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At the end of the
war, after the Red Army returned and conquered the area, the Christians
of Kletsk put the criminals on trial. The accused admitted their crimes
and witnesses strengthened the charges with regards to the Germans and
their Belarussian and Lithuanian collaborators.
The murderer, Nikolai
(Kolya) Zadalin, a local Belarussian, was caught and tried. Another murderer,
a commander by the name of Goren, who was also involved in the murder
of the Jews of Baranovich, was caught by Dr. Nerkonsky, a Jew from Baranovich
who tracked down those who'd murdered the Jews of his town. He traced
him to the town of Vrotslav, where he was put on trial and the sentence
carried out -- death by hanging.
One of the chief
murderers, Joseph Gornevich, was put on trial in Baranovich. He was one
of the participants in the liquidation of the area' s ghettos: Baranovich,
Horoditsch, Neshvizh, Stolptsy and Kletsk. He was sentenced to death and
hanged in Vrotslav. [Source: A report from the N.K.V.D.
on the trials of war criminals, Yad Vashem archive. And the newspaper
Slovy Polsky, October 20, 1947. ]
Shalom Cholovsky,
one of the organizers of the resistance in the nearby town of Neshvizh,
a partisan and Holocaust historian, in his explanation of the characteristics
of ghetto life - the imprisonment, the tortures, the decrees, and the
decree of "The Final Solution," emphasizes that it was "characteristic
of the underground." And he continues:
I don't mean to say
that every Jew in the ghetto was in the underground or was a fighter,
but there is no denying that the way of life in the ghetto was all in
all, like that of the underground. This is the truth in and of itself
and not in comparison to other people of that time. When we uncover this
Jewish world, we are shocked and excited by the human and Jewish strength,
that they possessed. These many anonymous Jews were marked by great courage.
[Source: Shalom Cholovsky, The Jewish Battle
in the ghettos and partisans, Periodical Moreshet, November 1990.]