Murder Story of Chashniki Jews in Zarechnaya Sloboda

The murder site is situated near the place Zarechnaya Sloboda, one kilometer northeast of Chashniki, on the eastern side of the Ulla River. In the morning of February 14 (according to another source, February 12), 1942, some 100 young people were sent out of Chashniki to clear snow from nearby roads – thus distancing the most active sector of the Jewish population from the site of the future massacre. At about 1 or 2 pm, a detachment of Einsatzkommando 9 entered Chashniki on horse-driven sledges from the direction of Beshenkovichi. That morning, the Belarussian police had begun to assemble the Jews in the building of a former Catholic church, which had been turned into a “House of Culture” during the Soviet period. According to eyewitnesses, many Jews refused to go to the church and, towards dusk, the area resembled a battlefield: there was shooting and the police stormed some houses. A number of Jews tried to flee and were killed on the run, some of them quite far from the town center. A group of policemen intercepted the young people returning to the town after clearing the snow, and escorted them to the church. About 1,000 Jews spent the night in the church, closely guarded by the Belarussian police. On the morning of February 15, the mayor sent Belarussian men to deepen the pits near the village of Trilesino, from which sand had been taken before the war. At around 10 am, the police, under the command of M. Pakhomov, drove the Jews from the church to Trilesino. On arrival, the Germans and the police saw that the Belarussian men had failed to make the pits deep enough because of the heavy frost. They made the Jews sit down on the snow, thirty meters from the pits, and fetched some dynamite to deepen the pits. When the preparations were finished (about two hours later), the mass shooting began. The killers, both Germans and local police, took several people (probably entire families) in turn, undressed them, and stood them at the edge of the pit where they were shot with machine guns. Before the victims were killed, the GFP [Geheimfeldpolizei - Secret Filed Police] unit responsible for rounding up the Jews (together with two volunteers from a local Luftwaffe unit) searched them for any valuables. The murder operation took the whole day. Over the following days, the police combed the town and its vicinity and found some Jews in hiding. After the murder operation, the victims’ belongings were collected, sorted and, under the auspices of the SD, handed over to the mayor to be sold to the Belarussian population. The murderers themselves estimated the number of those killed at 1,180. The list (probably incomplete), compiled by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission in 1944, indicates 700 Jewish victims. The Secret Field Police (GFP) was an organization subordinate to the Wehrmacht military police, whose main objective was to fight subversion and spying in the army, as the Gestapo did in the civilian population. Most of the GFP men were recruited from the Gestapo. After the outbreak of the war, the field units of the GFP were mainly involved with fighting the partisans, underground and other enemy bodies, that is with wide-reaching war crimes against the Soviet population, among them Jews. On the eastern front, there was close cooperation between GFP units and Einsatzgruppen divisions.