Dzisna

The earliest documentary reference to the presence of Jews in Dzisna dates to the mid-18th century. In 1797, Dzisna was home to 412 Jews, out of a total population of 1,164. The local Jewish community began to grow in the late 19th century. According to the all-Russian census of 1897, there were 4,716 Jews in Dzisna, constituting seventy percent of the town's total population. Dzisna was an important trade hub on the left bank of the Zapadnaya Dvina (Daugava) River, and its Jewish community included many affluent merchants, who traded mostly in agricultural produce. World War I and the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-20 dealt a blow to the Jewish community of Dzisna and its economy. The first postwar census, conducted in the newly independent Poland in 1921, recorded the presence of a mere 2,742 Jews in the town. In the interwar period, the local Bund branch ran a large library and a Yiddish school belonging to the TsISHO network. A chapter of the leftist non-Zionist Jewish Bund party had emerged in Dzisna long before World War I. After World War I, under the impact of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, a constellation of Zionist movements and parties emerged in Dzisna, ranging from the leftist Poale Zion to the rightist Beitar (from 1929 on). The town also had some (illegal) Jewish communists. In 1939, on the eve of World War II, Dzisna was home to an estimated 3,000 Jews (some estimates of the size of the prewar Jewish community of Dzisna run higher). In September 1939, World War II began, and Dzisna was occupied by the Soviets. This was followed by the Sovietization of the local economy and social life: Trade was nationalized, and all non-communist organizations were suppressed. Since Dzisna had the reputation of a wealthy town, many of its Jews were arrested by the Soviet political police and/or deported to northern Russia or Siberia. At the same time, quite a few refugees from German-occupied western Poland arrived in Dzisna. On June 22, 1941, the Soviet-German War began. On July 3, German troops entered Dzisna. A short while later, someone cut a German telephone wire. On July 14, the Germans assembled all the town's men, Jews and non-Jews alike, in the square in front of the Orthodox church. They picked ten men as hostages and executed them. Seven of the victims were Jews; two were Poles, and one was a Belarusian. The rest of the men were ordered to bury the dead. The German soon introduced anti-Jewish decrees (the requirement to wear a Star of David on one's clothing, a prohibition on leaving the town, forced labor, etc.). In late July, a Jewish council and Jewish police unit were formed. In early August, a ghetto was established in the southern section of the town, straddling both banks of the Dzisenka River (a tributary of the Dvina). In addition to the Jews of Dzisna, some of the Jews from the towns of Łużki and Miory, and from the nearby villages, were moved into this ghetto. It was not fenced off. Many inmates were killed by the guards while attempting to leave the ghetto. Many others died of starvation and typhus. On March 28, 1942, the SD entered the ghetto and took away thirty Jews; in the morning, they shot them in the commandant's office. On the night of June 14-15, 1942, a squad of the Security Police (SiPo), reinforced by gendarmes and local policemen, surrounded the ghetto, and then entered it. The Jews tried to resist, setting the ghetto houses on fire. Only a minority of the inmates were able to escape by taking advantage of the confusion: The Germans strafed the ghetto with machine guns and threw hand grenades into it; the policemen shot those trying to swim across the river. Several hundred Jews managed to reach the forest, but the majority of them were seized by the local police or by peasants over the following days. The rest of the ghetto inmates were shot by the Nazis near the village of Ościewicze (known as Vostsevichi in Belarusian), some three kilometers south of Dzisna. According to German sources, 2,181 Jews from Dzisna were killed on that day, whereas Soviet documents put the number of victims at 3,800. Seventeen Jewish artisans, together with their families, were spared by the Germans during the massacre, but they were murdered by the local police in Dzisna in January 1943. Some of those who had successfully escaped into the forests eventually came to the Glębokie Ghetto, where they shared the fate of its inmates. Others joined the Soviet Morozov partisan brigade. Most of the fighters of this brigade perished in 1943, during a German anti-partisan operation. Only a few Jews from Dzisna survived World War II. Dzisna was liberated by the Red Army on July 4, 1944.