From the Facebook page of Vasily Sarychev. In search of lost time
Translated. Edited.
Posted here for archival reasons, because Facebook wants to remove it.
The girl in the picture is Brest resident Basya Melnik. After her, there were no diaries or anyone’s memories left - only this photo from the German registration sheet. Basya was killed in the Bronnaya Gora tract in October 1942, among 17,000 prisoners of the Brest ghetto (in total, about 50,000 were shot here).
Another 10,000 Jews of the city died earlier, in the first year of the occupation. Of the entire huge Brest community imprisoned in the ghetto, nineteen people survived.
The most terrible document ever seen is a sheet of the Book of Registration and Control of Population Movements of Brest, kept in the regional archive, which was kept by the city government during the occupation. The line dated October 15, 1942 says: Poles - 15,829, Belarusians - 4,709, Russians - 2,342, Ukrainians - 1,169, Jews - 16,934, various - 88.
The next day there were no Jews. The clerk's hand automatically brought up the usual list of ghetto residents, but he was corrected. Behind this number crossed out with two horizontal lines is the entire horror of what happened. Further and until the end of the book, a dash was placed under the column “Jews”.
October 16, 1942 - DAY TO DAY 75 YEARS AGO - the Jewish population of Brest ceased to exist.
Freight trains packed with people were sent from the siding between the city and the fortress. The echelons moved to the Bronnaya Gora station and then along the branch line allocated by the Germans several hundred meters to the northwest. The Nazis forced those leaving the carriages to take off their clothes and take them along a narrow corridor of barbed wire to a clearing with already dug holes...
This carefully fenced clearing was already being talked about in the surrounding villages: it could only be that the Germans were preparing to build a secret facility. Signs were posted at the approaches: “Danger to life! It is prohibited to go further! Patrols shoot without warning! In the summer, villagers were driven into the forbidden territory and ordered to dig several huge rectangular holes. Those who dug had no idea what these pits were intended for...
Witness Roman Novis worked as the head of the Bronnaya Gora railway station before the war; during the occupation he was transferred by the Germans to the position of switchman.
From his testimony:
“...The carriages of the arriving trains were closed. All 5 trains were supplied to the branch line, which departs from the Bronnaya Gora station... at a distance of 250-300 meters from the central road. Near the branch, where 6 large pits were prepared in advance, each approximately 25 to 30 meters long, 10-12 meters wide and 4 meters deep, citizens were unloaded. Corpses were also thrown out of the carriages. I believe that the dead could only appear from exhaustion and severe pressure, especially with little air access.
Citizens unloaded from the carriages were forced to take off their outer and underwear, i.e. Everyone, men, women and children, stripped naked. After this, the fingers were examined and the rings were removed. After such a thorough check, the naked people were taken one by one to the pits and lowered down the stairs. In the pits they were placed face down, close to each other, and when the row was completely filled, they were shot from machine guns. After this, the second and third rows were placed in the same way until the hole was filled. I personally saw all the bullying and executions of citizens, I heard their groans, the screams of children, women, men: the railway switches and the booth where I was were no further than 250 meters from the pits...
...In March 1944, the Germans brought about 100 free citizens on foot. I don't know where they come from. They were placed in a camp at the Bronnaya Gora station and were kept under strict surveillance. At the beginning of May 1944, these people excavated holes near the railway line, in which the executed citizens, previously delivered by train, were placed. During excavations, corpses were burned on site. The Germans dismantled 48 military barracks to burn the corpses. In addition, they apparently used some kind of liquid. I conclude from the fact that when observed at night, a blue fire was visible. During the burning of corpses, an unbearable smell was felt in the village of Bronnaya Gora... The burning continued for 13-14 days. They burned continuously, day and night.
...After finishing the work of excavating and burning the corpses of the party of 100 driven citizens, I did not see anyone. I believe that they were also shot and burned.
In total, 186 carriages with Soviet citizens arrived at the Bronnaya Gora station and were shot. The trains were sent back to their place of departure. On the way back, the carriages contained clothes from those who had been shot.
I was on good terms with the station chief, Hailem, and he shared a few things with me during conversations. So he said that in total more than 48 thousand Soviet citizens were brought and shot. Heil also reported that the Germans sent 2 large passenger cars containing gold coins and gold items from the scene of the execution in 1943.”
The destruction of the Brest community took place not only on Bronnaya Gora. The executions were carried out directly in the Brest ghetto (along Karbysheva Street), in the southern suburbs, in the fortress, on Rechitsa in the area of the eighth fort... Random witnesses who managed to survive revealed the terrible truth to people.
It is a known fact that 200 girls from the Brest ghetto were brought to Belsky’s estate (the area of the current Leninsky village near Zhabinka). Young Jewish women were settled in barracks and used in peat mining and in the fields. In the fall of 1942, a large group of German soldiers arrived. The estate was surrounded by a tight ring, the girls and several dozen other Jewish families brought in the car were brought to a huge freshly dug hole at the end of the alley, forced to strip naked and began to be shot...
The non-Jewish population behaved differently towards Jews. This was a certain moment of truth, a manifestation of the measure of the soul. Brest residents Pyotr Grigoriev, Pelageya Makarenko, the Golovchenko spouses, Floria Budishevskaya, the Kurianovich spouses and many others who remained unknown, risking their lives, hid and looked after the doomed. “He who saves one life saves the whole world,” is a saying from the Hebrew Bible engraved on the Righteous Among the Nations medal.
There were examples of the opposite kind.
From the report of the Brest-Litovsk gendarmerie dated November 8, 1942:
“...The sympathy of the local population for the Jews during the action against them in October 1942 was very great. Over the past month, it has been established that the population no longer fears execution. (Rumors spread throughout the city that after the Jews they would deal with the Russians, and then with the Poles and Ukrainians. - V.S.) Now the local population is especially diligent in helping to locate the Jews who have taken refuge in the forests.”
That autumn, the extermination of the Jewish population was carried out everywhere in the occupied territories of the Brest region. During the days of the Kobrin punitive expedition, when the doomed were driven through the streets, several children escaped from the column.
Miraculously, they bypassed the chain of encirclement, dived into the opening of a stone fence and disappeared. The children hid in the park next to the church on Pervomaiskaya Street, where priests discovered them at night. Seven more frightened children were holding onto the coattails of a boy of about eight years old. The priests sheltered them in their plebania.
The rumor that Jewish children were being hidden in the church spread to nearby houses. Parishioners carried food and clothes. But someone betrayed the compassionate priests. They were shot right at the walls of the church - priests Vladislav Grobelny, Jan Volsky and eight children, to whom the ministers gave several days of life at such a high price.
Another terrible fact was told by a random witness to the extermination of Jews near Chernavchitsy. The execution was over, everyone was dead, and the wind blew across the field the photographs that the victims carried with them as their most precious possessions.
©Vasily Sarychev
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