Murder Story of Minsk Jews at the Dzerzhinsk-Stankovo Railway Line

…March 1942 witnessed another mass pogrom, which was terrible. The "Judenrat" was ordered to supply 5,000 people. If this order was not complied with, all the members of the Jewish committee would be annihilated.… I. Mushkin and other "Judenrat" members with ties to the underground were at a loss. They wanted to remove unnecessary persons. Trusted members of the "Judenrat" (I. Mushkin, Dolskiy, and others) told H. Smolar [head of the underground in Minsk ghetto] that all the ghetto inmates should hide…. Then, the Germans did the following. They waited for the [labor] columns to return to the ghetto. All the columns were assembled on Republic Street. They were driven to the Jubilee Market. Afterward, all the people were herded toward the wallpaper factory, and then along Opanski Street, toward the railroad. There, freight cars were waiting for them. All the people were loaded onto them, taken beyond Dzerzhinsk (to the town of Voiskovichi), and shot there. My 20-year old daughter Sonia, a medical student, was among the victims….

…On March 2, 1942, cars with Gestapo agents drove up to the ghetto; in one of them was Obersturmfuehrer Schmidt, who was totally drunk. This was a bad sign, and the Jews were worried. Columns of workers, however, set out as usual for work. The Gestapo agents went to the office of the labor exchange and began to drink. There was no shortage of vodka and expensive wines; everything had been brought to the ghetto in a truck. Not all of those who had arrived were able to squeeze into the apartment, and some of them remained in the street and in the square. They called for the policeman of the fifth sector, Richter, who was in charge of the ghetto. The Gestapo agents began to drink and stuff themselves in the street, after which they set about "work". They burst into apartments with whips and revolvers and drove the people into the yard of the wallpaper factory on Shpalernaya Street. Crowds of people – women, children, the elderly – stood and waited for their turn to die. In two houses along Tekhnicheskaya Street, the executioners did not find the residents, since they had hidden in concealed apartments. The Germans put these houses to the torch and burned the people alive. When columns of workers began to return, they were met by a member of the Gestapo. These workers, along with the crowd awaiting death in the courtyard of the wallpaper factory, were led to the railroad, loaded on cars, and sent to Dzerzhinsk. There everyone was shot. Many attempted to escape, but the murderers' bullets caught up with them….