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Ghetto in Zhlobin, Belarus

After the war, the local authorities established an unspoken prohibition on the study of the Holocaust in Zhlobin. Therefore, enthusiasts began to restore the lists of the victims only during Perestroika. Fragmentary eyewitness information of the ghetto in the city have been preserved.

It is known that before the start of the war in 1939, official statistics in Zhlobin numbered 3.7 thousand Jews. They made up 19% of the local population. Local historians managed to establish the names of 400 Zhlobin Jews who volunteered for the front. How many were drafted into the Red Army on summons, as well as the number of those who managed to evacuate is unknown.

In July 1941, battles for the city went on with varying success. Therefore, on July 3, the Germans managed to capture the settlement, but Soviet troops drove them out on July 13. The Nazis established final control over Zhlobin in August 1941. Researchers suggest that before the start of the second occupation, a significant part of the Jews managed to leave the city.

As in other settlements of Belarus, the occupiers began with restrictive measures. Jews were ordered to wear decals. They were not allowed to appear on the central streets of Zhlobin, to communicate with the local population. In the fall of 1941, resettlement to the ghetto began. In small Zhlobin, the Nazis created two ghettos. For one they took the People's House on Tovarnaya Street, and for the second, a two-story barracks on Pervomayskaya Street. It is known that the second ghetto was surrounded by barbed wire. The building remained intact in the post-war period.

There is no information about the living conditions of Jews in the Zhlobin ghettos. According to eyewitness information, there was famine in the ghetto and there was no medical care. In the spring, the Nazis began to liquidate the ghetto. According to eyewitnesses, the Belarusian burgomaster tried to postpone the extermination aktion.

Some of the prisoners managed to go to the partisans on the eve of the execution. Some were lucky enough to leave the ghetto on the day of the aktion. Therefore, the surviving Basia Paley was in a neighboring village in search of food, and when she returned, she learned that the ghetto had been destroyed.

The Nazis drove prisoners to the place of execution near the village of Lebedevka in open cars. Elka Sorkina, who jumped out of the back and survived, used this. Mother of Boris Makovsky handed him over to a local resident when the car stopped briefly at the crossing and thus saved his life.

On April 12, 1942, the Nazis killed 1.2 thousand people near Lebedevka. Two days later, 198 more people from a neighboring settlement were killed at the same place.