July 22: Our Commemorative Visit
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."

---