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

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

Velizh lies on the banks of the Western Dvina River, 125 kilometers (78 miles) north-northwest of Smolensk and 80 kilometers (50 miles) northeast of Vitebsk. The Jewish population stood at 1,788 in 1939.

On July 13, 1941, units of German Army Group Center captured Velizh. At the end of July and the start of August 1941, the occupying authorities established a Judenrat and ordered the Jews to register and to wear a yellow patch for identification.¹

Jews were not permitted to socialize with Russians or to appear at the market. Some of the Russian population began to treat the Jews with unconcealed hostility. One witness reported that the Russians viewed the Jews mainly as an opportunity to extract booty.²

Each day, Jewish men ages 15 to 60 had to appear before the Kommandantur, where they were given shovels for different forced labor projects. Generally they worked repairing the Velizh-Demidov-Smolensk highway. At work, they were beaten and humiliated. Occasionally, the guards ordered their victims to squat down and get up 100 times while holding an axe or shovel.

Jewish women also had to perform heavy labor, hauling bricks, logs, or beams, or cleaning toilets. Others had to do pointless tasks, such as gathering stones and putting them into a pile, then the next day dispersing them again. Sometimes they had to do more grueling work, such as collecting water from the river, carrying it up a hill, pouring it on the earth, and then [End Page 1834] climbing down the hill to get more. The guards often whipped the women.

In August 1941, Sonderkommando 7a (subordinated to Einsatzgruppe B) shot a Jewish woman and eight former Komsomol members from Velizh for sabotage at the Voroshilov kolkhoz 17 kilometers (11 miles) from Velizh. They were accused of having “attempted to intimidate the population by spreading false rumors.”³ From September 4 to the start of October 1941, Sonderkommando 7a was based in Velizh, where it apparently played a key role in the persecution of the Jews. In September 1941, on the pretext of a work assignment, the Germans gathered approximately 150 Jewish men ages 18 to 35, took them out of the city, and shot them. Shortly afterwards, 50 young women were brutally beaten with rifle butts for trying to run away through the streets.

At the end of September 1941, the Kommandantur issued an order for the Jewish population to be resettled into a ghetto. They were allowed to bring with them only essential items, namely, basic foodstuffs and warm clothing. The Jews’ remaining property was to be turned over to the Russian policemen and redistributed. The ghetto was set up on the edge of the city, next to a large pig farm. A fence surrounded the ghetto, reinforced with barbed wire. Men of the Russian police (Ordnungsdienst) guarded the perimeter.⁴

There were 1,400 to 1,500 Jews in the ghetto. About 1,000 people lived in just 27 houses. The living conditions were atrocious, and many people were unable to wash themselves. About 500 people lived in the pigsty, in which rows of bunk beds, two or three tiers high, stood around one oven, with hardly any room to sleep. Food had to be prepared over bonfires.

Jews were forbidden from leaving the ghetto on pain of death. Non-Jews were also not allowed to enter it. Russian policemen, upon spotting someone trying to escape, would run after them, shouting: “Catch the Jew [zhid]!” Those whom they caught were brutally beaten. They chased the ghetto inmates out of their dwellings and made them watch the executions. The one exit from the ghetto was usually locked; only trucks carrying corpses to the Jewish cemetery were permitted to pass through.⁵

Sources are scarce on the Judenrat’s activities in the Velizh ghetto. The foreman (starosta) in charge was the teacher Mendel’ Itkin. One witness recalled that “the leaders of the Judenrat did not have any detailed or reliable information…. [T]hey were unfortunate people themselves.”⁶ The main task of the Judenrat was to pass on German orders to the ghetto population. The foreman assigned people to labor tasks according to the demands of the occupying authorities.

Initially, the Jews lived on whatever they had brought from their homes into the ghetto. But most of the goods spoiled, and famine set in. Many of the inmates were refugees from Belorussia and other places, and without any supplies, these people suffered badly. People grew swollen from hunger, and many young Jews died in the streets. The more fortunate with regard to rations were those in mixed families, as they generally received help from their Russian kin. Neighbors and friends gave some assistance to the ghetto, providing the inmates with potatoes and bread. Sometimes ghetto inhabitants, having removed their yellow markers, managed to get out of the ghetto and obtain foodstuffs from people they knew. They bartered gold and silver items for food.

Winter came, and in the pigsty it was unbearably cold. The Jews were unable to obtain firewood for heating; instead, they broke up the bunk beds. Living conditions deteriorated further. The prisoners used kerosene lamps until the fuel ran out. Several people died each day of hunger, cold, and typhus. Some elderly people fell out of their high bunk beds and died. There was no medicine. The Russian doctor Vasilii Zhukov lived in the ghetto with his Jewish wife and their three children. He was responsible for treating everyone.

Many ghetto inmates owned gold and silver items. Some of the Russian policemen who guarded the ghetto accepted such things in exchange for a little food. But the Germans found out about the barter and shot those policemen. Then the guards started to rob the Jews more systematically.

Witness testimonies provide little information about forced labor by ghetto inmates. They indicate that the Jews were taken out in convoys to work from morning to evening. As a rule, they performed heavy physical and menial jobs. Some Jewish tailors had to mend clothing for the Germans.

On several occasions in December 1941 and January 1942, the Russian police took young Jewish girls and teenagers for work in the city and shot them after they had finished. In a Smolensk court in March 1960, Piotr Sychev, who worked with the German Secret Field Police (GFP), recounted how he had participated in these shootings on three separate occasions.⁷

The Jews did not see any prospect of being rescued from their hopeless situation. A former ghetto inmate recalled that in the ghetto “they gathered in groups and sat silently in the darkness. They didn’t want to speak with each other.”⁸ Jews who came back to the ghetto observed the silence and tried to support the inmates who remained behind each day.⁹

There were some incidents of resistance during the course of an Aktion carried out against the young men. According to testimonies gathered by the Soviet 4th Shock Army, “an unidentified Jew tried to organize a resistance movement armed with axes, but the Germans shot him and his associates before they could realize their plans.”¹⁰ A group of young Jewish girls also escaped from the ghetto and joined Soviet partisan detachments.

With the advance of the Red Army close to the city in late January 1942, some Jews escaped from the ghetto. They hid with acquaintances in the town or went across the front line. Two days before the destruction of the ghetto, the Russian doctor Vasilii Zhukov managed to get his family out and save them.

On the morning of January 30, 1942, the 4th Shock Army attacked Velizh from three sides. Fighting was heavy until February 2, 1942, when Soviet forces successfully liberated the northwestern part of the city up to the Western Dvina River. Then their advance was halted.¹¹

On January 30, the Germans and Russian police sealed all the exits from the pigsty, poured gas on it, and set it on fire. [End Page 1835] Then they burned down the houses in the ghetto where other Jews were still living. The police opened fire on any Jews who tried to escape from the flames.¹² Maria Savinskaia, one of the ghetto inmates, recalled at a trial in Smolensk in March 1960: “I saw my mother’s black hair catch fire. We got her out through a small window. Then shots were fired. I was wounded, but my friends did not make it. We could only save ourselves. For a long time … there was the stench of charred corpses and burnt hair. I’ve never been able to forget that smell.”¹³

Approximately 100 people managed to escape from the pigsty, and of that number, most were wounded or later killed. Dozens of Jews who escaped from the ghetto and hid in the basements of town buildings were discovered and shot by members of the Ordnungsdienst. About 600 people were killed during the liquidation of the ghetto.¹⁴ Some of those who initially escaped from the burning ghetto were killed subsequently during the fighting in the town. Only a few dozen Jews survived, including the teenagers and young women who fled and joined the Soviet partisans.¹⁵ The report of the Velizh District Commission in August 1944 indicates that not 1 Jew remained in the town.¹⁶

The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) assigned responsibility for the crimes against Soviet citizens to the local German military administration in Velizh (Ortskommandantur 849); the Wehrmacht officers Kohlman, Agement, Lugash, and Rosenfeld; Bidiukov, the mayor of Velizh; and Murashkin, the chief of the Russian police.¹⁷ The Soviet authorities tried a number of Russian policemen who took part in the murder of the Jews. In March 1960, a Smolensk court sentenced two former policemen to death, and a third received 15 years in prison.¹⁸