8th August 1943
Petrikow
SEE 28/57
Occupation of Petrikow
Pre-1941: Petrikov, town and raion center, Poles’e oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Petrikow, Rayon and Gebiet center, Generalkommissariat Shitomir; post-1991: Petrykau, raen center, Homel’ voblasts’, Republic of Belarus.
Petrikov is located 53 kilometers (33 miles) west of Mozyr’. In 1939, the Jewish population of Petrikov was 1,074 Jews (18.6 percent of the total).
Petrikov was occupied by the Germans on July 29, 1941, and then again, after a brief Soviet reoccupation, on August 19.
Petrikov became the center of a Gebiet comprising the Petrikow and Shitkowitschi Rayons; it was attached to Generalkommissariat Shitomir in Reichskommissariat Ukraine. There was a garrison of up to 1,000 soldiers and policemen in Petrikov. The Gendarmes were housed on the premises of the former Petrikov raion committee of the Belorussian Communist Party; the SD, on Volodarskii Street; and Sonderstab R, in a former pharmacy. A sapper unit and six armored cutters for patrolling the river were stationed on the banks of the Pripiat’. A system of controlling the movement of the local population was also instituted.
Separate killings of Jews, members of the Communist youth organization (Komsomol), and Soviet activists began in the summer of 1941. Aron Fainshtein (born 1871), who ran the pharmacy, was tied by his legs to a horse and dragged through the streets of Petrikov until he died. Fania Kustanovich (born 1936) was thrown into a fire because her mother Klara refused to reveal the hiding places of Red Army soldiers who had been caught behind German lines. Afterwards, Klara herself was shot..
The Nazis also persecuted and shot Jews in the surrounding villages. According to the testimony of Yevgenii Dus’, starting in the first days of August 1941, the Germans made a list of all the Jews in the Koptsevichi sel’sovet and demanded they report every day to the police station. Jews were forced to perform senseless work such as dragging a cart loaded with water, bricks and stones, scrap, and garbage from one place to another while the Germans laughed, insulted, or mocked them.3 On September 15, 1941, an SS execution squad arrested the chairman of the kolkhoz, P.K. Gramovich, and a worker, L. Pasovskii, who were then led into the woods and brutally tortured. In August 1941, 4 people were shot in the village of Sekerichi.4 At the end of September 1941, 25 Jews from Koptsevichi were placed in a vehicle under the pretext of being dispatched to Petrikov for interrogation and transported to the edge of Zheleznitsa, where they were shot.
Until the end of September 1941, Jews lived in their own houses in Petrikov. They were obliged to wear distinguishing markings and had to unquestioningly carry out German orders. They were watched by a police force selected from local inhabitants. After the first mass execution, in September 1941, a ghetto was set up. To that end, the Germans allotted three buildings on Volodarskii Street. Many of these buildings lacked doors and windows. The ghetto was fenced off by barbed wire and placed under guard. The inhabitants themselves had to see to feeding themselves, providing their own heating, and coping with other problems of survival. The Jews were only able to leave the ghetto at night. Teacher Faina Raskina, Zaivel’ Peschanskii, and another person named Branets were killed for violating the internal regulations of the ghetto as established by the Nazis. The Nazis also refused to let them be buried in the Jewish cemetery. Every day at 6:00 a.m., those who were physically able were taken out to work, either logging or clearing snow from the roads. The ghetto existed until April 1942.
The first Aktion was conducted on September 14, 1941 (or September 22, according to other sources), when a punitive squad of around 100 men, probably from the 1st SS-Cavalry Brigade, arrived on motorboats along the Pripiat’. They ordered the Belorussians and Russians to mark their homes with the sign of the cross. At the time, the Jewish community was observing the Jewish New Year in the synagogue. At Bliuma Gertsulina’s house, the executioners demanded she say where her valuables were hidden and then shot her. They killed a tenth-grader, Borukh Gertsulin, on Karl-Liebknecht Street. They chased the Jews—adults and children alike—in groups of 30 to 40 into the river. At the inlet Bychok, they forced them to lie facedown in the mud and then shot above their heads so that nobody would get up. Then they gathered around 400 people and told them all to undress and get in the water. The Germans opened fire with machine guns from the cutters. The dead and wounded floated in the water. Afterwards, the Germans finished off the wounded.
The next day, the Nazis sought out the surviving Jews within the town and killed them on the spot where they found them. A group of Jews were driven to a cattle yard at the kolkhoz “Chervonnyi ogorodnik” (Golden-red Gardener) and shot there. The executioners burned down 35 houses on Third International Street and 17 houses near the pier. In several of the houses, they burned adults and children alive.
A second Aktion followed on February 15, 1942, when a punitive squad consisting of Germans and Hungarians passed through Petrikov and conducted a cleansing Aktion—a search for Jews who were still alive—in Rayons Kopatkewitschi, Petrikow, and Oktjabr. The squad burned some of the Jews seized, while others were stripped and chased in the frost towards the village of Belki, some 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from Petrikov, where they were then shot. In all, there were around 200 victims.
The third Aktion took place in the last days of April 1942. The German Gendarmerie roused the remaining Jews at 4:00 a.m. and led them to a slaughterhouse about 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) northeast of Petrikov. The Jews were locked up in a barn, and each was undressed separately and then led out to be shot. The local inhabitants were forbidden not only to bury them but also even to go near the bodies. They were allowed to do so only after two weeks.
In the following months, the Nazis and their accomplices hunted down surviving Jews who had hidden in the countryside with the assistance of Belorussian acquaintances. In March 1942, 23 Jews were killed in Kopatkevichi (Petrikow Rayon); in July 1942, 22 Jews in the village of Smetanichi; and on November 7, 1942, 20 Jews from the village of Babunichi. In February 1943, a police detachment of 15 men under the command of the chief of the indigenous police post in Koptsevichi, Igor’ Tseslik, unexpectedly appeared in the village of Brinev. They arrested the family of Boris Komissarchik (four people), led them out to a kolkhoz barn, stood them up against the wall, and shot them with machine guns.
Several Petrikov Jews survived the war. Among them was Ginda Gutman, whom the executioners had thought to be dead. She hid in the village of Belanovichi and then made her way to the village of Makarovka in the Kiev oblast’, where she pretended to be a Pole under the name of Stepanida Beniak. Together with a group of Ukrainian women, “Stepanida” was sent to work in Germany.1
Petrikov was liberated on June 29, 1944. During the years of occupation, 770 Petrikov Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis and their accomplices. Of these, it was possible to determine the names of only 132 families, including 66 women (50 percent) and 48 children aged 15 and younger (36.4 percent).
Source: Smilovitsky, Leonid . “PETRIKOV.” The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ENCYCLOPEDIA OF CAMPS AND GHETTOS: ZHYTOMYR REGION (GENERALKOMMISSARIAT SHITOMIR), edited by Lohse, A. (Ed.) and Parken, O. (Ed.), translated by Ray Brandon, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2025. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/document.3291.
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