Qualla: Damachava Ghetto

Damachava Ghetto: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Before the war, Damachava was a Jewish village. The 3,000 Jewish residents of this small settlement near the Bug River in western Belarus made up almost the entire population. They ran the shops and the orphanage, kept the synagogue and the schools, farmed the surrounding fields. The Wehrmacht arrived at seven in the morning on June 22, 1941, the first day of Operation Barbarossa, and the killings began that week. By the time Soviet troops liberated Damachava on July 23, 1944 - more than three years later - ten Jews from the village remained alive.

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Damachava Ghetto: The First Murders

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Seven Jews were shot on July 23, 1941, exactly a month after the German occupation began. Two days after the occupation began, on June 24, 36 Jewish men had been ordered to escort carts of looted valuables across the Bug River. They returned. They were shot. The Russian Jewish En...

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Damachava Ghetto: September 1942

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On September 18, 1942, the Germans ordered the remaining Jews of the Damachava ghetto to dig pits on a sandy hill half a kilometer east of the village, in a place known locally as the Shilov Swamp. Some of those forced to dig understood what the pits were for and tried to scatter...

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Damachava Ghetto: Names That Should Be Said

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

An incomplete list of those murdered was eventually published in the chronicle-documentary book Memory: Brest District, part of a Belarusian regional series compiled in the 1990s and 2000s. It runs to roughly 2,000 names of those tortured and killed in the ghetto itself, not coun...

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Damachava Ghetto: The Trial in London

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Among those who participated in the killings was a local Belarusian policeman named Andrei Sawoniuk, who later took the name Anthony and emigrated to Britain after the war. He worked as a railway ticket inspector for British Rail until his retirement. In 1999, when he was in his ...

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