Stolpce

The first Jews settled in Stołpce in the second half of the 16th Century. In 1897, the town was home to 2,409 Jews, who made up 64 percent of the total population. In the 1880s, a circle of the proto-Zionist Hovevei Ziyon emerged in Stołpce. The Russian Revolution of 1905 brought about anti-Jewish pogroms and attempted pogroms; the leftist Zionist Poalei Zion and the leftist anti-Zionist Bund party joined forces and organized a Jewish self-defense force. The town suffered a great deal during World War I, and it was ravaged by a fire in 1915. The Polish-Soviet War of 1919-20 brought even greater hardship. Many Jews left Stołpce for other localities in Russia, with some of them settling in nearby Minsk; many others migrated overseas. After the war, the town was incorporated into the independent Polish state, and it lay close to the Polish-Soviet border. Its economic importance declined, and many of its Jewish residents switched to small trade and crafts. In 1931, Stołpce was home to a mere 2,014 Jews, who comprised 30.7 percent of the total population. A constellation of Zionist parties and groups emerged there in the 1920s. The Bund with its youth movement, Tsukunft, was also active in the town. The private Hebrew-language school that had been established before World War I joined the Tarbut network after the war. The religious Hebrew-language Horev school was attended by 150 pupils in the late 1930s; a strictly Orthodox Beit Yaakov school for girls was opened in 1935. In September 1939, World War II began, and Stołpce was occupied by the Soviets. The new authorities changed the language of instruction in schools to Yiddish. They seized and shut down the two synagogues, converting one of them into a movie theater, and turning the second one over to a cooperative of glove makers. During the first weeks of the war, about 2,000 refugees from German-occupied western and central Poland arrived in Stołpce. In the spring of 1940, the Soviets offered them Soviet citizenship. Most of the Polish Jews declined the offer, and were deported eastward. Nevertheless, about 500 Jewish refugees appear to have resided in Stołpce on the eve of the Soviet-German War. Following the German invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941, only the Jewish communists and Young Communist League members were able to evacuate. When the Germans occupied Stołpce on June 27, most of the town's Jews (about 3,000) were still there. On the following days, the occupiers killed 200 Jews as punishment for the actions of a Soviet sniper who had allegedly shot at German soldiers. On July 25, they killed 76 Jews (other sources give the figures 78 and 87), mostly professionals, under the pretext of their having previously collaborated with the Soviets. In July or early August, the Germans transferred some 500 able-bodied local Jews to the labor camps of the Organization Todt in Baranowicze and Minsk. The third mass murder, the so-called "Grosse Aktion", took place on September 23 - October 1, 1942. The Nazis carried out a selection among the ghetto inmates, sparing about 500 Jews who were deemed capable of work. 1,975 people were killed between September 23 - October 1, 1942, and this was followed by the massacre of 300 additional people on October 11-14. The murder site lay a mile (1.5 kilometers) northwest of the town, near the villages of Konkolowicze and Zajamno. 210 Jewish workers remained in the Stołpce Ghetto; they worked at various German labor installations serving the army. Some of them managed to flee into the forests and join the Soviet partisans. The Germans would occasionally shuttle Jewish inmates from the Stołpce Ghetto to the Nowy Świerzeń labor camp and back. In January 1943, the Gendarmerie shot 254 Jews from Stołpce and Nowy Świerzeń; many others were caught in the area and killed in January-February of that year. Stołpce was liberated by the Red Army on July 2, 1944.