Research trip n°6 Belarus, Brest and Grodno Regions

Dates: April 28 – May 10, 2010

Regions: administrative regions of Brest and Grodno, area surrounding the city of Baranovitchi

Participants: Geoffroy Lauby (team leader and script editor), Oleksii Kosarevskyi (interviewer), Johanna Lehr (interviewer), Lilia Votler (interpreter), Svetlana Bieroulova (interpreter),  David Grinberg (cameraman), Nicolas Tkatchouk (photographer), Mikhaïl Stroutinski (ballistics specialist), Denis Mouravitski (researcher)

Cities and villages investigated: Tourets, Mir, Byten, Jirovitchi, Kozlovchtchina, Medveditchi, Tchepelevo, Petralevitchi, Slonime, Dvorets, Diatlovo, Novoïelnia, Lesnaïa

                This trip was Yahad’s sixth research trip in Belarus, a 13-day mission around the city of Baranovitchi, in the southwestern part of the country.

                 For better understanding, it is important to know that the area was part of Poland from 1920 to 1939. Therefore, there was a significant Polish population, but also numerous Belarusians and Jews. The Soviets took possession of this territory in September 1939, making it part of Soviet Belarus. The Germans occupied the area in June 1941.

                 Following are the main points from the research trip.

Ghetto / absence of ghetto

                 While a number of urban areas featured a ghetto (Slonime, for example, which had a ghetto with tens of thousands of Jews), this was not the case in a number of smaller towns and was even less so for villages, even those that had a Jewish population.

                In Tourets, a town with a population between 1,000 and 2,000 before the war, the Jewish population, prior to being executed, was gathered regularly in the central plaza following the invasion in order to pay their contributions to the Germans. The Jews had some form of identification, but there was never a ghetto established in the town. On the other hand, a ghetto of significant size was established in Dvorets, a town of about the same size, though relatively late. This ghetto also included numerous refugee Jews from Poland.

In Medveditchi, a small village with less than 100 Jews, Jews were subject to being called to perform forced labor, but they were able to remain in their homes. In the village of Lesnaïa, however, with a Jewish community of approximately the same size as Medveditchi, a mini-ghetto of two buildings was created. But in Medveditchi, those who were made to work were closely-supervised, whereas the Jews in Lesnaïa worked unsupervised.

In Mir, the Jews there were held for some period of time in a famous castle.

                It appears that, the administrations and death squads at the local level were provided with ample latitude.

                 As with previous trips, one of the recurrent themes in the testimonies is the descriptions of regular interaction between the ghetto and the external population. Mikhaïl (born in 1926), said he was able to enter the Mir ghetto for trading quite easily, despite its prohibition. He added that the residents of Mir could contact the Jewish leader of the ghetto in order to hire (at no cost) the services of a specialist. Vassili (born in 1921) from Byten, on the other hand, said that it was not possible to use Jewish services.

Many methods of execution

                In Byten, during one of the first executions, the first victims were chosen randomly by the calling out of numbers in the town square. In Jirovitchi, all of the town’s residents were assembled on the town square. The Jews were then set aside and sent directly to the execution site and killed.

                A number of killings took place in isolated locations making it sometimes difficult to find eyewitnesses — even more difficult where the majority of the population was Jewish, as was the case in Kozlovchtchina. Nikolaï (born in 1925) from Zapolje, was requisitioned to dig a grave, but when the shootings were to take place, he was sent home “for a lunch break.” He was then called back to cover the grave.

                Nevertheless, Pavel (born in 1929) was able to view the shootings in Tourets while he was at school; Nadejda (born in 1930) from Byten watched the killing of the Jews inside the ghetto from her window, and recounted that the executioners “tossed a corpse straight into a well.”

                In Dvorets, the Jews were locked in and burned alive in a barn. Also in Dvorets, Alexandra (born in 1927) saw the Jews crowding together on a dirt pile placed between two graves. They were shot and they fell randomly on either side of the hill.

                There were also no established rules about who the executioners would be during the killings. Sometimes it was Belarusian auxiliaries, as in Diatlovo. But in Medveditchi, it was the Germans themselves that shot the Jewish men as they stood, without having dug a grave beforehand. It should be noted that this form of execution was rather uncommon.  Witnesses also testified that the Germans raped Jewish women in Medveditchi.

Invaluable discoveries

                Vassili (born in 1921), a former policeman in Byten, was enlisted in a Belarusian protection unit under Polish officers’ orders in 1943, right after the liquidation of the Jews in the city. His unit was then merged with the local police in 1944. Vassili testified, “I didn’t have a choice, I could have run away, but my family would have been killed.” He had to stand guard in his village and fight against the partisans in the forest. But at night, he met with the partisans to inform them of future actions. After the war, he was imprisoned for 10 years in a Gulag.

                At a market in Diatlovo, Chifra (born in 1924), a Jewish survivor from the city ghetto said that inside the ghetto, repression was very strong: “I was terrorized, I would stay locked in our house in the ghetto.” Once she found out that a shooting was to take place, Chifra and some others escaped the ghetto by an underground tunnel. For 6 months, she lived in a camp with other Jews and partisans. After that, she moved about from village to village and from house to house.

               In Mantiouta, a small hamlet in Dvorets, Ivan (born in 1926) also mentioned a Jewish camp in the forest.  He accompanied the team into the forest to look for it but no trace was found. In Novoïelnia, Maria (born in 1922) worked as a nurse in a German military hospital. She testified that “Jewish nurses were still working for about a month after the invader’s arrival” but then disappeared.

 During the course of this trip, the research team visited 13 cities and villages, interviewed 46 witnesses, and investigated 24 execution graves or sites, most of which have memorials, some of which were erected relatively recently.