Murder Story of Grodek Wilejski Jews in Semerniki

On June 3, (or July 11, according to other accounts), 1942, the Germans liquidated the ghetto in Gródek Wileński. An SD squad, headed by Gebietskommissar Schmidt and reinforced by local policemen (both Germans and Belarusians), arrived in the town, assembled the 1,100 Jews of the ghetto, and carried out a selection. They picked 400 able-bodied Jews, loaded them onto trucks, and took them to the Krasne Ghetto as forced laborers. The rest of the Jews – 700 women, children, elderly people, and disabled individuals – were led out of the town in a northeasterly direction, to the barn on the eastern edge of Semerniki. Then, all the 700 people were locked inside the barn and burned alive. According to some accounts, the perpetrators initially shot the victims, and then forced the Jews who were still alive to stack the bodies of the dead in the barn; afterward, they locked those survivors in the barn, and burned them together with the bodies.