Right now, when the whole world has turned viciously on Israel, when denying the Holocaust is fashionable and being an antisemite has suddenly become not shameful again, even politically correct, it is a hundred times more important to remind ourselves what real genocide is. At least to oneself, because those unwilling to hear won’t hear anyway.
Books about the Nazis’ “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” have always held a special place on my list. Because, as I’ve said many times, for me this is not an empty phrase and not a “Zionist fabrication.” And then, unexpectedly for me, the BAbook publishing house began selling a book I had never heard of before, even though it was first printed back in the USSR. Now, its author, David Guy, has decided to reissue it, in part in response to the October 7 massacre in Israel.
And I’m grateful the book caught my eye, because people know very little about the history of the Minsk Ghetto. The one that’s usually on everyone’s lips is the Warsaw Ghetto, vast, on whose ruins—among other places—the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 fought, only to be crushed by the Nazis when Soviet troops were already not far off. The ghetto itself has been shown more than once in cinema, and Roman Polanski’s Oscar-winning The Pianist is almost entirely devoted to the story of one Jew in that ghetto.
And yet, about the largest ghetto on the territory of the USSR—the Minsk Ghetto—there is little information. Partly this is because, after the war, the topic of the Holocaust was barely covered in the USSR, including because in 1947 a state-level anti-Jewish campaign began, which peaked in the Doctors’ Plot of 1953, just before Stalin’s death.
The Minsk Ghetto began to be formed in the very first days of the war—at first as a place of resettlement for the Jews of Minsk and the surrounding area, and later as yet another camp for Jews transported from other countries; in particular, a significant number of Jews from Germany itself ended up in the Minsk Ghetto. The Germans fenced off a section of the city near the historic center on Nemiga and, within a matter of weeks (if not days), drove all the Jews there from their homes and apartments. Jews who had failed to flee the advancing German army and had returned home also found themselves there.
In his book, David Guy traces the history of the ghetto from its formation in 1941 to its liquidation shortly before the liberation of Belarus by Soviet troops. Moreover, Jews from this very ghetto played a very notable part in the republic’s liberation. In a place where people were supposed simply to die, they managed to organize an underground and, together with cells from other parts of the city, set up the collection and transfer of weapons, medicines, and considerable manpower to the partisan detachments. Although, as the book also shows, provocations by the Gestapo—and Soviet party leaders who believed them—sometimes led to the summary execution on the spot of people who had torn themselves out of the horror, fleeing for safety and to serve the partisan movement.
In structure, the book is reminiscent of the work of the Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich, who received the Nobel Prize for her works. While there is some authorial text about the events described, the lion’s share of the book consists of recollections by participants and witnesses, recorded or found by the author—of whom, after the ghetto’s several years of existence, not that many remained.
From these accounts one can also learn why Jews often did not try to escape—why they went practically like lambs to the slaughter, even once they understood what awaited them. Of course, in the first days they did not yet realize that Hitler’s Germany had set itself the goal of exterminating an entire people, but the proximity of Minsk to the occupied lands of Poland made it possible to learn what the Germans were doing there—that is, what awaited the Jews of Belarus as well.
No matter how some facts were hushed up after the war, witnesses say that many pogroms, acts of violence, and executions were carried out not only by Germans. There were Belarusians serving in the police, and Ukrainian and Latvian police battalions carried out bloody raids on the ghetto itself; later a Lithuanian battalion joined them—evil knows no nationality.
The same was true among the Jews themselves. Some tried to curry favor and thus prolong (or perhaps even save—who knows) their own lives by turning in neighbors and hunting down members of the underground. Others placed personal grievances below fraternal solidarity. Thus a former convict who became an internal guard of the ghetto not only refrained from using his position to betray the judge who had sentenced him, but even helped avert pogroms and, as best he could, aided underground members in his sector.
It was hardest for those who were of no use to the Germans in those days. Without work, they could hope only for help from loved ones who themselves didn’t know how to survive. And there was no one to protect them. The elderly, women, children—first in line for privation, hunger, and death. In Roman Polanski’s film The Pianist there are shots of auxiliary police beating a child to death after catching him trying to carry a sack of supplies into the ghetto. It looks horrific, but it’s even more terrifying when you realize that, at a certain point, such deaths became commonplace in the ghetto.
Children as young as four understood that during raids you had to be quiet as a mouse if you wanted to survive yourself and not doom your loved ones (the book includes the recollections of such a boy). Mothers, trying to save their children somehow, tried to place them with non-Jewish families or in orphanages, inventing Russian and Belarusian names for them—knowing the child could be betrayed and that the chance of ever meeting again was very small. The head of an orphanage where Jewish orphans lived forged documents, writing for each: “Belarusian, no information about parents.” In doing so, he saved dozens of children. Unfortunately, these were drops in the ocean. Because for others, death was their lot. One survivor recalls how another shelter was destroyed under the supervision of Wilhelm Kube himself, the Gauleiter of Belarus: “Children were thrown alive into a pit and covered with sand amid heartrending screams.” The executioner Menzel reveled in killings, including of children: “Gestapo man Menzel, who sometimes inspected labor columns and did not allow mothers with small children to be present, tore a baby from a woman’s arms, stepped on its little head, and ripped the body in two.” And this is not literary invention, but recollections…
David Guy’s book includes several photographs from the streets of the ghetto itself. Very few, because no one intended to create a record of the extermination of an entire people. And looking at these photographs, reading eyewitness accounts, I tried to recognize my own relatives in these people. Because it is precisely the Minsk Ghetto that is a terrible wound in the history of my family: in it perished my grandfather’s sister along with two children—her own and my mother’s older brother, who in 1941 was only four years old.
After the war, the history of the ghetto was studied and documented at the Academy of Sciences of the BSSR, but the Party did not wish to make these facts public: “Extensive materials were collected, but they never reached publication—the folders with prisoners’ accounts, photographs, and topographic diagrams were stamped ‘Top Secret.’ Thus, the republic deliberately hid the memory of the hundreds of thousands who perished, while simultaneously combating ‘Zionist influence.’” By hook or by crook, the author managed to study part of these materials, which ultimately formed the basis of his book.
I am grateful to the author for gathering all this information and deciding to republish the book. This book is a record of horrors. The testimony of those who lived through them. Such books must exist; they must be read, and their history told, so it is never forgotten. And so we don’t begin to deny it—as is now fashionable in Europe, which has once again, with wild fervor, taken up the flame of antisemitism after the massacre of October 7, 2023—when, through deft propaganda, the victim suddenly became the executioner.
My rating: 4.5/5
