Masyukovshchina Related Communities
Minsk Related Murder Sites
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Murder Story of Minsk Jews in Masyukovshchina
Murder Site
Masyukovshchina
Belorussia (USSR)
According to one testimony, in December 1941 (probably during the mass-murder operation of early December 1941) an unidentified group of several thousand Jews of all ages and both sexes were taken to Masyukovshchina, an area northwest of Minsk (now part of Minsk), and shot near the site known as Petrashkevichi, or Petrashkevich's Farmstead, in the vicinity of the 352nd Soviet POW Base Camp.
According to testimonies gathered by East German investigation offices and cited by the German historian Christian Gerlach, as well as the postwar testimony of the former commander of the Order Police in the General Commissariat of White Ruthenia (who, however, erroneously identified Drozdy as the killing site), some Jews from the ghetto were also taken to this site during the massacre of March 2-3, 1942, and shot there.
Furthermore, according to the materials of the postwar German judicial proceedings cited by Christian Gerlach, the Nazis also used Petrashkevich's Farmstead as a killing site during the large-scale massacre of July 28-31, 1942. The victims were both local and foreign Jews.
Related Resources
Written Testimonies
German Reports / Romanian Reports
Soviet Reports
ChGK Soviet Reports
From "The Liquidation of the Minsk Ghetto. An account by Abram Mashkeleyson"
…In accordance with the plan drawn up ahead of time by the Gestapo, they first removed the Jews from one residential district. This area, which was now "liberated", was excluded from the ghetto. Then they moved the barbed wire barriers to the next district. In this way, they removed block after block from the ghetto, which became smaller and smaller.
They took the Jews away to…Khasonovshchina [sic for Masyukovshchina]… not far from Minsk. They brought them there in huge groups of five or six thousand people, stripped them naked, and forced them into a ditch, after which motorcyclists with machine pistols [light machine-guns] would drive up and down the ditch, shooting these unfortunates. They covered the dead and wounded with a thin layer of earth, and then flattened the burial site with tractors….
Rubenstein, Joshua and Altman, Ilya. The unknown black book : the Holocaust in the German-occupied Soviet territories . Bloomington, Ind. : Indiana University Press, 2010, p. 248.
Masyukovshchina
Murder Site
Belorussia (USSR)
53.902;27.559