabitants and taking their boots.
On August 8, 1941, soldiers of a German Death’s Head Unit (Totenkopfverband) arrested Boris Semenovich Glushkin and humiliated him. The next day they announced that he would be publicly executed. First they stripped him naked, then dragged him behind a horse until he was half-dead, before killing him. The Germans also raped his wife.1
On August 27, 1941, a German special unit arrived in the town and collected the Jews together. They issued instructions for the Jews to surrender their possessions and move into the ghetto. The Germans fenced off a piece of ground with barbed wire and put up a sign that read: “Ghetto. No entrance.” All Jews, including children, had to wear six-pointed stars on their clothing cut from bright yellow material. Anyone was permitted to insult or beat a Jew with impunity.
According to the account of Sophia Glushkin, subsequent “checks” were carried out regularly in the ghetto at night. “People were herded into the cemetery, girls were raped, and people were beaten unconscious.”2
Some younger Jews escaped from the ghetto to the forest and joined the Soviet partisans. However, it was not possible for the older people or women with children to escape in this way. On April 8, 1942, Glushkin learned that a German punitive unit had arrived in the town, and with some others she decided to flee. [End Page 1801]
The German forces and their local police collaborators surrounded the town and hunted down the Jews. They gathered the Jews in a yard and made them remove their clothes before shooting them so that they would fall into a pit. After the mass shooting, the Germans returned to the ghetto to look for any items of value and also discovered and murdered a baby who had been left behind in a crib.3
In liquidating the ghetto on April 8, 1942, the German forces (probably a detachment of Einsatzgruppe B) shot about 30 Jews. In total at least 63 Jews lost their lives in the Krasnyi ghetto.4
Sophia Glushkin with her eight-year-old son managed to make it to the nearby prisoner-of-war camp, where she had some contacts. From there she escaped to the partisans, where she served for two years as a courier and endured many hardships until the Red Army liberated the area.5
SOURCES
The account of Sophia Glushkin can be found in Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, eds., The Black Book: The Ruthless Murder of Jews by German-Fascist Invaders Throughout the Temporarily-Occupied Regions of the Soviet Union and in the Death Camps of Poland During the War of 1941–1945 (New York: Holocaust Library, 1981), pp. 254–256.
Additional relevant documentation can be found in the following archives: GARF (7021-44-626); and USHMM (RG-22.002M, reel 10).
NOTES
1. Ehrenburg and Grossman, The Black Book, pp. 254–256, testimony of Sophia Glushkin on November 9, 1943, regarding Krasnyi.
2. Ibid., p. 255.
3. Ibid., p. 256.
4. Rossiiskaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia (Moscow: Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Jewish Encyclopedia Research Center, “Epos,” 2004), 5:195; Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: HIS, 1999), p. 685; Vadim Doubson, “Getto na okkupirovannoi territorii Rossiiskoi Federatsii (1941–42),” Vestnik Evreiskogo Universiteta. Istoriia. Kul’-tura. Tsivilizatsiia, no. 3 (21) (2000): 159.
5. Ehrenburg and Grossman, The Black Book, p. 256.
