Murder Story of Baranowicze Jews at the Former Zielony Most (Green Bridge)

On March 3, 1942, they divided the ghetto population into "productive" and "unproductive" categories. The former group consisted of able-bodied people and professionals who were needed by the Germans. The rest, some 3,000 people – elderly and sick individuals, widows, children – were sentenced to death. On the night of March 3, 1942, the Judenrat distributed certificates to those whom it had decided to keep alive. The certificate holders were to assemble in one part of the ghetto, on Sadowa Street…, while the rest were to stay where they were. Germans stood at the passage between the two parts of the ghetto, checking the certificates. From time to time, they would beat even the vital workers to within an inch of their lives. My brother Eliezer received such a heavy blow to the face from a German that for a time he could barely speak. Still, we managed to procure certificates for our whole family. We were all assembled on Sadowa Street. We were in a state of panic, because we did not know what lay in store for us. At 5 AM on the eve of Purim [sic], several Germans took up positions at the intersection of Sadowa and Sosnowa Streets, and began to divide the people into two groups, sending them to the right or to the left, respectively. Being sent to the right meant death, while those sent to the left would be spared. At the passage from the left section to the right one, we were convoyed.… The people being sent to the right were beaten brutally by the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Ukrainian policemen, and by the Poles and Germans. They [the killers] loaded them onto trucks and drove them to the ditches near the Green Bridge.… It is difficult to describe the pictures that we saw there, when [the perpetrators] separated children from their parents and parents from their children.… …Upon arriving at the murder site, [the victims] were forced to [continue] digging their graves. They were ordered to strip naked, pile all their clothing (with the men's clothing being piled separately from the women's) on the ground, and then stand on the lip of the ditch. And [the perpetrators] shot them with machine guns…. The murderers used music broadcast through loudspeakers to muffle the cries and screams of the victims. The Germans, drunk on the [alcohol] supplied to them on site, did their work with great relish. Non-Jewish locals would later tell that, after the ditches had been covered with soil, the earth kept heaving, because many of the people buried there had been merely wounded. My maternal aunt and her son were killed in that "Aktion". Having finished the massacre, the Germans rounded up forty men in the ghetto and brought them to the mass grave to arrange the bodies and cover the graves with soil. When their work was done, they were shot, as well. Then, a German commander came to the ghetto by car and ordered the chairman of the Judenrat, Izykzon, and his deputy, Ms. Mann, to go with him. He took them to the murder site and shot them. These were the last victims of that day.