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

Pre-1941: Rudnia, town and raion center, Smolensk oblast’, RSFSR; 1941–1943: Rudnja, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Rudnia, Russian Federation

Rudnia is located 68 kilometers (42 miles) west-northwest of Smolensk on the railroad from Smolensk to Vitebsk. By 1939 there were 1,640 Jews living there. [End Page 1816]

Because of the rapid advance of the German army, only a small number of Jews were able to evacuate or escape from Rudnia in an organized fashion. Some Jewish families tried to leave the town to the east on foot or in carts, but they were ordered to turn back. German airplanes dispersed leaflets with the message: “Take up the stick, and drive the Jew to Pales-tine.” Local collaborators took the Jews’ livestock, vehicles, and other belongings. Those Jews who refused to comply were killed.

German forces captured Rudnia on July 14, 1941. Shortly after the occupation began, the occupying authorities registered Jews. Jews were ordered to sew yellow rings onto the backs of their clothing. In the first days of the occupation, German propaganda organs actively promoted antisemitic agitation among the local population. Many residents of Rudnia took advantage of this lawlessness to rob the Jews.

In August 1941, the German Ortskommandantur issued an order for all the Jews in Rudnia to be resettled into a ghetto. Those who refused to comply were to be shot on the spot. Jews who owned farm animals, such as cattle or poultry, were not permitted to bring their animals with them. The local police (Ordnungsdienst) used physical force to intimidate the Jews and confiscate their clothing, watches, domestic items, gold, silver, and other jewelry. One woman who survived the ghetto observed that “nothing was off limits to any of them.”¹

The ghetto was established on one street in the town, and it consisted of 20 or so half-destroyed homes. It was fenced off with barbed wire and guarded by German soldiers and local police. Around 1,200 Jews, residents of Rudnia as well as Jewish refugees from the Baltic states and Belorussia, were assembled on the small market square and then crammed in the ghetto.² Initially, people could come and go freely, and some Jews received food brought by neighbors from outside the ghetto.³ Judging from the list of those Jews who were subsequently shot, many families with multiple children resided in the ghetto. About half of the children were under the age of 16. There were also some elderly men living in the ghetto and many artisans of various professions, including 32 carpenters.⁴

In August, the Germans raided a home where the 17-year-old student Abram Dol’nik lived. At school, Dol’nik had been studying to be a radio technician, and he refused to hand over his equipment to the Germans. For this, they shot him and another 15 to 20 young Jews. In September, the Germans discovered in the courtyard of one of the homes in the ghetto a pistol obtained during the retreat of the Red Army. As a result, 100 Jews were shot, ostensibly for concealing military weapons.⁵

The inmates of the ghetto lived under conditions of great overcrowding and poor sanitation. They were subjected regularly to assault and degradation. Only 100 grams (3.5 ounces) of bread were allotted each day to the prisoners. All Jews had to hand over any valuable items or face being shot. Those who were considered prosperous were taken hostage and held for ransom. The Jews were also taken out for forced labor. Young Jews had to do the heaviest physical work, including road and gas pipeline repairs. One of the few medically trained people in the ghetto, Ida Brion, fled eastward in the fall of 1941 after hearing from escapees of the Vitebsk ghetto that all the Jews would be shot unless they escaped.

On October 21, 1941, a detachment of Einsatzkommando 9 arrived in Rudnia from Vitebsk. With the help of the local police, the detachment shot a large number of ghetto inmates. The Jews were told that they were being transported to Vitebsk and that they should take enough food and belongings for two days. Drunken local policemen randomly assaulted the Jews. Before sending the Jews to the place of execution, the Germans shot young children, the infirm, and others hiding in the ghetto who had refused to leave. The column of ghetto prisoners included women, children, elderly persons, and young infants. The mass shooting took place in an antitank ditch on the outskirts of the town. Those persons wearing good clothing were ordered to strip down to their underwear. The Germans forced several people into the ditch and then shot them. The corpses were flung into the water. They threw children alive into the ditch and tossed infants up in the air and shot them. The killing went on for several hours. According to the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), more than 1,000 Jews were shot.⁶ After the shooting, there were heartrending moans from down in the ditch. The Germans and their collaborators then threw down heavy stones and covered the grave with three layers of dirt.

The report of Einsatzgruppe B indicates that it had conducted a “large-scale Aktion” against the Jews in Rudnia because the Jews had “provided significant help to the partisans, spread subversive propaganda, occasionally refused to work, and would not wear distinguishing markings for Jews.” The report states that 835 Jews were shot in total.⁷

Subsequently the Germans shot the chief of the local police in Rudnia, a man named Korotchenkov, on the same spot where the Jews were killed. The Germans tortured him in front of his underlings as a punishment for having concealed goods stolen from the Jews. The policemen threw his body on top of the corpses of the Jews who had been shot previously. The Germans then confiscated Korotchenkov’s belongings from his apartment.⁸

A group of young Jews from the ghetto was taken out to work and they were not shot on October 21, the day of the mass shooting.⁹ Instead, they were grouped together with a number of specialists: doctors, shoemakers, carpenters, painters, bakers, and others. These Jews remained in the Rudnia ghetto.

In the fall of 1941, the residents of the Jewish kolkhoz “The Path to Socialism” (Put’ k sotsializmu) were also shot. Having captured Rudnia, the Germans took over the kolkhoz and forced the Jews to work there for them. One day in the fall, the Jews were taken out into the field to gather in the harvest, and after they were finished, they were shot. Only two children managed to survive.¹⁰

On February 24, 1942, the last prisoners of the ghetto in Rudnia were shot at the request of the local Ortskommandantur, Feldkommandantur 815, and also General Max von [End Page 1817] Schenckendorff, the commanding officer of Rear Area, Army Group Center. The victims included refugees from various raions of the Smolensk oblast’ and from Belorussia. The remaining Jews in Rudnia were killed along with 200 Jews from the nearby ghetto of Mikulino and also Jews who had been brought in from other towns and villages of the Rudnia raion. When the Jews from Mikulino arrived, the Jews in the Rudnia ghetto understood that they were about to be shot, and many tried to escape. About 20 persons were killed inside the ghetto.¹¹ Those remaining were gathered into a column, taken out to the antitank ditch, and then shot.¹² According to the activity report of Einsatzgruppe B for the second half of February 1942, first 311 Jews were shot in Rudnia, then another 55 Jews and Communists.¹³

In 1941–1942, the Germans and their collaborators shot between 1,500 and 2,000 Jews in total in Rudnia.

Some members of the local population disapproved of the actions of the German occupying authorities. One witness recalled “an exchange with German soldiers from the Ortskommandantur on the question, ‘Why in the world are they shooting innocent Jewish families?’” The Germans answered that “the Jews had betrayed Germany in the past, and that because they had kept the Germans down whenever they could, they were no longer allowed to live. They would only take vengeance on the German nation.”¹⁴ However, many of the residents of Rudnia supported the destruction of the Jews. After the liberation of Rudnia, one young house wife bluntly said to a soldier who stayed overnight in her home, “It was tough to live with the Germans. But they did something good by shooting the Jews. The Jews deceived us by supporting the Soviet powers.”¹⁵ She did not know, apparently, that the soldier was Jewish.

Not many Jews successfully escaped from the ghetto. On the night before the large-scale Aktion, two girls got away. One of them, Chaia Sheftlina, saw the mass shooting of October 21, 1941. She later gave her testimony to the ChGK. During the occupation, she hid in the home of a Russian friend in Rudnia.¹⁶ A few Jewish children were also able to climb out from under the pile of corpses after the mass shooting and escape. One nine-year-old boy hid for a time with residents of Rudnia, then managed to escape from the town.¹⁷

Of the Jews who survived the ghetto, the majority ended up in partisan detachments. I.L. Finkel’shtein escaped from the ghetto together with his wife after the October shooting. Apparently, he was among the group of artisans who were spared on October 21. Because he was not called up for the war, he elected to join one of the partisan detachments that were active in the Smolensk oblast’. After he left the ghetto, the Germans hanged his wife and children. In the winter of 1941–1942, Finkel’shtein’s detachment blew up several bridges and killed up to 100 German soldiers. One Jewish girl was a partisan agent in Rudnia. For two months she was inside the ghetto, but she escaped and again joined the partisans. Many young Jews successfully escaped from the ghetto at the time of the mass shooting on February 24, 1942, and were accepted into various partisan detachments.¹⁸

The ChGK documents indicate that a German punitive detachment of the Security Police and SD arrived from Vitebsk for the mass shooting of the Jews on October 21, 1941. It was headed by the chief of the Gestapo in Rudnia, a man named Walter Bruk (or Buk).¹⁹ Tit Nikonov, the deputy head of the local police under Korotchenkov, was arrested and executed by the Soviet authorities in Smolensk after the liberation of Rudnia by the Red Army on October 29, 1943.²⁰