Years of Suffering and Trials

Years of Suffering and Trials

22 июля 2018 1099

73 years have passed since the end of World War II, but it will be remembered as one of the most tragic pages in the history of world civilization. Entire towns and states lay in ruins. The war took millions of lives, turned into a great tragedy for the whole generation and left an unforgettable mark in the life and fate of many families and peoples. The Jewish nation was particularly affected. During the Nazi occupation there came years of suffering and trials for the Jewish community of Novogrudok.

 

German troops entered the town on July 4, 1941. From the first days of occupation the Nazi "new order" against the Jewish population was introduced. The announcements of the registration of all Jews were posted immediately, it was organized by the Judenrat ("Jewish council"). The Judenrat was to be the link between the German administration and the Jewish community to carry out German orders. The head of the Council was a lawyer Hertz Chekanovsky.

***

The life of Jews was regulated by the orders by the Gebietskommissar, the head of the civil occupying administration. On 26 September 1941, an order was issued according to which Jews were required to wear a yellow star on their chest and back, to have an identity card. They were forbidden to leave the town without official permission, engage in trade, visit the market, contact with the Christian population and walk on the sidewalk.

***

In 1992 the Novogrudok Museum of History and Regional Studies was opened, and we didn’t know that before the war, Novogrudok was a shtetl and  63% of its residents were Jews and that only 600 Jews (out of 6,000 Jews living in Novogrudok) survived after the war.

Jack Kagan was the first to tell about what happened to Novogrudok Jews during the war. He came to Novogrudok from London in 1992, 47 years after the war ended...

2

What does 47 years mean for history? A drop, one moment... But during this time the town has changed, and become unrecognisable. Even the places of executions was difficult to find without the help of the Jews’ friends. It seemed that only they remembered where the tragedy took place, where people were killed by thousands just for being Jews. As it turned out later, not only Jews remembered. In the town there lived witnesses of those terrible events.

Jack Kagan wrote about four mass shootings, told the history of his family and asked the town administration to put new monuments on mass graves sites.

In 1993, a large group of former Novogrudok residents from different countries of the world came to see the opening of the monuments on the way to Litovka Lake and in Minskaya Street.

Among them were former partisans of the Bielski group: Yakov Bergman and Khaya Bielskaya, the wife of one of Bielski's brothers – Asael, who died on the front in 1945. They willingly told their stories. It was felt that Novogrudok occupied an important place in their lives, although it was not easy to recollect.

Yudel Slutsky, standing in the square, which used to be a market before the war, told how in the first days of the occupation, on July 26, 1941, his father and brother were shot here together with other 52 Jews. It was a demonstration shooting. It was a Gebietskommissar’s response to the request of the Jewish delegation not to send Jews to work at Shabbat (day of rest and seventh day of the week). And then Jewish girls and women were forced to wash the blood off the pavers in the square. Among them was Rae Kushner, whose grandson Jared Kushner is currently senior advisor to his father-in-law, Donald Trump, the President of the United States.

Many years later, there was a witness of that very execution Gennady M. Korshun, who came from the city of Uzhgorod, Ukraine. During the war he was a teenager. That day he and his mother came to the Church and due to his curiosity he went up to the bell tower of St. Nicholas Cathedral and saw everything. Together with his father, he also came to the ghetto in Korelichskaya street (now Minskaya street). His father worked as a truck driver in the war and brought coal for the ghetto forge. Jews offloaded coal, and shovels disappeared from a truck. Then they were used to dig a tunnel.

Gennady’s father deliberately left a piece of bread and something to eat in the cab of the truck. It was also for those who were kept behind the barbed wire.

Jack Kagan organized visits of former Novogrudok residents almost every year. First of all, the guests visited the places of executions. There lay their loved ones.

***

On December 11, 1941 a ghetto was established in Peresetskaya St. (today Sechko St.) in Novogrudok.  First there were 1,500 prisoners but in the spring and summer of 1942 about 4500 Jews from Lyubcha, Ivenets, Korelichi, Rubezhevichi, Vselyub, etc. were taken to Novogrudok. The Ghetto was overpopulated. During the preparation for the next action of shooting 500 craftsmen were transferred to a new ghetto oi Korelichskaya street (now Minskaya St). The daily diet of the prisoner was initially 250 g of black bread and a bowl of soup. Later the rate of bread was reduced to 150 grams.

***

And then they went to the village of Kamenka, where the Bielski group and the Victor Panchenkov group lived during the war. In the village there are people who still remember the Bielskis. However, there was neither Agatha who helped partisans nor her house any more. A local resident Victor Shimon knew where there were dugouts in the forest. It was also a sacred place for him. Yakov Berman, a former partisan of the Bielski group, told what tricks the partisans used not to leave traces in winter forest. He told that they came from Naliboki Forest to Kamenka for a few weeks to blow up the German train at the station Yatsuki. In Israel he kept a long leather coat of a German officer, which he kept until today as a trophy after that operation.

Victor Shimon and his father transferred to the ghetto the gun dismantled to pieces. He also said that the hats made of blue cloth, sewn by tailors in the ghetto, were worn by the partisans from the Bielski group. He knew that fact, because he and his father handed over them to the partisans in the forest. V. Shimon still kept the accordion, which was played at parties during the war. The village of Kamenka was even called "Red Moscow" because there were partisans around, and the Bielski camp was a kilometer from the village.

3

Miron Petrikevich from the village of Small Izva recollected: when it got dark Asael Bielski came from the forest to their house, hung up his coat and put on Miron’s coat and went to the dance. After the dance he came back, changed his clothes again and went to the forest. He was the best dancer in the area before the war. Being in the partisan group Asael married Haya Dzentelskaya from the village of Small Izva. They came together to the Dukhovniks’ to take bread, which the hostess baked for the partisans.

There still remained a few stones of Dzentelski’s mill near the Dukhovniks’ house. But there is not a trace left neither of the Bieslski’s mill, nor of the village of Stankevichi, where the family of famous Jewish partisans lived.

By Tamara Vershitskaya, research worker, curator of the Museum of Jewish Resistance in Novogrudok

Translated by Helen Chal

 

Novardok: time of hope and expectation