OPOCHKA
Pre-1941: Opochka, town and raion center, Kalinin oblast’, RSFSR; 1941–1944: Opotschka, Rear Area, Army Group North (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Nord); post-1991: Opochka, Pskov oblast’, Russian Federation
Opochka is located about 125 kilometers (78 miles) west-northwest of Velike Luki on the Velikaia River. According to the 1939 population census in Opochka, which at that time was part of the Kalinin oblast’, 289 Jews lived in the city (2.59 percent of the total population). The town was occupied on July 9, 1941, a little over two weeks after the initial German invasion of the USSR on June 22. At that time a number of Jews were able to evacuate to the east. Men of an eligible age were called up to the Red Army or enlisted voluntarily. Around 200 Jews remained in the town under German occupation.
During the period of the occupation from July 1941 until July 1944, a German military commandant’s office ran the affairs of the town. The German military commandant established a local administration and recruited a local police force (Ordnungsdienst) for security purposes from among the local residents.
Shortly after the occupation of the town, German security forces murdered a number of Jews at the Jewish cemetery. The German military commandant issued an order calling for the registration and marking of the Jews. They were also forced to perform heavy labor. In August 1941, all the remaining 100 to [End Page 1810] 200 Jews were resettled into a ghetto located in a half-burned barracks building.1 The ghetto existed for more than six months. From November 1941 onward, groups of Jews were taken out and murdered near the villages of Maslovo and Pukhili. On March 9, 1942, the ghetto was liquidated, and German forces shot the last remaining 100 or so Jews.2
In the fall of 1943 the Germans dug up the bodies of their victims and burned them in an attempt to cover up the evidence.
SOURCES
Documentation and witness testimonies regarding the extermination of the Jews of Opochka can be found in the following archives: GAPO; GARF (7021-20-18); and YVA. Additional information can be found 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. 938.
NOTES
1. GARF, 7021-20-18, pp. 2–3; Vadim Doubson, “Getto na okkupirovannoi territorii Rossiiskoi Federatsii (1941–42 gg.),” Vestnik Evreiskogo Universiteta v Moskve: Istoriia, Kul’tura, Tsivilizatsiia, no. 3 (21) (2000): 159.
2. N.I. Vasil’ev, A.V. Stepanov, and T.F. Fedorov, Opochka: Putevoditel’ (Leningrad, 1973), p. 90.
