Interview with Nina S.

     In 2016 I hired the Jewish Heritage Research group to conduct on-site research in Dubrowna and interview local townspeople who might remember the Jewish community there.  Following is the edited interview with Nina daughter of Kuzma S., born in 1929.  Her family refused having her photograph taken.

     “Our family lived in a small wooden house with a thatched roof on Mostovaya Street in Dubrowna. My father used to fix wooden carts and made wheels for them. There were 7 children in our family and I was the eldest. We were poor: my youngest sisters wore hand me down coats and dresses my parents earlier bought for me. I had only 2 pairs of shoes which I wore in autumn and winter. My mother knitted warm socks from goat hair for all of us. We had our own vegetable garden and a few goats.

     “Lots of Jews lived on out street. I remember my Jewish friends: Tsilya SEGAL, Matlya LIVSHITS, and Beylya DAVIDOV. We all went to the same class at school. Belarusians, Poles and Jews all went to the same school.  It was a two story wooden building located on Oktyabrskaya Street.  There were about 30 pupils in our class and 20 of them were Jewish.  Most of the teachers were Jewish as well, though the headmaster was Belorussian.  When classes were over for the day, we would often go to the cinema, which was located in a church.  The communists closed the Jewish school in the middle of 1930s.

     “As my father used to say, after the Revolution almost half of Dubrowna’s residents were Jewish but they started leaving for towns and cities, that’s why the Jewish population decreased up to 1/3.

     “The Jews were educated people. Our neighbor Yakov SEGAL spoke several foreign languages; he was an engineer at a textile factory. All adult Jews spoke Russian and Belorussian with a slight accent so it was easy to spot them out. A lot of elderly Jews wore beards. They gathered together in Aron’s house (I don’t remember his last name) on our street and sang Jewish songs; we, the children, danced under their windows to their singing. Our family had lots of friends among local Jewish residents. They always lent money to my mother when she needed it.

     “My father had a friend – we called him Shimenka. He was a watchmaker. He always repaired my father’s watch for free and only asked for some goat cheese; he gave us a wall-clock as a present for the New Year right before the war.

     “A ghetto was set up in Dubrowna in the autumn of 1941.  It was located on several streets where Jews used to live.  It was fenced with barbed wire.  They did not let us come near the Jews, even when they were being escorted to work.  In December 1941, local policemen along with Nazis surrounded the ghetto and led people to the gulley next to the textile factory in groups of fifty.  Almost all the Jews were killed that day.  Only 300 workmen and their families were left alive.  They were killed in the spring of 1942, next to the first execution place. 

     “When the war started several Jewish families who lived on our street evacuated to the east. I remember the OSINSKY and KHAZANOVICH families who managed to leave.  They survived and returned to Dubrowna when the war was over. They moved to Israel in the 1970s.

     “By the beginning of the war all synagogues and churches in Dubrowna were closed, but the buildings were used for other purposes. The Communists turned the Catholic church into a cinema, the Orthodox church was turned into a foster home, and the synagogue was used as a vegetable storehouse. The synagogue was called “Tall” and it was built of red bricks. The synagogue was destroyed when the Nazis left Dubrowna in 1943.  Nowadays a kindergarten is located on that very same lot where the synagogue used to be.

     “When the war was over, only about 100 Jews were left in Dubrowna. They said, the Jews even had a secret place to pray. Today I do not know of any Jewish families that still live in our town.”

Below are various views of Oktyabrskaya Street.  Photos were taken during a 2016 research trip.