The Shoah (1939–1945)
Ashmyany Selection
23 octobre 1942·Ashmyany
The toll is reproduced exactly as the source states it — never rounded, never added to another. Tolls overlap from one event to the next.
The occupier demands that the chief of the Vilna ghetto himself deliver part of the population of the neighbouring ghetto; after discussion, the Jewish police designate elderly women and hand them over to the shooters, in the name of the calculation that a smaller number would save the others. The case was debated by survivors and remains one of the harshest dilemmas posed by the forced organization of ghettos.
In Ashmyany, the selection preceding the liquidation of the enclosed quarter is entrusted to the Jewish police from Vilna, upon whom the occupier has imposed the delivery of a fixed number of elderly persons in exchange for a reprieve for the others. The designated men are taken to the pits of the region while the rest of the population is transferred. The episode has remained one of the most discussed cases of the dilemma imposed on Jewish councils and their police forces.
- Period :
- The Shoah (1939–1945)
- Type :
- Shoah
- Region :
- Central and Eastern Europe
- Country :
- Biélorussie
Yitzhak Arad, *The Holocaust in the Soviet Union* ; *Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos*, dirigée par Geoffrey Megargee.