» Articles » Ghetto in Bragin

Ghetto in Bragin

Bragin is an urban-type settlement, the center of the homonymous district in the Gomel region. The first mention of Jews here dates from 1648. According to historians, on the eve of the Nazi invasion, more than 900 Jews lived in the village. There is no information about how many Jews in Bragin were drafted into the army with the outbreak of war.

Gomel region was occupied two months after the German invasion. Therefore, part of the Jewish population managed to evacuate. However, Bragin, like a number of other small settlements, was far from the main highways. It was possible to leave it, having reached the Khoiniki railway station or to leave on foot.

An organized evacuation was not carried out, but, according to local historians, almost a third of the Jewish population left the village on foot. It is not known whether the estimates of refugees who accumulated in Bragin in the first months of the war are taken into account, or is it only about the original inhabitants of the village.

The Nazis occupied Bragin on September 28, 1941. One of the first aktions of the occupation authorities was the registration of the Jewish population. Until September 1941, Jews lived in their own homes and were subject to mobility restrictions.

On September 12, 1941, punishers arrived in the village. The very next day, a punitive aktion was carried out. The Jews were ordered to gather in the local school district, on the pretext of the election of the headman. Those who arrived at the appointed time were divided into groups of 30 people and shot in the garden of the local resident Maria Demyanchik. Punishers used her house as a stronghold. During the first aktion, about 300 people were killed. After some time, the neighbors buried the bodies of the dead in a common grave on Selishche Street.

Bragin was the center where Jews were brought from neighboring villages. Those brought from the district were kept together with the surviving Jews from Bragin in the territory of the local school. According to local historians, about 600 people were kept in the Bragin ghetto. In November 1941, the punishers set about liquidating the ghetto.

A deep burial ground was dug up in the courtyard of the local police, where naked victims were forced to go down and look for a place, and then they were shot. Another place of execution was Pesochnaya Street. A mound was excavated here in the late 1950s, and after a while, Stela appeared in memory of the victims.

In 1943, a couple of weeks before the retreat, the Nazis forced prisoners of war to destroy traces of the crime by digging and burning corpses.

According to official data of the Extraordinary State Commission in the Bragin district, the Nazis killed 8.8 thousand people.