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A Soldier from Uzbekistan Who Was Murdered in Auschwitz
December 2006 was a special month for Fazhila Jumayeva, an Uzbekistan resident. She finally found out what happened to her brother, Yozi Khaydarov, during the war. All she had known of him for years was that he had gone missing in action in 1941, during fighting on the Eastern Front in World War II.
Cooperation between the Museum and the Warsaw-based Association of the Heirs of Polish World War II Veterans led to the discovery of the truth. When members of the Association visited the Museum last summer, their party included Boris Shmirov, the Association’s representative in Uzbekistan.
During a meeting, the Museum Archives presented the delegation with copies of records concerning Uzbek Soviet POWs whom the Germans imprisoned in Auschwitz. The documents, including information from POW registration cards and the Death Books, listed 12 Auschwitz prisoners known to have come from the central Asian country.
With the names of the POWs in hand, Boris Shmirov began looking for their relatives. The first ones he found come from the family of Yozi Khaydarov, a POW given camp number RKG 9983. His younger sister, Fazhila Jumayeva, and several of his nieces and nephews, are still alive.
The materials that Shmirov took home from Poland made a big emotional impression on Fazhila. After all these years, she still cherished a few mementoes of her brother, including a photograph taken in 1938, three years before the fighting on the Eastern Front began. A copy of the picture and new information about Khaydarov have been added to the Museum archives.
The picture is a rarity, since the Museum possesses very few prewar photographs of Soviet POWs. This is probably the only picture in the Museum collections of an Auschwitz prisoner who came from Uzbekistan and was a Muslim.
According to the information now available, Yozi Khaydarov was born into a Muslim family in the town of Nurota, central Uzbekistan, in 1915, and not 1911 as recorded on the POW registration card in the camp records. Inducted into the army after the outbreak of warfare on the Eastern Front, he was a private in the 132nd Rifle Battalion, 27th Rifle Division, 4th Rifle Corps. He was 26 when the Germans captured him in July 1941. He arrived in Auschwitz on February 8, 1942, and died within a month, on March 4.
The cause of his death is listed in the camp records as influenza, but it may be supposed that, like the majority of the more than 10 thousand Soviet POWs imprisoned in Auschwitz, Yozi was either murdered or died as a result of the incredibly harsh conditions that the SS created for them in the camp.
Religious Denominations of Auschwitz Prisoners
The Nazis registered about 400 thousand prisoners in Auschwitz. Half of them were Jews, most of whom professed Judaism.
It is estimated that the approximately 200 thousand non-Jewish prisoners included:
- 165 thousand Catholics
- 12.3 thousand Eastern Orthodox
- approximately 11.6 thousand protestants
- 5.5 thousand Greek Catholics
- and at least 9.7 thousand believers in other religions, or agnostic.
The latter category also includes 58 Muslims. They were Soviet POWs, whose records, including their religious denomination, are found in the documentation preserved at the Museum.
The group whose numbers are most exactly known are the Jehovah’s Witnesses, at least 387 of whom were imprisoned in Auschwitz.
