Murder Story of Minsk Jews at the Tuchinka Brick Factory

…On November 6 [1941] … people suddenly learned that there would be a pogrom the next day. That morning, the city woke unusually early. SS troopers and local policemen were prowling the streets, and the section – encompassing Nemich, Bashkovaya, Khlebnaya, Rakovskaya, Ostrovskaya, and other streets – was surrounded. They broke down doors and smashed open trunks, cupboards, and wardrobes, while window glass showered down into the street. Trucks drove up to the houses and took away clothing, pots, pans, and furniture. Beaten and bleeding, the residents were driven into the streets. The column of people gradually grew. There were women young and old, as well as little children, standing there. Many mothers were holding infants in their arms. Moans and heartrending cries could be heard everywhere. Thirty thousand people were thrown into the street in this way. For a whole day, columns of martyrs, forced along by storm troopers, walked toward the town of Tuchinka. Wishing to justify their crime, the Germans staged a "revolutionary procession." They grabbed the first man who came along, thrust a red banner into his hands, and placed him at the head of the crowd. The Nazis forced the people to sing revolutionary songs at gunpoint. Then, the mass shootings began. They ordered living people to lie side-by-side in a huge trench. From above, they sprayed them with automatic fire as from a hose. Then, they placed a new group atop the killed and wounded inmates and shot them in the same way…. There was another pogrom less than two weeks later. Just like the first time, they took those they seized to Tuchinka and shot them there. One woman was hit in the leg during the shooting and thrown into the pit, but, since the pit had not been covered, she crawled out of the grave and returned to the ghetto. They killed children by smashing them against stones or throwing them to the ground, or else they tossed them into the pit alive….

…On November 7, 1941, the Germans carried out a massacre…Naturally the most terrible blow was aimed at the ghetto. The people were ordered to put on their best clothes and to dress their children as if for a holiday. Even small babies had to be taken. All the people were lined up in columns of four and taken under guard to Novokrasnaya Street. A truck was drawn up next to the park and used as a platform from which to photograph one of the columns. The machine gun began to bark, and the column was massacred. Trucks drove up to Novomyasnitskaya Street and picked up people… The trucks went back and forth all day. About twelve or thirteen thousands Jews were taken to Tuchinki that day and kept there two days. The groans and crying of thirsty children crowded upon each other carried for long distances. On the third day the machine guns were used. Thousands of bodies were laid out in trenches which had been prepared in advance. Of the thousands who were taken to the execution site, two or three returned. A ten-year-old boy returned to the ghetto. He said: "At 7:00 PM, a great number of women and children were brought to the barracks in trucks. They were held there for three days, without being given anything to eat or drink. Some of them, the small babies and the old folks, died in those three days. When they took us from there, I was with my mother's sister. There were no other trucks behind us, and my aunt lifted the tarpaulin and said: 'Jump, sweetie, maybe you'll survive'. I jumped as the truck was driving down the road. I lay on the ground for a while, and then I came here." The next story is that of a woman who had been led out into a field to be shot. She came to the ghetto, her body swollen and bloody. She was naked and wounded in the arm. She had seen long wide trenches, alongside which Germans and policemen were forcing people to undress. As soon as the small children got down from the trucks, the policemen took them from their parents and broke their spinal columns against their knees. Small babies were thrown in the air and shot at or caught on bayonets and then flung in the trenches. Naked people were lined up next to the pit and shot with machine guns. Those who refused to undress were murdered in their clothing. If their clothing was of good quality, they were undressed after being killed. One woman was forced to undress and stand beside a pit. They wounded her in the arm; she fell and was covered up by bodies. That night, when things quieted down, she crawled from the pit and came to the ghetto… On November 20, 1941, morning had not yet arrived but the Germans and police were already walking down the streets of the ghetto: Zamkovaya Street, Podzamkovaya Street, Zelenaya Street, Sanitarnaya Street, and others. Again the people were driven from their apartments, marched in columns to the graves in Tuchinki. Lime had already been prepared at the graves, and the people were thrown alive into the pits. There they were shot and burned…

…On November 7, 1941, on the anniversary of the great October Socialist Revolution, large armed units of fascists broke into the Jewish ghetto at 5:00 AM, surrounded five of its twelve blocks, and herded everyone into the street – men and women, the elderly, and children. The howls of mortal fear and horror, the cries of desperation, the weeping of children, and the sobbing of women filled the surrounding areas and could be heard throughout the city. The fascists chased the crowd in its many thousands onto a nearby square, where they formed them into columns and then, after loading them onto trucks, transported them out of town. There, by the old German cemetery, outside of Kalvaria, long deep trenches had been excavated ahead of time with the help of dynamite. Several days before that, rumors had been going about in the city that these trenches had not been dug for no reason at all, that the fascists were preparing mass murder. But the human brain refused to believe in the possibility of such an atrocity. However, the foray of the Nazi gangs into the Jewish ghetto and, most important of all, the dispatch of many thousands of people in the direction of the trenches, unsettled the whole of Minsk. Many Russians and Belorussians who had friends and relatives in the ghetto rushed there to see for themselves if the rumors that had reached them were true, and became witnesses to the savage treatment meted out to a defenseless people. Many – and I was included in their number – followed the trucks on foot right up to the place of slaughter. What we saw there makes us tremble from horror to this day. When the enormous crowd of Jews condemned to death by the Nazis had been assembled beside the trenches, the German soldiers began throwing them in while they were still alive. The children first (suckling infants pulled from their mothers' arms were torn in two by the fascists and flung into the ditches); then the women on top of the children; and finally the men. Then they began blazing away with machine guns into this half-dead human mass writhing in the convulsions preceding death. Sunset was already approaching when the chatter of the machine gun ceased. The fascists soon covered the common graves with a thin layer of earth, so thin that the earth rose and fell slightly for a long time afterward from the pressure of those who were only wounded or who by chance were left untouched by the bullets. Tatars living not far from the place of execution reported that some of those thrown into the trenches had succeeded in scraping away the earth at night and crawling out of the awful graves. They hid out in the Tatars' gardens; the Tatars did not hand them over, and after keeping them at their homes for several days, helped them to escape from the fascist hell. On November 7, 1941, my mother died as well, along with her entire family of nine people.… On that day alone, November 7, 1941, approximately 35,000 Jews perished in Minsk at the hands of the Hitlerites.

...[T]he pogroms resumed on November 20. On that day at 4-5 AM, the ghetto section between Zamkovaya and Tatar Streets was surrounded. Entire families of people caught by surprise were driven naked outside, herded to Tuchinka, where pits had been dug in advance, and shot. In this way, another 5,000 Jews perished…

…On November 20, 1941, another pogrom started. At 4 AM, when the entire ghetto population was still asleep, the Fascist butchers surrounded the ghetto on all sides and began to drive the half-naked people out. Although I had not yet recovered from giving birth, I, too, was driven out with my three-weeks-old baby and my parents. All of us were forced to form up a column and herded toward Tuchinka. The column was under reinforced guard by Gestapo men and a battalion of Ukrainian traitors. When the column reached the end of Opanski Street, all of us realized that they were taking us to be shot. My parents were walking by my side. My father cried to me: "My daughter, you are young, and must live and fight on; run, save yourself" – and he shoved me out of the column with one hand: "Run!" I started running with my child in my arms. The guards fired at me and at any other people who tried to escape. I do not remember how I got to a barn on Opanski Street, but, during the night, some Russian woman approached me, asking me how I was feeling. She brought me some food, and gave my child a bit of sweet water to drink. Then, she told me that many people had escaped from the column, that the Germans were combing through the area, and that I needed to get out of here. In the evening, two boys helped me get back to the ghetto. In the morning, I met a girl who had miraculously managed to crawl out from under the bodies, having been lightly wounded. She told me that many Jews had bolted away after my escape from the column, and that the Germans had opened fire in the ensuing panic. My mother became mentally unhinged, and started crooning and crying in an inhuman voice. The Germans shot her on the way. My father refused to leave her body, and was shot beside her….