The Communal Graves of the Jews of Kletsk

A Memorial Visit to the Communal Graves of the Jews of Kletsk

August 28, 1991

From the day that the Iron Curtain was raised many have rushed to their cities of origin in hope of prostrating themselves on the graves of their fathers in Eastern Poland and Western Soviet Union, primarily in Bylerussia. The Jews of the towns and cities were murdered by the masses in pits and ditches which had been prepared beforehand. Punar and Babi-Yar are the most famous of the mass graves, but there are innumerable others beside each town and city. Within a few months after the Nazi invasion, from August until November 1941, three fourths of the entire Jewish population in these regions was destroyed by the Germans and their loyal henchmen among the Lithuanians, the Ukrainians and the Bylerussians.

Kletsk, the town of my childhood and my youth, sits on the road to Moscow at a distance of 150 kilometers from Minsk. I came to it as an emissary of the Kletsker Committee which was organized in order to erect a memorial in memory of the town's Jews who were murdered. I came to see and to hear. There are testimonies, albeit few, of the few who were saved from the machine- gun fire and crawled out from the piles of corpses, but it was important to see things en situ with my own eyes. What was at all left of the place?

The terrible tragedy of the Jews of Kletsk took place on the 9th of Heshvan, the 30th of October 1941. All the members of the community, the elderly and babies, seven thousand souls (and among them hundreds of refugees who had fled from the area of German conquest after the division of Poland) were ordered by the Germans and their henchmen to assemble in the vicinity of the marketplace before dawn. About two thousand people, mostly craftsmen and those employed in factories-along with their families-were taken out in a "selection" from among the masses and were imprisoned, squeezed into the large synagogue which was popularly referred to as "the cold synagogue: ("die kalte Shul"). All the rest, approximately five thousand people, were led group by group during the entire day up until evening to the pits outside of the city on the road to Nesvizh which had been dug in advance by diggers from among the non-Jewish neighbours. There the Germans stripped their victims of their clothing and strafed the human-filled pits with machine-gun and rifle fire during ten consecutive hours.

Nisan Israelvitch, who was among those imprisoned in the synagogue, relates that towards the end of the day the door was opened and Isaac Tziok and his wife were thrown in. He related that Koch, the German commander of the city, had come to the killing-vale and seen Isaac, who was a well-known locksmith, within the pit and immediately gave an order to take him out. He shouted that such an excellent professional as this shouldn't be killed. Isaac refused to be saved without his wife and his request was granted.

At evening time, those imprisoned within the synagogue were ordered to go live in the evacuated houses around the courtyard of the synagogue, about thirty people in each apartment. On the 22 of July this ghetto and its inhabitants were liquidated. One of those who remained, the Partisan, Alter Meirovitz, may his memory be for a blessing, described the final hours of the ghetto in Pinkas Kletsk: At 4 a.m. the police surrounded the ghetto from all sides. Each of the adults took up an offensive position and welcomed the murderers with a barrage of stones which had been prepared beforehand. Not with ease will the enemy be permitted to destroy us... hundreds of Jews broke through the fences of the ghetto and tried to save themselves, but only a few reached the forests and the Partisans...

The Kletsk ghetto was then one of the few ghettos in which the inhabitants rose up and fought and offered resistance. Additional details on this valiant battle at whose head stood members of the Halutz are given in Shalom Holevski's book On the Banks of the Nieman and the Dnieper. They fought with stones, with axes, with iron rods, and, in the end, they set fire to the ghetto with cans of kerosene which they had prepared beforehand and a strong wind spread the flames over the entire town.

The Journey from Israel to Kletsk

And now I am on my way to the vale of death. From Ben-Gurion airport to Riga by airplane and from Riga to Minsk by train. In Minsk my wife and I were welcomed by a friend from youth, Yoske Pashpiyorko, the only Jew residing in Kletsk. He had studied economics, joined the Communist party and for 20 years had been the manager of a kolkhoz. Now he is retired. In our youth the two of us had sat on the same bench in the "Tarbut" school and together we had joined the Shomer ha-Tzair. For fifty years the Yiddish language had not risen from his lips and now he has difficulty speaking it. I address him in Yiddish and he answers in Russian.

We are on the highway to Brisk and the heading towards Kletsk. Road signs of familiar places pass by our faces. Memories flood me, emotions overcome me and I am unable to utter a word. Baranovitz, Stolpatzah, Mir, Salonim, Lakhovitz, Niesvuzh. I had known the towns and their Jews. The regional summer camps of the Shomer ha-Tzair rise up in my memory. These are not anonymous places. Each place raises in my imagination living faces of young boys and girls, scenes of the past, and tears choke my throat. As we approach Kletsk I break out in tears and my friend clutches my hand...

Kletsk Today

In the center of the town was a square plaza surrounded by shops. They were called "The Salt Shops" (die Saltz Kramen) but I don't know why. Between this square and the adjacent square of shops was the marketplace which was thronged with people on market days twice a week. Peasants would come with their wares and return with their purchases and at the same time hang out in the tavern, stop by the Pravoslavian Church and equip themselves with medications from the pharmacy. From this center the streets of the town branched out whose official names, those on the street signs, were not used. The inhabitants gave them their own names. Seventy percent of the town's inhabitants were Jews and all the others were Bylerussians, Russians, Tatars, as well as Poles; mostly policemen and clerks of the authorities.

Today all of this is gone. The town has been built anew. The place of the Jewish houses is taken by new houses, the majority wood and the minority brick, which in appearance are indistinguishable from their predecessors. Running water and sewage pipes are not to be found. The population is peasantry that migrated to the city. The area of the market and the shops was torn down already in the days of the Germans, the work done by Jews. On its site spreads a park in whose center is a statue in memory of the victims of the war and the fighters for the liberation of the city. There is no reference to Jews. The three-story offices of the Party, a restaurant and a hotel have been built there along the sides of the rectangle. A cultural center is under construction/ The Pravoslavian church remained on its foundation but shorn of crosses. It was taken over for some military project. Rumour has it that in a little while the military will be taken out of there and the crosses will again decorate the building.

Visiting the sites of the Tragedy

Yoske and I are on our way to the first communal grave. A huge sandy expanse surrounded by trees from which they extracted sand. At the top of the hill is a church and a Christian cemetery. My body was filled with sensations of anger. Crows accompany us with their cries and awaken dread. In the place of the killing is planted a marker. Red granite and next to it a small aluminum sign: "Eternal memory for the victims of fascism who fell in the great war of the homeland, September 1941". That is all. The Nazis killed the Jews and the Soviets erased their memory. But it was for the sin of their Judaism that they were slaughtered! They say that in the era of glasnost all the wrongs will be set right. I hope that we won't be proved wrong.

We arrive at the second communal grave which is at the end of the Starinah forest, on the other side of the city. We pass by the place which was a brick avenue that extended to the Karasni-Stab River. This avenue would be filled on Shabbat by Jews taking a stroll following the meal. The river whose vistas were beloved by us as a bathing place is now a large and deep drainage ditch. In the Starinah forest were buried the Jews of the ghetto who were murdered on the 22nd of July, 1942. Yoske points out two solitary trees, the sole witnesses of that terrible day. There is no sign or memory of a communal grave.

On my return to Israel, we decided to erect in the Starinah Forest a gravestone and upon the larger communal grave which had a gravestone, to set up a plaque upon which would be inscribed in Hebrew and Russian that this is the place in which the Jews of Kletsk were murdered and buried by the Fascist Germans and their henchmen. A group of Kletskers from Israel, the United States and Canada was organized, in total 17 members of whom 7 are of the second generation of the survivors of the shoah. We set out on a visit of week.

We visited the memorial site at Khatin, 50 kilometers from Minsk that impressed us with its scope and its form. The site is in memory of the Partisans and Bylerussian peasants whom the retreating Nazi army destroyed and burned their villages. One of the designers of the site is a Jewish architect named Leonid Mendelovitz Levine who was awarded the Lenin Prize and is one of the head planners of the rebuilt Minsk. He is also the head of the Jewish communities of Bylerussia and in a conversation with us he told of his inexhaustible efforts to renew communal life and tradition in the lives of the remnants.

An Official Welcome

July 22

On Monday, July 22 we set out for Kletsk with an accompanying bus. At the gates of the gates of the city an official delegation from the region surprised us and welcomed us. In it were the second secretary of the regional executive council, the secretary of the organization of fighters and partisans, and my friend Yoske, bedecked in medals. Three girls in folk dresses gave us bread and salt and said words of welcome.

In the first vale of killing we heard the speech of Ribakov, the secretary of the organization of fighters. He said what he said about the significance of the place and the event, he spoke about "the victims of the Nazis", party activists and partisans and also gypsies and he forgot for some reason an entire community - the 4,500 Jews whose corpses, and their corpses alone, filled the pits of the site. That which the official host left out I filled in during my words.We said kaddish and the son of the partisan Nisan Israelvitz read El Male Rahamim. Bouquets of flowers were laid down.

Many of the inhabitants of the area were present. There were those who approached us and brought up memories of that bitter and precipitous day: "The Germans took up positions in the high places and also climbed up in the trees. Their job was to watch with seven eyes lest someone escape. The task itself was done by Lithuanian and Bylerussian police. The victims were ordered to strip and the clothes were gathered into a pile. A careful search was conducted on the bodies and also in the hair they looked for valuables.., the shouts, the crying, and the shots were heard from a distance of seven kilometers. For several days the earth shook .... the sun hid in order not to see the grotesque sight.."

We move on to Starinah Forest which is adjacent to the town. This is the forest in which during our youth we had set up scouting campgrounds and also on ordinary days we spent time hiking. My friend Yoske knows exactly where the communal grave is and we set up the gravestone upon it --black granite, unhewn, as it was quarried from the rock-- and upon it a plaque with an inscription in Hebrew and Russian: "Never Again! Here are buried the Jews of the Kletsk ghetto who were murdered by the Fascist Germans on the eighth of Av 5702, 22nd of July 1942. Eternal remembrance for the victims of bloodshed May their souls be bound up with living". On the upper Portion of the stone is engraved a Magen David.

Secretary of the Region Zhukovski opened the memorial service and in contrast to the official spokesmen at the first site he spoke with emotion about the Jews of the Kletsk ghetto and also did not leave off the names of the small Jewish communities in the area which were destroyed. I delivered a eulogy in Hebrew and it was translated into Russian. In the name of five hundred years of life together I turned to the inhabitants of Kletsk to take care of the memorial site Matvi Ronitz arrived from Minsk in order to deliver a eulogy in the name of Head of the Community Levine who was sick.

The event was filmed by the Minsk television station and was broadcast twice from beginning to the end the next evening.

At the Kletsk Museum

We visited the Kletsk municipal museum. In the vast array of exhibits dating from 1128, the year of the city's founding, until today, there is no mention of the Jews who were the majority population. On one of the walls are mounted pictures of all the churches of the city and also that of the mosque which served the Tatars, but the place of a synagogue, even one of the seven which had existed, is absent. The director of the museum apologizes and promises to correct the distortion and assemble a place for the Jews. And indeed he prepared a small exhibit of a few items which we had brought.

An Official Meeting

Secretary Zhukovsky in his meeting with us talked about the region and in candid terms emphasized the economic shortages and about the distress of the kolkhozes which were exploited by the state: I asked him if the time had not come to return Jewish property that remained, for example, the yeshiva building which is the only Jewish public building which remains on its foundation. I didn't receive a unequivocal answer to my question; only a promise "to act out of the most positive attitude."

A Last Look

We walked along the streets which served as the borders of the ghetto. Everything has been rebuilt, strange and estranged, only the misery of fifty years ago hasn't changed...

Each of us sought to find his former home and the disappointment was bitter. We went to visit the Jewish cemetery. It also was erased from the face of the earth like the life. A construction company had set up in its place and there was no memory of gravestones, rather they were used for the "industry" of whetting stones. Here and there among the dense vegetation appear the frames of graves cast in cement and some solitary gravestones. [Photos of Jewish Graveyard]

We, the delegation of the few who survived, have returned with a feeling that we did something, however small, for the remembrance of our beloved -- our families and all the other members of the community. We accorded them, to the best of our ability, a final honour.

Elimelech Benari

Beit-Zera

Many thanks to Mr. Reuben Argon and his son, Uri, the managers of the "Turico" travel agency in Holon who did a great deal to help bring about the memorial service for the Kletsk martyrs.