Braslaw

In 1569, the year of the establishment of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, there were three Jewish families living in Brasław, according to the official records. In 1897, the town was home to 1,234 Jews, comprising 82.2 percent of the total population. World War I resulted in the exodus of many local Jews, who moved eastward. During the subsequent Polish-Soviet War of 1919-20, the Polish army committed anti-Jewish pogroms in Brasław. When the fighting was over, many Jews returned to the town. In 1921, when Brasław became part of independent Poland, the local Jewish community numbered 1,130 members. Economic life was reviving. The Jewish economy was buoyed by cross-border smuggling with neighboring Latvia. A printing house, movie theater, and soft drink factory were opened. In this period, several Zionist bodies, including the religious Mizrachi organization and the rightist Beitar youth movement, were established in Brasław, as were the Orthodox Agudat Yisrael party and the Bund. Some local Jews supported the Belorussian nationalist Hramada party. The town was home to two Jewish schools: a Yiddish school of the Tsisho network, and a tiny religious Hebrew school of the Yavneh network. In the late 1930s, a greater number of Jewish children attended the state-sponsored Polish school. In September 1939, World War II began, and Brasław was occupied by the Soviets. The new authorities nationalized the private businesses and deported "unreliable" elements to the Soviet interior. The Jewish population of Brasław swelled because of the influx of refugees from German-occupied western and central Poland, as well as from the Memelland and other parts of the Nazi Reich. On June 27, 1941, five days after the outbreak of the Soviet-German war, the Germans entered the town. Their arrival was followed by a slew of anti-Jewish decrees (Jewish homes were marked with the word "Jude"; Jews had to wear a yellow badge on their clothes, and were prohibited from using the sidewalks, visiting the movie theater, having contacts with non-Jews, etc.) and the introduction of forced labor. Several small-scale killings of Jews by the Nazis took place in July-August 1941. Thus, 13-18 Jews (the figure varies depending on the source) were executed in July for shirking their work duties. In 1941-42, the Nazi authorities imposed "ransoms" on the Jews and seized their cattle, valuables, furs, etc. In April 1942, a ghetto was set up in Brasław. The Nazis also used it to imprison Jews from nearby villages, such as Dubki, Jody, Slobodka, Dubinowo and others. As a result, its population reached 2,000 people. In May 1942, there were rumors of an imminent mass murder of the Jews of Brasław. The ghetto inmates began to build shelters and bunkers for hiding. There was a clandestine organization that planned an escape into the forest on the day of the liquidation of the ghetto. On June 3, the German Gendarmerie, assisted by local collaborators, rounded up about 2,000 Brasław Jews. On the next day, they were shot. Only a handful of Brasław Jews, most of them "specialists", remained in the old ghetto. In September 1942, the Germans repopulated the ghetto with some of the Jews from the nearby town of Opsa. This second ghetto, nicknamed the "Opsa Ghetto", was liquidated on March 19, 1943. During the liquidation, the Nazis met with considerable resistance. Some of the inmates managed to escape and joined the Soviet partisans. Brasław was liberated by the Red Army on July 6, 1944. The number of Jewish victims of the three mass-murder operations in Brasław is estimated at 4,000-5,000.