Murder Story of Klimovichi Jews in Dolgaya Dubrava

Nazis burst into Klimovichi, Mogilev District, on August 10, 1941. From the very start, they tormented the residents, looting and terrorizing them. However, the main target of the Nazi terror was the Jews. After a while, members of the Gestapo arrived. This marked a new stage in Nazi misdeeds. German thugs prowled about from door to door, seizing all they could take. Their visits also involved raping the women. After robbing the Jews blind, the Hitlerites enclosed them in a ghetto, thus commencing their monstrous plan to annihilate the entire Jewish population. Germans implemented the first mass terror attack in Klimovichi in November 1941, on the eve of the anniversary of the Great October Revolution. The chief of the German Headquarters ordered all Jews, regardless of age or gender, to come to the garage of the local hospital on Sotsialisticheskaya Street. The brutal slaughter of the helpless people began with the ailing 70-year-old Bruk, who was late in reporting to the garage collecting point, rushing out from his home. The Hitlerites foisted a red flag into his right hand and attached a live chicken to his left. Beating the elderly Jew with their clubs, the Nazis compelled him to walk and call out: “I, a disdainful Jewish swine, was going to celebrate the Revolution anniversary.” He was murdered next to no. 26, Proletarskaya Street. Then the Gestapo went to the garage, selected 100 people and hurried them to the pits, dug in the Dolgaya-Dubrava area, where they killed them. A new group was lain across the corpses and shot at point-blank range in the same cool, bestial manner typical of professional murderers. In many cases, babies were thrown into the pits alive. Many adults, only injured, were also buried alive. The Hitlerite butchers murdered more than 750 people that day. A large number of patrols was set up next to the grave so that no one (could) help the victims who were buried alive. ... Among the tortured and shot Jews of Klimovichi were Raisa Markovna Zadelshanskaya, a high school teacher; local hospital pediatrician Roza Aronovna Kogan; the married Lichterman doctors; two Lichterman babies; and hundreds of other martyrs. ...