Sofia Drojez

Testimony of Sofia (Blyakher) Drojez, born in Kolyshki, Belorussia in 1935, regarding her experiences as a child in Kolyshki until March 1942, and her escape to Shikhazany with help from the partisans From a family of four sisters in Kolyshki; her father is a blacksmith; Jewish holidays; draft of her father into the Red Army; retreat of the Red Army in the direction of Smolensk; some of the village's residents join the partisans and some of them become policemen; arrival of many Jewish refugees to the area; establishment of a ghetto; ghetto life including overcrowding; hunger; outbreak of a typhus epidemic; they hear from an acquaintance who is a policeman on 17/03/1942 about the plan by German soldiers to murder the Jews; finding a hiding place with her mother and two of her sisters beneath the floor of a nearby house; concentration of the Jews, and their transfer to a ravine in the area*; murder of the Jews including members of her family, by a firing squad; escape to the partisans with help from neighbors; transfer to Toropets by the partisans; escape to Shikhazany on a train; return to Kolyshki at the end of the war; information regarding her father's death in battle at the front; * Note: Meaning the shooting of Jews in the Liozno area in the Adamenki forest on 18/03/1942.