Chapter 12
The war began on the night of June 22, 1941, and Minsk was among the first cities attacked by the Nazis. At four o’clock in the morning, dozens of German planes dropped down hundreds of bombs on the sleeping city.
Genya, awakened by the explosions and not yet fully awake from sleep, grabbed her three-month-old daughter Raya in her arms and rushed out of the house into the street. Something unimaginable was going on there: explosions were thundering, houses were collapsing and burning, people were rushing around in panic, seeking escape from the bombs and machine guns, motionless bodies were lying in terrible poses, and the wounded were screaming. Some military man urged everyone to go down to the basement.
Genya followed his advice. The basement was cramped, dark, and stuffy. The children were crying. From all sides could be heard: “War… the Germans… us…”. In the following days, the raids happened again. The Germans bombed the railway station, military barracks, state institutions, and even reached residential areas. The city was engulfed in fires. There were many victims.
Genya was very worried about her husband, a young journalist who had gone to Brest on business just two days before the war began. If he returned, they would decide together what to do. On the third day, her brother, the poet Gennady, ran into the room on Nemige Street where Genya’s family lived. He said that the Writers’ Union, of which he was a member, had received an order from the authorities to evacuate the writers and their families urgently. Several passenger cars had already been prepared at the freight station for this purpose.
Gennady and his wife were allocated two seats in one of these cars. The train would leave early tomorrow morning, but it wasn’t known yet where it would go. From the military, it became known that the Germans were advancing rapidly toward Minsk, and it was unlikely that they would be able to stop them. Gennady believed that in this situation one could not wait a single day; Genya had to leave for the east today, together with Raya and Ida. All he needed to take with him was his documents, money, the most necessary clothing, and some food. He gave Genya his duffel bag, in which he thought all of her belongings should fit. There was nothing more he could do to help his sister.
Genya was distinctly aware of the dangers of delay. Even before the war began, she knew that the Nazis were repressing Jews in Germany and the conquered countries. Without wasting time, quickly gathering her things and leaving a note for her husband in a conspicuous place, Genya locked her room and went with her daughter to Ostrovsky Street, where she found Ida sitting on the bed in complete confusion. But Genya knew how to be persistent and persuasive when necessary.
Soon the two women, carrying shoulder bags and a baby in their arms, were on their way to the train station, hoping to leave to the east on the first train. Ida was unwell, limping and breathing heavily. In the station square, people were standing, sitting, fussing with suitcases and knots. It was clear at first glance that they were alarmed and that the place was in disarray.
With difficulty the women squeezed onto the platform and saw the horrific picture of an almost completely destroyed station: broken cars and platforms, protruding mangled rails, smoking craters, burning wreckage of station structures. A crew of workers hurriedly put the least damaged tracks back in order. It was clear that it would be impossible to get out from there.
The women were confused, their hopes for salvation crumbling. At that moment, an officer climbed to the windowsill of a large window and called everyone’s attention with his hand. The people huddled around him. On behalf of the military commandant of the station, the officer said that there would be no evacuation of civilians from the Minsk station in the next few days, so people should head for other major railway junctions on their own.
The people around them were exchanging opinions animatedly. Genya heard a respectable man in uniform convincing his companion of the need, without delaying a single minute, to hire a carriage and go to Borisov, where, as he knew, several empty train cars had already been sent to evacuate the population. “The Germans might be here any day!”, Genya heard, and these words made her make the irrevocable decision to head immediately to Borisov, located about 60 kilometers from Minsk towards Moscow.
There was almost no hope for getting a means of transportation, and the weak, sickly Ida, for whom the travel on foot was impossible, with bitter regret parted with Genya and little Raya, wishing them good luck. She returned to her room, anxious, frightened, alone, putting her hopes only on the merciful God.
By the next morning, Genya had reached Borisov, having walked most of the way, holding on to a passing overloaded wagon, in which the owners allowed her to put the baby down from time to time.
At the local station, too, people and their things were crowded, waiting for the next train to be ready for loading, and on the tracks was a car ready for departure. Genya, with Raya in her arms, went to carriage after carriage, begging people to let them in. Finally, some kind-hearted women took pity and with their hands hauled Genya and the child inside. So they found themselves on a train bound for distant Tashkent.
Three days after her departure, German tanks entered Minsk, but Genya learned of this much later. And during the long and difficult journey to the evacuation, she often thought of Ida; she wanted to believe that the Red Army would stop the Germans, and Ida would have time to escape.
But poor, defenseless Ida was to drink to the bottom from the bitter cup of humiliation, suffering, deathly horror, and hopeless doom that the German Nazis and their Belarusian henchmen had prepared for the Jews. One of the first directives of the new authorities required all Jews to wear yellow badges sewn onto the front and back of their outer clothing at all times on the threat of death and to immediately relocate to a section of the city specially designated for them – a barbed-wire enclosed ghetto consisting of several streets that survived adjacent to Jubilee Square. Here there was also a puppet organization of Jewish self-government, the Judenrat. It kept a registry of ghetto inhabitants, dealt with displaced people under the control of the SS, and formed work crews of able-bodied men and women who were used by the Germans in cleaning the streets, repairing houses, city communications, and the railroads.
In the ghetto there was a ruthless regime: Jews were forbidden to walk on the sidewalks, to congregate even in small groups, to talk loudly, to use lights at night, and to leave their houses at dusk. The patrols opened fire on any violation of these orders, and children, women, and the elderly fell victim to them every day.
The house where Ida lived was within the ghetto, very close to Jubilee Square, so she didn’t have to move anywhere, but a family of four were stationed to move in with her: an elderly woman with a daughter and two granddaughters. It got crowded, but Ida quickly found common ground with the new tenants and put all her meager possessions at their disposal. They, in turn, shared with Ida their meager sustenance, which they managed to trade with fear for their lives for clothes and other saleable goods from speculators who regularly traded in the secluded areas near the wire fence.
Ida only went outside the gates of her house in the most extreme cases. She was terribly afraid of the evil SS men roaming the streets with their creepy skulls on their sleeves and the perpetually drunk Belarusian policemen; she was feeling that to them she was a helpless and defenseless victim. Who but the Almighty could protect or at least comfort a weak, elderly woman in the inhumane conditions of the ghetto?! To him, the merciful, all-seeing one, Ida prayed daily for her salvation and the salvation of the people dear to her, Joshka, Braina, Genya, the children: “Baruch Atah Adonai…”.
Braina’s seventy-year-old mother was the only one from the Shvedik family who remained in Bobruisk by the beginning of the war. Sick elderly Jews, who for various reasons could not evacuate, anticipating the arrival of the Germans, comforted themselves and others with memories of the fairly tolerable behavior of German soldiers during their previous occupation of Bobruisk in 1918. But they could not have imagined the German fascists.
Immediately after capturing the city, they forbade Jews to walk on the sidewalks and ordered them to wear yellow stars. They were then forced to leave their homes and gather in several houses allocated to them. All those who could not or did not manage to move there by the appointed time were brutally murdered by the police. A few days later it was the turn for all the rest. Like cattle, on a trestle bridge, people were herded into trucks and taken to the village of Kamenka, where the Soviet prisoners of war were forced to dig two huge pits. In a state of insanity, under the vicious scolding and beating of the policemen, the unfortunate victims submissively undressed and walked into the bullets of the executioners…