Copyright 2000 Michael Steinore
Overview
This is a list of Urechye Holocaust victims from the
records of the Extraordinary State Commission to Investigate and Establish War Crimes
of the German-Fascist Invaders (RG-22.002M, Reel 24, Fond 7021, Opis 82, File 9. USHMM).
The list entries are numbered 880 to 1400 because they are part of a larger
victim list for Slutsk Raion, Minsk Oblast. The date of compilation
of this list appears to be in the Sept.-Oct. 1944 timeframe, 2 to 3 years after
the atrocities occurred. I do not know what the population of Urechye was in June, 1941
(just before the German invasion), but my guess is that this list represents at
least half of the townspeople of Urechye.
List Details
The list order appears to be a random grouping by family units, as if someone went around
asking the surviving townspeople who they recalled.
The original list in Russian had a number of errors in it, such as incorrect gender endings for
patronymics, impossible dates of birth, occupations, etc. In most cases those errors
were preserved by me. Therefore, it would be difficult for you to know whether an error is due to
the original, or introduced in translation, but I think the translation and the data entry
is very accurate. [This philosophy of error preservation is not the norm, but consider:
if someone is a 3 year old tailor, which item is in error, the age or the occupation?
Therefore, how do you correct it?]
The original list was cursive handwriting, so occasionally legibility was bad.
'?' indicates a question as to the spelling, '---', means the information was not
provided in the original list. The Nationality is either 'bel.' for Belarussian, or
'evr.' for Evrei, or Jew. Two columns of information were left out: Sex, which
should be obvious from the full name; place of last work, which indicated in almost
all cases Urechye, but in about two dozen cases, the place 'k-z'.
Observations
By entering these names in a spreadsheet, and performing various sorts and counts one can
make a number of interesting observations, which would not be so obvious otherwise.
The year of birth was often an estimate rounded to the nearest 5th year. This observation
comes from noting the unaturally high percentage of birth years ending in 0 and 5 (half of the
list).
Slightly over half of the 30 different Jewish surnames that appear in the
1906-1907 Duma voter lists
for Urechye are still found in the list of Holocaust victims 4 decades later. For those
Jews who did not emigrate before the Russian revolution, they were unlikely/unable to
migrate from Urechye during the Soviet period. Because the
Duma voters were only a select 6% of the population, it is likely that a good percentage
of the other Jewish surnames found in the Victims list existed in Urechye in the early 20th
century as well.
The bulk of the occupations were farmer, laborer/worker, housewife and student. There
does not appear to be any concentration of particular type of craft, as one might have found
at the turn of the century.
There is no concentration of certain Jewish first names or patronymics, as one might have
expected of Jewish naming patterns in a small town in the 19th century. By this time,
the range of acceptable names had broadened considerably. Abram is the most popular
in both categories.
