Elimelech Benari's Kletsk Memoir

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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.

1991 Monument dedication in Kletsk. 1991.
Cameramen are likely from a Minsk television station.
Elimelech is visible to the right of the blue enclosure, wearing a beret.

An unknown person reflecting at the monument. 1991.

Monument close-up. 1991.

Never again!

Here are buried the Jews of the city of Kletsk who were murdered by the German fascists.

9 Mar Heshvan 5702 --30 October 1941

09/26/2007 for the victims of bloodshed! May their souls be bound up in the bundle of life.

Joseph Peshpeyorko, the sole surviving Jew
in Kletskat the time of the dedication. 1991.

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.

Monument erected by Elimelech Benari in the Starinah forest,
the site of the final murder of the Jews of the ghetto.

Never Again!
Here are buried the prisoners of the Kletsk ghetto who were murdered by the German fascists
Menahem-Av 5702 -- 22 July 1942.
Their memory will never be forgotten. May their souls be bound up in the bundle of life.

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 Belarusian 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 Belarusia and in a conversation with us he told of his inexhaustible efforts to renew communal life and tradition in the lives of the remnants.

Page Last Updated: 22-Jun-2011