Murder story of Belynichi Jews in the Mkhi Ravine

In 1941 I was living in Zadrutskaya Sloboda [Street] and I saw how the Jews were being led along our Zadrutskaya Street to be shot. The police did not let any of us out of our huts but I looked out from behind the curtain. They drove the Jews into a field, where they remained for a short time then, after lunch, they were taken to be shot. They were not allowed to take things with them. The police were leading them. They said that the Jews would be taken to Esmony, where they would live and work, but when the people saw that they were being taken by another route, they started to be upset and alarmed. The police did not allow them to scream and beat them. There were several hundred of them. Some Jews lived beyond the bridge on our Zadrutskaya Sloboda. I knew the Merkulovs well; they were pensioners. In 1944 I was taken away to Germany. It was said that one [Jewish] man succeeded in escaping.

I was born in Belynichi County in the village of Pilshichi. Before the war ours was the only Jewish family living in the village…. When the Germans came, father was in shock. There was no place to flee to.... There was a policeman who denounced us, saying that we were aiding the partisans and harboring Jews. Soon he came with a letter ordering us to leave Belynichi to move to another place of residence. We were taken to the ghetto in a cart by the local police on November 12, 1941. Mamma continued to repeat that the Germans would not kill us since during the last war [World War I] they had saved and protected the Jews and killed the Belarusians and Poles. We couldn’t take anything with us; if we did, they would have taken it all from us. We were put into a wooden building packed with people. Since we couldn’t lie down or sit, we stood. We had no food. People lived in different buildings, wherever they managed to find a place. The partisans shot the police that took us to be killed, on their way back. On December 12 at six in the morning the pogrom began. They surrounded the ghetto. There were dogs on chains, policemen with rifles, and Germans on horseback. They killed sick people on the spot. It was overcast, damp, and cold with a light drizzle. One heard screams, prayers, weeping, and shooting. They drove us through a wood and through the village of Sloboda. We were weak; everyone was exhausted, hungry, and frozen. The police beat us on our backs with whips. My family was in the last ranks. The policemen aimed the barrels of their rifles at our backs. I already knew that we were being taken to our deaths. Friends of mine from the village, where we had spent the night when they took us to the ghetto, ran up to us and told us that for a whole week collective farmers had been digging a large pit outside Belynichi and that we were being taken there to be killed. I told this to Mamma but she didn’t believe me. They took us to a grove of trees, where there were piles of sand that had been dug up. The width of the pit was 10 adult paces and its length – 40. There is a monument there now. They chose the place because there was a swamp around it with the only entrance being through the grove. They began to shoot from machine-guns. They took nurslings away from their mothers and threw them alive into the pit. We were in the last rows and saw everything. A German with a big whip approached and beat people on the head. They took away any valuables people had and then forced them to strip. At Mamma’s urging my sisters and I began to shout that I was Russian and that I had been taken into the ghetto by mistake. They forced me to say “Na gore Ararat rastet krupnyi vinograd” [a Russian phrase full of letters that many antisemites believed Jews pronounced in a characteristically Jewish way) but they didn’t catch me with this. I spoke without an accent. Even though we always spoke Yiddish at home, my accent was not Yiddish but rather that of a country person. I was sent to jail in Mogilev to be checked out. However, nobody remembered about my nationality at the Mogilev jail. There I came down with typhus and was sent to the hospital. I was there for a long time. No one paid any attention to me. I was small and thin... I learned that only Semyon Kuperman (who lives in Mozyr) was the only person beside myself from the Belynichi ghetto who survived, and there was also some other woman.