Murder Story of Daraganovo Jews in Krynki

There are some splendid places in Krynki, not far from Osipovichi. There is the Ptich River, deep at its bend, with sand and pine trees. Before the war there was a fashionable resort that drew people from the surrounding area…. Many people wished to send their children to the Krynka Sanatorium, located not far from the village of the same name. They were very successful in treating juvenile bed-wetting there. And the conditions there were wonderful also…… The war began quietly there, without chaos. First the caregivers left. Only a few staff members and the directress were left. She released the older children, those who could make their way home. During the first months of the war parents came for many of the children. But no one came for the Jewish children. Ghetto areas were already closed off in many towns and villages of Belorussia. They also set up a small ghetto at the children’s sanatorium: all of the Jewish children were put into one big room. They spent the harsh winter of 1941-1942 in this unheated hall. Yellow stars were put on their summer Pioneer uniforms (some were given back the clothing, also for summer, in which they had arrived). Soon the whole Krynki Sanatorium had been transformed into a kind of children’s concentration camp. Children were brought there from the orphanages of Daraganovo, Korytnoye, Lapichi, and Osipovichi. During the fall everyone had to work in agriculture. “The Jewish children harvested only cabbages and beets. That was our basic diet,” recalled Vladimir Semenovich [Sverdlov]. "Things became really bad when winter began. There was no possibility of supplementing our diet. They gave us 100 grams of bread a day. There were so many children in the room that there was simply no room to spread out mats. The children slept right on the floor, on a bed of leaves. But that did not protect them from the cold. At the very end of November, when the frosts became severe, they provided three logs a day for heating the huge room.” Vladimir Semenovich remembered [this situation as follows]: “There was a box with garbage in the yard; we used to gaze at it with longing. When anyone succeeded in climbing inside, he shared the peelings and leftovers with everyone. The oldest one of us, my friend Yasha, who was 12, always saw to it that the small and weak children got the most. When he saw that someone was doing especially poorly, he asked everyone to break off a few crumbs from their bread to contribute to them. Of course, that didn’t help very much. In January and February, almost every morning, they took a dead child out of the room. We didn’t see this ourselves, but were told by local people that they were not even buried. After all, why try to break up the frozen ground. Instead they were dropped into the Ptich River through a hole in the ice. We were no longer tortured by fear: we were simply indifferent to everything. It was not frightening to die of hunger; that was peaceful. But there was no refuge from the cold. When you exhaled, you would get icicles in your nose. We wanted one thing only: for everything to be over with as quickly as possible. We stopped talking to each other, even stopped recognizing each other – we all looked neglected, unkempt, and sick, and resembled skeletons. ‘Abram died today. Who will die tomorrow?’ – that was all that we said to each other at that time.” There were no Germans working in the building that was a concentration camp. The director was a former major in the Red Army, Shipenko, a Ukrainian, who had been taken prisoner of war. But he was not the evil genius of the place. Sometimes female cruelty is much more refined and terrible than the male variety. The children called Vera Zhdanovich, the assistant director for administrative matters, “that German woman.” As early as the end of fall, many children began to suffer from frostbite. Vladimir Sverdlov recalled that, when he was finally given the clothing that he had arrived in, there were no boots left, only galoshes. He wore them all winter. "They set up an isolation box in the 'sanatorium.' You could end up there for the slightest infraction. If you threw an extra log on the fire, you got three days. If you grabbed a potato from the pigs, you got five days of solitary. To make this more effective they regularly dropped snow into this 'cooler.' During her investigation after the war that sadistic women said: 'The children were very disobedient. If you didn’t keep them under control, they would have burned down the whole building.' ... They got rid of the children who were ill very quickly. They sent the ones with frostbite to the hospital in Osipovichi - not to cure them, but to receive confirmation that it was not worth treating them. They were shot the same day, at the town’s cemetery. A policemen was assigned to keep order at the orphanage. He never parted with his whip…. Once he caught Volodya Sverdlov near the garbage box and began to beat him. In despair the boy tore the star off his clothes and began to trample it into the snow. Volodya said: “He beat me half to death and then hissed with spite: ‘If it were up to me, I would shoot you.’” Evidently, it wasn’t up to him since there was no such order. “As for me” [he noted] “I couldn’t get out of bed for a month and constantly wet my bed. Furthermore, that didn’t shock anyone. You have to remember that the sanatorium was for children who would persistently wet their beds. The hall emitted such a suffocating stench of ammonia that the caregivers would not enter unless they had to. And the children were in no hurry to carry out the pee-pots…. It was the beginning of spring of 1942. The general apathy gave way to hope. The haggard children seemed to revive. We picked and ate the swelling buds and needles of the firs or spruce trees and convinced each other that it had been the harsh frosts that had held the Red Army back but, now, with the thaw, they would soon liberate us all.”... It was probably in late April although another source says – May. Memory has not preserved the date of that terrible day. Before dawn some policemen and the caregivers came into the room that was a kind of ghetto. They began to lift and take away the children, who didn’t understand what was happening. “You are being taken to another orphanage, where it will be bright and warm and there will be enough food,” said one of the policemen. They lined up the older children by twos. The youngest, from several months to three years old, were loaded onto two carts. They read out the list of names. Two girls, Valya Fridlyand and Raya Vinnik, had run away during the commotion. Where can a child hide? Under the bed, of course! The caretakers pulled them out and put them back in place. Just because of that episode, which was subsequently recalled by the caregivers when they were interrogated, the girls’ names became known. The column of children headed toward Krynki. In the dark you couldn’t tell how many people there were. You could only hear voices speaking German and loud laughter. Yasha, who was at the end of the line, whispered: “Vova [Volodya], they aren’t transferring us anywhere. If we were being resettled, they would do it during the daytime! We are being taken to be killed.” Together with the children they took a couple of adults, a radiologist named Rokhlin and a nurse, Mariya, who cared for the infants (unfortunately, her last name is not known). Mariya was a Polish Jew, who converted to Catholicism when she got married. She had fled here from Poland in 1939, when the Germans got there. Since she was Catholic, they didn’t intend to shoot her. Several times policemen pushed Mariya away with the butts of their rifles, but her 10-year old son was in the column. Mariya went to be shot with him. The way went by a young grove of pine trees. The trees were low but thick. A grown man could not hide there but it was just right for an emaciated 11-year old boy. Volodya whispered to Yasha about his plan. “But where shall I go?” the latter said, smiling sadly. “With the way I look I’ll be in trouble as soon as I run into the first German. You don’t look very much like a Jew, so you should run for it.” “What about following the current of the river since that’s the direction of your hometown Mozyr?” Volodya practically screamed at him. “It’s very, very far. I won’t make it. And, also, how can I leave them?” asked Yasha, pointing toward the young children who had grabbed onto his hands. “I am sorry about one thing more than anything else in the world” Vladimir Semenovich says today: “that I did not know his last name. Only that he was Yasha from Mozyr. I owe my life to him...” “And who bothered to speak to us?” recalled a very old resident of Krynki, the 86-year old Alesya Yaroshevich. “They stuck an automatic weapon into our back and forced us to dig: for this they took all the men they could find. I remember how they pushed those children, it was already evening and they could barely move their feet, there was a huge amount of dust. But we were afraid to look in that direction… The policemen surrounded the children. One of them read from a list, seven or eight names at a time. They took the children whose names had been called to the pit and flung them into it. The Germans stood on the edge of the pit and shot. The very young children who could not yet walk were taken directly from the carts and thrown into the pits, like they were cats.”...

In December 1941 those children who remained in the orphanage were transferred to a children’s sanatorium in Krynki. Approximately 300-350 children were living there and the conditions were quite awful. There was even a place of solitary confinement. In early 1942, not far from this camp, the German murderers, together with a subunit of the Bobruysk SD, shot 82 [84] Jewish children, along with three women. The murder victims included 15 children under the age of one year.