Zdzieciol

The town of Zdzięcioł was known to the Jews as Zhetl, or Zhetel. The first Jews settled in Zdzięcioł in 1580. The town's Jewish population rose at the end of the 19th century, reaching 3,033, or 76.2% of the total population, in 1897. The local Jewish community was divided along religious lines: half of the Jews were misnagdim following the "Lithuanian" school of Orthodox Judaism (in 1909, there was even an attempt to transfer the renowned musar yeshiva from Novogrudok to Zdzięcioł), while the other half were followers of the Stolin-Karlin Hassidic rebbe. World War I led to a reduction in the town's Jewish population, mainly because of the expulsion of Jews by the Russian army in 1914-15. However, many of the expellees returned to Zdzięcioł after the war. In 1926, the town's Jewish community numbered 3,450 members, once again comprising about three quarters of the total population. In the interwar period, about one-third of Zdzięcioł's Jews made their living from trade, while about a half of them were artisans or factory workers. The rest were professionals, schoolteachers, religious functionaries, or farmers. The town was home to a Yiddish school of the Tsisho network, a Hebrew school of the Tarbut network (from 1927 on), and several private Jewish schools. A modern hospital was opened in the town in the early 1920s. There was a Jewish (Yiddish-, Hebrew-, and Polish-language) library in Zdzięcioł in the 1920s, but it burned down in the fire of 1933. Branches of various Jewish parties operated in Zdzięcioł in the interwar period. These included Bundists and Zionists of various stripes, but the most influential of them all was the local chapter of Agudat Yisrael. On September 18, 1939, shortly after the outbreak of World War II, the Soviets occupied Zdzięcioł. The new authorities nationalized private businesses and expelled the town's most prominent Jews and Poles to Siberia. Due to the influx of refugees from the western, German-occupied part of Poland, the Jewish population of Zdzięcioł swelled to more than 4,500 people. In June 1941, the Soviet-German war broke out, and on June 30 Zdzięcioł was occupied by the Wehrmacht. On July 15, the Germans arrested six Jews who were accused of having collaborated with the Soviets, and shot them in Nowojelnia, 7-8 kilometers east of Zdzięcioł. On July 23, a murder squad from SS-Einsatzkommando 8 arrived in Zdzięcioł, arresting 120 prominent Jews and members of the intelligentsia and shooting them in a forest near the military barracks in Nowogródek, 25 kilometers northeast of Zdzięcioł. In February 1942, a ghetto was established in the town. The major massacres of the Jews of Zdzięcioł took place in April and August 1942. On the night of April 29-30, the Germans assembled the ghetto inmates in the market square in the town center. After a selection, about 1,000-1,200 "useless" Jews (mainly women, children, and elderly people) were taken under guard to the Kurpiesze (Kurpeshy) Forest, two kilometers north of the town. There, a second selection took place, and about one hundred people – those deemed to have a "useful" profession, together with their families – were returned to the ghetto. Then, the Germans and their local collaborators shot the remaining Jews. The second massacre began on August 6, 1942, and lasted for three days, since many Jews had prepared hiding places, and the Germans needed time to locate them. The victims, who numbered between 2,000 and 3,000, were taken to the Jewish cemetery on the southern outskirts of Zdzięcioł, where they were shot and buried in three mass graves. Approximately 200 Jewish artisans were transferred to the Nowogródek Ghetto. An estimated 3,500 Jews were killed in Zdzięcioł between 1941 and 1943. Only a handful of the town's Jews (about 370, according to some estimates) survived – by joining partisan units, hiding in the forests, or being sheltered by sympathetic non-Jews. Zdzięcioł (present-day Dziatlava, Belarus) was liberated by the Red Army on July 9, 1944.