SVIATSK
[End Page 1827] Pre-1941: Sviatsk, village, Novozybkov raion, Orel oblast’, RSFSR; 1941–1943: Swjatsk, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Sviatsk, Briansk oblast’, Russian Federation
Sviatsk is located 202 kilometers (126 miles) southwest of Briansk directly on the border with the Republic of Belarus’. According to the 1926 census, there were 588 Jews living in Sviatsk.1 The results of the 1939 census reveal that the Jewish population had been roughly halved from the 1926 figure. This decline was due primarily to the resettlement of Jews to other regions.
Units of German Army Group Center occupied the village on August 16, 1941, about two months after the German invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941. During that time, approximately half of the Jews were able to evacuate to the east, and men who were eligible for military service were inducted into the Red Army. Only about 150 Jews remained in the town at the start of the German occupation.
Throughout the period of occupation (from August 1941 until September 1943), a German military administration (Ortskommandantur) governed the village. The German military administration appointed a village elder (starosta) and policemen who were local residents.
Soon after the occupation of the village, the local authorities organized the registration and marking of the Jews and arranged for their use in various kinds of forced labor. German security forces conducted a first Aktion about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) outside the village of Sviatsk on October 12, 1941, when they shot 27 people (23 Jews, 2 Communists, and 2 prisoners of war). The remaining Jews were moved into a ghetto, which remained in existence until January 25, 1942. On that day, the Jews were gathered in the courtyard of the village administration building where they were forced to wait stark naked in the freezing cold for several hours before being taken out to be shot on the grounds of an old brick factory.2 German security forces (probably a detachment subordinated to Einsatzgruppe B), assisted by the Russian local police, shot 116 people on this day, and 9 more Jews on the following day.3
SOURCES
Documentation regarding the persecution and murder of the Jews of Sviatsk can be found in the following archives: GABrO and GARF (7021-19-1 and 2).
NOTES
1. Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1926 goda. Tom 2 (Mos-cow, 1926), p. 40.
2. GARF, 7021-19-1, p. 6. See also Benjamin Pinkus, Jews and the Jewish People, 1948–1954: Collected Materials from the Soviet Press (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Centre for Documentation of East European Jewry, 1973), p. 147; and 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. 1269.
3. GARF, 7021-19-2, pp. 141, 146; see also Rossiiskaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia (Moscow: Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Jewish Encyclopedia Research Center, “Epos,” 2000), 6: 460; and Il’ja Al’tmann, Opfer des Hasses: Der Holocaust in der UdSSR 1941–1945 (Zürich: Gleichen, 2008), p. 321.
