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"Lechovitz" (Yiddish)
The holocaust had a devastating
effect on the Jews of Bilohirya. Germany invaded
Russia on June 22, 1941 in Operation Barbarossa. The
invasion was swift and forceful, leaving many residents
trapped and overcome. Belogorye was occupied in early
July 1941. The situation quickly became very grim.
Hundreds of people were shot to death over the summer of
1941. The remaining Jews were then confined to an
overcrowded ghetto until June or July of 1942. At that time,
the Germans formed Einsatzgruppen, or killing squads, to
carry out German orders to execute communist officials,
Jews, politicians, and other categories of people.
Einsatzgrup C was deployed to Volhynia, where they conducted
mass murders, including the slaughter of 33,000 Jews at the
ravine of Babi Yar in Kiev. In Bilohirya, there were
mass shootings in the surrounding forests, killing virtually
the entire Jewish population of those towns. This
devastation was echoed in hundreds of other communities in
the Soviet Union. By the spring of 1943, when Germans began
their retreat from Soviet areas, the Einsatzgrupen had
murdered an estimated 1.25 million Jews and hundreds of
thousands of others in western Russia.
Some Jews survived the war
having served in the armed forces. A few others managed to
escape to safety elsewhere within the Soviet Union or
beyond. The few survivors are not believed to have returned
to Bilohirya.
To review the ever-growing
database of Jews from Bilohirya killed and persecuted in the
war, visit the Yad Vashem website.