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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 Belarusian 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."