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

Pre-1941: Petrovichi, village, Shumiachi raion, Smolensk oblast’, RSFSR; 1941–1943: Petrowitschi, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Petrovichi, Russian Federation

Petrovichi is located 90 kilometers (56 miles) south-southeast of Smolensk. On the eve of war in 1939, the several hundred Jews living in Petrovichi accounted for about half of the village’s population. Some famous Jews were natives of Petrovichi: Isaac Asimov, who became a central figure in American science fiction, and Semen Lavochkin, who later became a designer of Soviet fighter aircraft.

German troops captured Petrovichi on August 2, 1941. Before the occupation, many Jewish families attempted to leave the village in horse-drawn carts. Almost all of them, however, were forced to turn back. Some Jews did not believe the Soviet propaganda and were in no hurry to evacuate. Only a few succeeded in escaping. One who did manage to leave with his family was Leib Ryskin, chairman of the Imeni Tret’ego Internatsionala (Third International) kolkhoz. His actions were influenced by a German leaflet that he happened to pick up along the road: “Pick up a stick, and drive the Yids back to Palestine!”¹

The German troops established a ghetto soon after their arrival. It held approximately 400 Jews, including some people who had fled from other places or who had come to visit relatives during the summer vacation.² About 40 percent were women over the age of 16, and approximately one third of the ghetto’s prisoners were children under 16, based on the lists of Jews who were shot.³

The ghetto consisted of a single street, and as many as five or six families lodged in each house. Overcrowding was intense—everyone slept on the floor in a single row. German soldiers, followed by the local police, looted most of the possessions the Jews had been forced to leave behind in their former homes. All Jews were required to wear a badge with the word “Jude” sewn on their outer garments. A small plaque with the same inscription was affixed to every house in the ghetto. A Jewish elder (starosta) was chosen and required to report to the Kommandantur for the assignment of work details to the Jews.

German soldiers and Russian police constantly made the rounds of the Jews’ houses in the ghetto and robbed them of their meager belongings. Any attempt at resistance resulted in cruel beatings of the ghetto dwellers.

The oppressors subjected the Jews in the ghetto to refined taunts and seized any opportunity to kill them. Soon after the ghetto’s establishment, some of the men were taken forcibly and transported to an unknown destination; they never returned. Observant elderly men were subjected to savage treatment. Some of them were shot, and others were tied to wagons by their beards and dragged through the village.⁴

If no other work could be found for them, the Jews were made to carry manure from one place to another. The women had to hold the stable dung in their skirts, while the men were forced to use their hands. An eyewitness of the events described the German atrocities in detail:

Our stables all were about half a kilometer apart. And the Jews were ordered to pick up the manure with their hands and run, carrying it from one stable to another. Old men and young ones had to run and run without stopping. There was rain and slush. The children were crying. Even the mothers, grandmothers, and grandfathers were running, urged on by lashes, with manure in their hands. The people couldn’t keep it up, of course. I remember how Khana-Rokhl Berman, a neighbor, came running up to a stable and pushed her children inside, and later she went in behind them.

The Germans forced the Jews to lie on boxes used to hold potatoes, then lashed them and beat them with sticks. The others had to stand there and watch. The beatings continued until the person’s skin was stripped off, and pieces of scarlet flesh showed through. Sometimes they forced the Jews’ own comrades to flay them.⁵

Semen Azimov, a former teacher of mathematics and physics, was subjected to malicious insults. He left the ghetto and wandered through the woods and villages, begging for a piece [End Page 1811] of bread. With the help of the local residents, the Russian policemen caught him, put him in a cage, and humiliated him, beating him mercilessly. He showed the Germans his letters from relatives in America, counting on favorable treatment, but his efforts only brought him additional blows.

At night the Russian policemen used to drag young girls out of Jewish houses and rape them—frequently, they also killed them. Instances of Germans raping Jewish girls also took place. For example, the two Novikov sisters, who had fled to Petrovichi from Smolensk, were brutally raped. Afterwards the ghetto residents found one of the sisters hanged and the other murdered.

Part of the non-Jewish population of Petrovichi and the neighboring villages treated the Jews sympathetically. Some brought bread, milk, and other foodstuffs to their Jewish friends and acquaintances in the ghetto. Occasionally, local residents helped Jews who had escaped from the ghetto and hid them or their children. In most cases, however, the local collaborationist Russian police (Ordnungsdienst, or OD) hunted down the escaped Jews and killed them.⁶

According to German data, on May 31, 1942, 107 Jews were transferred from Petrovichi to Roslavl’. One of them was killed during an attempt to escape.⁷ The documents of the Smolensk Oblast’ Commission contain a list of the names of 84 Jews sent from Petrovichi to the Roslavl’ Gestapo.⁸ In Roslavl’, the Jews from Petrovichi were most probably shot by forces subordinated to Sonderkommando 7c within a short time.

In early June 1942, the approximately 230 Jews remaining in the Petrovichi ghetto were shot.⁹ One week before the Aktion, they were rounded up and placed in five or six houses near the Jewish cemetery. Each house held about 40 people.

Thirty members of the local police (OD) who had come from Khislavichi, under the command of three Germans and the chief of the local police in Petrovichi, carried out the Aktion. Several dozen local inhabitants dug the pit. After the shooting, the same locals buried the victims’ corpses. The shooting went on for three hours. The residents of Petrovichi were ordered to cover their windows and were forbidden to watch the Jews being led to their deaths. Later, those Jewish specialist workers who were kept alive at the time of the ghetto liquidation were also shot; they included several tailors, cobblers, and a saddler.

As the column of Jews moved towards the killing site, the student Sara Iasman, who had blue eyes and light, wavy hair, was repeatedly urged to leave, but she refused. Before she was shot, she cried out, “Fascists, you’ll get what you deserve!”

Many Jews tried to run away once the mass shooting started, but they were mown down by submachine-gun fire. Sometime later, the Russian police found and shot young children who had escaped and were hidden before the ghetto prisoners were taken away to be shot. Those who had fled to other villages were caught and shot on the spot. Only one girl, who chanced upon a partisan detachment, and a 12-year-old boy managed to escape.

The inhabitants of the village of Stakhovshchina hid a woman doctor, Konikova, with her three sons. The chief of police in Shumiachi, Gavrilok (the Germans shot him along with his family), had given her a document certifying that her husband was a Russian. One year later, however, she was shot, and one month before the arrival of the Soviet forces, her children, whom the villagers had hidden, also were killed.

The day before the destruction of the ghetto, some 30 Jewish teens had left it. In the forest, they encountered a group of armed Soviet soldiers that happened to be in the area, and they formed a partisan detachment. Khaim Gurevich, an 18-year-old, became a platoon leader in the detachment, and his 15-year-old brother Lev was a scout. The detachment sabotaged railroads and highways, and it also engaged in heavy fighting against German units and detachments of the OD, which was receiving support from a portion of the local population. A betrayal resulted in the overwhelming defeat of the partisan detachment. Seriously wounded, Lev Gurevich was hidden by the family of Prokofii Ivanov, a teacher from the village of Kosachevki, and he spent eight months living in a hole dug beneath the cellar. Ivanov’s wife was hanged.¹⁰