Death and destruction in Dayvd-Haradok. German crimes, local complicity in the Holocaust, and survivors’ search for justice in a former Polesian shtetl

Abstract

This article provides a microhistory of Davyd-Haradok during and after the Second World War. Within post-1945 Soviet Belarus, the case of Davyd-Haradok in August 1941 constituted one of the most extreme examples of local participation in the Holocaust, displaying a brutality and intimacy of violence previously known mostly from western Ukraine and the Białystok region. This article sheds light on this little-known history. By situating it in a larger context, in particular the 1941 wave of pogroms in the East European borderlands, it contributes to studies that examine variations in local complicity in German atrocities across time and space.