Alena Struzh earned her MA in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies at Columbia University in 2025. She studies Russian politics from as many perspectives as possible.
This post won the Grand Prize in History in the Jordan Center Blog's fifth annual Graduate Student Essay Competition.
In January 1942, hundreds of Jews were burned alive in the ghetto of Velizh, a small Soviet town tucked between Smolensk, Russia and Vitebsk, Belarus in the East European borderlands or “bloodlands” of the Holocaust. Yad Vashem estimates that between 1400 and 1700 Jews were killed during the destruction of the ghetto, which was built around a repurposed pigsty that the Nazis would ultimately burn down with Jews trapped inside.
Among the victims were dozens of my ancestors. Today, that killing site holds a monument to “victims of fascism in the town of Velizh.” Until 2008, there was no mention of Jews at all except in this oblique manner. Like much of the former Soviet Union, Velizh remembers its wartime dead, but not its Jews. Across the (post-)Soviet space, the Holocaust has been folded into a broader story of Soviet suffering, erasing the distinct racial targeting of Jews. Velizh is a microcosm of how that erasure was built into Soviet memory.
Before the Second World War, Velizh’s Jewish community made up about a third of the population. By war’s end, virtually all were gone. The Germans occupied Velizh from July 1941 to September 1943, confining resident Jews to a ghetto as of September 1941. Russian locals collaborated in the persecution of their Jewish neighbors. Jews were subjected to forced labor, shootings, starvation, and freezing. When it came time to memorialize the dead, the Soviet state erased their Jewish identity, dissolving their memory in a sanitized narrative of collective Soviet suffering under fascism.
How did this erasure of memory happen in a typical Soviet place like Velizh? As historian Anika Walke has argued, Jewish experiences of the Holocaust in Soviet territories were omitted from public monuments, official narratives, and national rituals, creating a historical “split memory.” The memory of Jewish suffering was not only forgotten, but made invisible by design. The commemorative landscape of Velizh, with its memorial parks, obelisks, and mass graves, is a case in point.Today, descendants of the victims have begun to reclaim their stories.
Unlike in Western Europe, where Jews were deported to extermination camps after a process of ghettoization, the Holocaust in Soviet territories was a local affair. Known as the “Holocaust by bullets,” it took the form of mass executions in forests, fields, and village outskirts—near the very homes where victims had lived. This proximity—Jews dying within sight of their neighbors—created a fraught legacy. The dead were near, but memory was not. Memorials honored “citizens,” “warriors,” and “victims of fascism,” rarely mentioning that the majority of victims were Jewish.
During the “Great Patriotic War,” as it is still known in Russia, the Soviet state oversaw a wholesale erasure of the particularity of Jewish experience, disregarding Jews as direct targets of Nazi racial ideology. This erasure persisted throughout the war, in its immediate aftermath, and in long-term Soviet and even post-Soviet memory. Jewish identity remained unnamed within the Soviet memorial establishment, creating divisions across personal and public memory. These “unwelcome memories,” as Arkadi Zeltser called them in his study of Holocaust monuments in the Soviet Union, formed a “layer of silence” (Anika Walke’s term) atop the violence, persecution, and destruction inflicted on Soviet Jews.
Velizh is home to a dozen or so major memorials dedicated to the Second World War. Most of them are military in nature: a for instance, a monument to the famous Katyusha rocket launcher, erected in 1989 on the highway leading into the town, and five gigantic steel bayonets dedicated to Soviet warriors. There is also the Lidova Gora park, with its mass grave of 10,000 Soviet soldiers, which acts as a central site of commemoration. On 9 May (Victory Day) and 20 September (Velizh’s liberation day) each year, local residents gather to honor fallen soldiers beneath a sculpture of a soldier and a farmer, flanked by monumental tableaux naming key soldiers buried at the site. The town center, called the “Avenue of Heroes,” features statues of local Soviet war heroes and another mass grave memorial.
Two of these memorials have a covert Jewish history. The first, a modest obelisk near Lidova Gora erected right after victory in 1945 and reconstructed in 1985, marks a mass grave site for 1500 Velizh residents who were shot by Nazis. According to the accounts of a local history group, about 400 Jewish families were among the victims. Yet the memorial mentions only the very general “victims of fascism.” This phrasing mirrors the Soviet framing of the “Great Patriotic War” as an act of universally anti-Soviet aggression, disregarding the specificity of the Holocaust as a genocide primarily targeting Jews.
The main memorial to the victims of the Velizh Ghetto is how locals know the site today. A first, modest monument was built in 1954, but gained its current form only in 1990, when Velizh residents asked that the monument be reconstructed.
Though it retains a certain Soviet monumentality, this memorial differs from more conventional obelisks. Located on the edge of the small town, it consists of a four-meter-high pillar with a large print of a human palm, framed by a low triangular wall. There are two inscriptions: the left-hand one commemorates “the citizens of Velizh who were shot and burnt alive by the fascists during the Great Patriotic War in 1941-1942. From their countrymen [zemlyaki].” The right-hand inscription, added in 2008, 64 years after the liberation of Velizh, states: “On January 28, 1942, the Velizh ghetto was brutally destroyed here. About 2000 Jews were burned. Eternal memory to the dead prisoners of the ghetto!” In 2019, the town council installed an additional large plaque financed by the Jewish Association of Russia, listing the names of all Jews who perished in Velizh, not only those burned. My ancestors’ names, too, are on this plaque. Every year on 30 January, the approximate day of the ghetto’s liquidation, Velizh residents gather to remember the brutal loss of Jewish life.
The memorial landscape of Velizh reflects a broader pattern in Soviet and post-Soviet memory culture. Whereas central sites celebrate military victory and a unified, heroic struggle, Jewish suffering is pushed to the margins, both geographically and symbolically. The town’s central squares celebrate fallen soldiers, while the Jewish memorial sits quietly on the outskirts, visited almost exclusively on important memorial days like Victory Day. Memorials to atrocities that implicate the local population—through collaboration, indifference, or malicious action for personal gain—are often delayed or avoided entirely.
Beyond the dilapidated Jewish cemetery and the memorial plaque, there are no signs of Jewish life left in Velizh. The two memorials thus mark a Jewish presence now reduced to its own death. The failure to commemorate these victims, moreover, plays into the initial intention of the Nazi genocide—to erase not only lives themselves, but also their very memory. Jews had lived in the region under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union, at times making up half of Velizh’s population. The town’s last Jewish inhabitant died in 1973.
Memorializing the loss of Jewish lives on Soviet territory has become the task of Jewish descendants who are dispersed around the world. In my family, it is one of my great-aunts who travels from Moscow to lay flowers at the memorial, who submitted testimony to Yad Vashem, and who raises funds to rebuild the local Jewish cemetery. She practices what scholar Marianne Hirsch calls postmemory: descendants’ remembrance as shaped by survivors’ trauma. To my great-aunt, these acts are crucial for our family’s survival story, which deserves a physical space of commemoration. Remembering becomes a form of resistance.
Jewish stories of survival and loss deserve dignified memorialization, a process that is far from complete. In places like Velizh, where official memory falters, it falls to descendants, removed from the town itself, to keep that memory alive.
