Chapter 16
For hundreds of years, Jews, subjected to pogroms, robberies, and persecutions by the dark forces of humanity, have addressed these words to the sky or simply to nowhere, whereas behind these troubles there is always the ignorance and obscurantism of specific people.
During the very same hours that Kultyapy in Petrovsk was nearly to the point of tears offending Kim, there was an unprecedentedly cruel massacre of defenseless people by the Nazis in the Minsk ghetto. “Why? For what?”, hundreds of men, women, and children asked in mortal horror at the firing pits, where they were killed in cold blood by those they had never harmed in any way.
It was on the day of the November 7th holiday that the SS, together with the Belarusian police, carried out in the Minsk ghetto the first action of the “final solution” to the Jewish question. Large deep pits had been prepared in advance not far from the fence of the ghetto.
A section of Ostrovsky Street, adjacent to the inactive church on both sides, was chosen for the operation of the extermination of the Jews. There stood a brick house in its immediate vicinity, where the sick and exhausted Ida still somehow existed.
At dawn, all the men, women, and children living in the area, regardless of their age and physical condition, were driven out into the street, beaten with batons, rifle butts, and feet. There was a stampede, and shouts of “For what? Where are we being driven?”, crying, moaning, and cursing. Children were looking for their parents, relatives – for each other. One of the policemen shoved a red flag into the hands of a young man with the words, “Today is your holiday, so celebrate!” He mechanically raised the flag above his head and immediately fell, riddled with bullets, drenched in blood.
When all the targeted houses were empty, the police chased the people into the courtyard of the bakery, forcing them to drag the sick and disabled in their arms. When they noticed a German officer in the cordon, those of the unfortunates who had German certificates appealed to him for salvation, and a very few, mostly medical workers, were taken out of the crowd on his orders and driven into an empty shop of the factory.
The ones who miraculously survived later said that they saw several trucks drive into the courtyard, and the policemen pushed into them all those who could not move around on their own, as well as women with small children. The rest of the others were somehow gathered in a column and herded straight to the pits, at the bottom of which were already lying the corpses that had been brought there in the cars earlier. The drunken policemen and SS men threw the people, shocked and numbed by their horror, into the pits alive and then opened fire with their rifles and pistols at the mass of still living, writhing and screaming human mass. When the movement in the pits subsided, the executioners splashed several buckets of fuel on the surface and set them on fire…
Many years later, the surviving prisoners of the Minsk ghetto recounted in their testimony this monstrous atrocity, a victim of which was also probably the poor, harmless, hard-working, kind and devoted Ida, the sister of Joshka Gershon. May peace be upon her ashes!
Throughout November and early December 1941 Lena lived in tension, but without any incidents, continuing to work in the restaurant and spending the rest of the time at home. In mid-November, late in the evening, a district policeman came to check on her. He was an elderly man with the habits of a former housekeeper manager. He calmly and peacefully spoke to the lady of the house and the tenants, checked the documents and the house book. He listened attentively to Lena’s calm explanations about her lack of a passport, asked a few questions about the orphanage and her parents, wrote something down, and then left. It seemed to Lena that no suspicions had arisen for him, however, she was worried for a few days after this visit, expecting any consequences. However, nothing happened. It lasted until December 14, Kim’s birthday.
In the morning, as she was getting ready for work, Lena thought about her brother and her parents, remembering how wonderfully they had celebrated this day in Minsk, and then at the orphanage. As she left the house, she noticed that at the billboard several people were discussing a new announcement in a lively manner.
It was an order from the German commandant that the entire Jewish population of the city, under threat of execution, be required to relocate outside the city within two days, to the abandoned barracks of the former workers’ settlement of tractor factory builders. For the next two days, crowds of thousands of people with their belongings, children, the elderly, and the sick moved through the streets outside the city, leaving behind dozens of corpses of the dead, murdered, and frozen along the way. Standing among the townspeople on the sidewalk and watching with her own eyes this horrifying exodus, Lena could hardly believe that all this was really happening, and that it was not just a nightmare…
Almost losing consciousness, she barely made it to her bed, collapsed without strength and just cried and cried… In the city there immediately began a distribution of notices about the search for Jews hiding under false documents, and appeals to the population to report to the authorities about such cases. A few days later, the landlady handed out summonses to her tenants, requiring that they appear at the local authorities’ office to re-register with all their available documents.
All four girls came to the office at the appointed hour. Through a half-open door, Lena saw that in addition to the local official, there was a German officer in SS uniform inside the office. This was unexpected, and she was frightened. The official summoned the girls in one by one. When Lena’s turn came, she was visibly worried. A few minutes later, waiting in the corridor, her friends heard a German’s loud and clear voice say, “Du bist Yude!” (You are a Jew!).
When the next girl entered the office, Lena was not there. And she didn’t appear in the hallway again. The lodgers who returned home told their landlady about what had happened, and she feared for a while about possible reprisals from the authorities, but they did not follow. The woman had no doubt that Lena had been sent to a communal camp, like all the other Jews they had found out about.
In the last days and hours of her much too short life, Lena had to experience the cruel tortures and abuses that the Nazi scum inflicted upon their victims in the Kharkiv death camp. Years later, from miraculously surviving former prisoners, it became known what had happened there. The former construction camp of the tractor builders consisted of several dozen barracks that were fit to be demolished, without windows and doors, with no water supply, sewage system, or heating.
In these barracks, wherein no more than 60-70 people lived at the best of times; the Nazis indiscriminately pushed in several hundred men, women, and children, among whom there were many elderly, disabled, and sick people. It was prohibited to leave the barracks under threat of death. For necessities or water, only those who were able to pay for it were let out. Every day dozens of people died there from hunger, cold, and disease. Among the corpses, excrement, moans and cries, in terribly cramped conditions, without water or food, in the freezing draft, completely innocent, very different, people born for peaceful happiness, suffered in agony and were condemned to death by the Nazis to benefit the crazy racial “theory” of the deranged Führer. Together with them in this icy hell, Lena suffered and was tortured – another innocent victim of Hitler…
Five kilometers from the camp, at the end of a narrow ravine, known as Drobytsky Yar, long deep trenches were dug. From
December 27, the prisoners of the camp began to be brought there by cars, and then marched on foot in a convoy, in groups of 500 to 600 people. On the approach to the trenches, they were forced to undress, and were driven under machine guns and assault rifles of the executioners. The remaining belongings of the victims were collected in a businesslike manner and taken to a warehouse for sorting. Thusly within two weeks from the end of December 1941 through the beginning of January 1942, more than 16,000 Jews from the city of Kharkiv were tortured and killed.
In this mass villainous crime, before it could have time to blossom, was cut short the life of the young, romantic, kind-hearted Lena, the caring and devoted daughter of Joshka and Braina…
Lena. 1940.