Dolhinow

The first Jews probably settled in the shtetl of Dołhinów in the first half of the 17th century. Their main occupation was the leasing of estates of Polish noblemen. In 1667 the was official local Jewish community included 485 Jews. With the growth of the Jewish population, the spectrum of Jewish occupations widened to include trade and crafts. In the late 18th-19th centuries the community divided along religious lines: about half of its Jews were Habad Hassidim, the rest were anti-Hassidic misnagdim. The conflict between these groups was acute. In 1897 Dołhinów's 2,259 Jews constituted 64 percent of the total population. A branch of the socialist Bund party was established in the town in 1903; during the revolution of 1905 the Bund organized Jewish self-defense. After World War I Dołhinów became part of the Polish Republic. Dołhinów found itself close (ca. 4 kilometers) from the border with the Soviet Union. At the beginning of the 1920s smuggling across the border bolstered the town's economy. However, in the mid-1920s, both countries incrased their border control. For 1925 the Jewish population of Dołhinów was estimated as 2,500. By 1939 it could only have decreased. In the interwar period the affiliation of Dołhinów's Jews shifted from support for the leftist autonomist Yiddishist Bund party to support for Zionism. A full constellation of Zionist groups, from the Left Poalei Zion to the rightist Brith Zohar and the religious Ha-Mizrachi, existed in the town. Most of the local Jewish children studied either at the Hebrew-instruction Tarbut school or the Polish-language state school. In September 1939 World War II began, and Dołhinów was occupied by the Soviets. Many Jews succeeded in following an administrative career under the Soviets (e.g. the town's mayor was Jewish) or in entering institutions of higher education. The German army entered Dołhinów on June 26, 1941, i.e. on the fifth day of Operation Barbarossa. Anti-Jewish orders followed, including the introduction of forced labor for Jews. On July 27 a Jewish council was established. From time to time the German authorities seized warm clothing, boots, utensils, furniture, etc. from Dołhinów's Jews. Small-scale shootings of Jewish Communists took place. Paradoxically, the Jewish population of Dołhinów increased during 1941: many Jews from Pleshchenitsy, Kraisk, Logoysk, and other towns and villages located to the east, where the Germans had conducted mass murders of Jews in the summer of 1941, fled to Dołhinów, which was regarded as a safer place. On March 30, 1942 (two days before Passover), SS and Gendarmerie men entered the town. With the assistance of the local police, they assembled Jews at the market square. There, the Germans conducted a "selection": they selected workers they considered useful and sent them, and their families, to the ghetto (according to some accounts, the ghetto in Dołhinów was established in the fall of 1941; according to other accounts, it was during and after the "Aktion" of March 30-April 1, 1942). The rest of the Jews, 640 to 1,000 of them, were taken under guard to a starch factory south of the town, where some of them were shot, while others were locked into an abandoned barn and burned alive. In April 1942 the Germans took 100 Jewish workers from Dołhinów to work at the Kniaginin railway station, 25 kilometers west of the town. The workers were held in a makeshift labor camp near the station. Some of them were murdered in random killings during the following months; others died while working. The second mass murder in Dołhinów took place during the last two days of April 1942. Taught by bitter experience, many Jews of the Dołhinów ghetto constructed sophisticated bunkers, some of which were two- and even three-storeys deep. The SS members who arrived in Dołhinów on the night of April 28-29 used hand-grenades to force these Jews from their hiding places. More than 1,000 Jews were taken out of town in a easterly direction and shot. The last several hundred Jewish skilled workers of Dołhinów were killed on May 21, 1942. Dozens of Jews, mostly from Dołhinów, fled to the forests earlier in 1942, at the time of the massacres, and joined sympathetic Soviet partisans. In August-October 1942 the Russian partisan officer Nikolai Kiseliov, accompanied by seven other partisans, escorted 280 Jews, mainly old men, women and children, across the frontline to the Soviet sside. This 1,500 kilometers long trek took over a month; Kiseliov succeeded in saving 218 Jews (some of the Jews perished on the way). Kiseliov was recognized as a Righteous of the Nations by Yad Vashem. Dołhinów was liberated by the Red Army during the first days of July 1944.