Remembrance

The Communal Graves of the Jews of Kletsk
August 28, 1991: A Memorial Visit to the Communal Graves of the Jews of Kletsk

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 Belarusians.

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.

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