Tag Archives: Minsk ghetto

A response from Australia to the story of Igor Kanonik about the Minsk ghetto

These are wartime documents from Australia.

Award list of Goberman Evel Davidovich for the Order of the Red Star

Award list of Goberman Evel Davidovich for the Order of the Great Patriotic War of 1st degree

Award list of Goberman Evel Davidovich for the Order of the Great Patriotic War of 2nd degree

For much smaller achievements they gave a Heroe title in the Soviet Union.

But of course not to a Jew … And Evel Goberman was the political officer of the first tank battalion, which means always ahead.

At the front from the first day, he took Berlin. His commanders, the commander of the battalion Bulgakov, and the commander of the unit Konstantinov became Heroes of the Soviet Union.

Bulgakov presented Evel Goberman to the Order of the Red Banner, but Konstantinov rewrote it (you can see everything in the award list) to the Order of the Great Patriotic War of the 2nd degree (he already had a 1st degree).

The certificate of the injury of Goberman Evel Davidovich

Goberman Evel Davidovich. Front photo of the year 1945

Goberman Evel Davidovich, born in 1906, in the army since 1939, member of the party since 1928, before the war he was married and had two sons, on the fronts of the World war 2 (in the Soviet Union -the Great Patriotic War) from the first day, from June 22, 1941.

A short comment from Igor Kanonik to the documents that were sent from Australia.

According to the russian security ministry archives, he went missing in December 1941. Evel Goberman did not knew that his wife Esther Ruvimovna with their two sons Vladimir and Felix managed to evacuate from Belarus to Sverdlovsk. He thought that they got into the ghetto like his parents and sisters …

Evel Goberman was seriously injured in January 1942, except for a serious injury, later
there were two more minor injuries.

As a political officer of the first tank battalion, of the 20th tank brigade,
captain Evel Goberman fought very bravely, his achievements are described in the award
lists. As part of the 1st Belorussian Front, the 20th Tank Brigade participated in the assault of
Berlin.

But even earlier, in 1944, a front-line journalist came to Evel Goberman the
writer Ilya Ehrenburg. He had heard about the exploits and was given the task of writing a
newspaper article and make a radio short story, which soon sounded on Central radio.
Neighbors came to Evel’s wife and asked if this was her husband, about whom they spoke
on the radio. Esther immediately went to the Sverdlovsk military registration office, and like this they found each other…

In November 1945, Evel Goberman was sacked from the front due to illness.

Evel Goberman died in 1979, his buried in the Minsk Northern cemetery.

The interesting thing is that now the great-grandson of Evel Goberman, came from
Australia and serves in the Israeli Defense Forces.

Translation from the original by Igor Shustin

Published 07/05/2020 21:57

Igor Kanonik. Minsk ghetto through the eyes of my father (part 3)

(end; beginning and continuation)

…Throughout August 1943, alone, father continued to go to peat mining for the sole purpose of fleeing into the forest as soon as possible. And in early September, a young village girl approached the Jews who worked at the peat and asked: “Who is Dodik here?” She first spoke with a policeman who checked her Ausweis and took some of the groceries from the basket that she carried for exchange in Minsk. Pulling father aside, she quietly asked: “What is your mother’s name?” Having clarified this question, she explained my father that if he would escape, then he needs to go round the German post deep in to the forest and wait for her after two kilometers at the edge of the forest. In two days she will be returning from Minsk, but he should not approach her, and instead carefully follow her through the forest.

It was a Minsk underground woman, a partizan detachment envoy Lidia Dmitrievna Berestovskaya (Kashchey after marriage). Heading towards Minsk, being on the next task of the command of the partizan detachment, and seeing a group of Jews from the ghetto, she immediately remembered the story of my grandmother Liza, that she accidentally heard in the detachment. Partizans asked grandmother from where did she came from and where her family was. And my grandmother had to tell that her only surviving son, a 14-year-old teenager Dodik, remained in the ghetto, and that he may continue to go to forced labor on peat mining to the same place from which she was able to escape in early August.

Lidia Dmitrievna Kashchei, who saved my father

On that day father jumped out of the moving car near the forest when they returned to the ghetto. A Lithuanian policeman just got into the cabin of the car to a German driver, as it began to rain heavily. Other Jews tried to discourage him from jumping, saying that if the guards notice that, they can kill him. Father told them that either way they would kill everyone soon. He spent two days in the forest, and on the third day he waited in the appointed place. By noon, the same young partizan appeared on the forest road. They walked for several days, mainly in the dark, through bushes and swamps, because they were afraid to go along forest roads, and my father did not have any papers. Lida was well-versed in the area, as she was from these places, from the village of Skuraty.

The partizan detachment was in a deep forest, but only ten kilometers from the site of peat mining. When they arrived, Lida told my father: “Go to that dugout, there your mother works as a cook”…

Ghetto Prisoner David Kanonik Testimony

On July 16, 1944, a partizan parade was held in liberated Minsk. In the middle of July 1944, father and his mother returned to their house, the Kanonik family house, where they lived before the war, before the ghetto, near Chervensky road, on 25 Krupskaya street. But the house was occupied, other people lived there for a long time, because they thought all the Jews died. The mother did not want to argue, although it was not a big problem to legally return the house. But she did not do so, apparently, not quite good memories connected her with this house. Having entered the barn in the yard, they found a box with pre-war photographs of the family among a pile of firewood. Grandmother and father went to live in Grushevka, where the old Goberman family house was preserved on Pakgauznaya Street, No. 7 (later Khmelevsky Street), in which grandmother lived until 1925, before she got married. And just than, her own younger sister Rosa Davidovna Troychanskaya (Goberman) returned from evacuation with her daughter Ella and son Erik. Rosa’s husband, Solomon Troychansky, remained in Chelyabinsk, as he held a senior management position at the defense plant. And the two sisters divided the house into two halves, with two entrances. Half of the house inherited by father and his mother had to be converted into a living room. Since before the war, it was used for a light chaise of great-grandfather David Goberman, the grandmother’s father, who worked as a cabman. In general, many Jews lived on Grushevka, who officially worked as cabmen in the Fridman brick factory, which was located in Tuchinka.

David Goberman had two siblings, Nokhim and Yankel, who also lived on Grushevka and were the heads of their very large families. All three were the sons of great-grandfather Abram Goberman, and all were born on Grushevskaya Street in house number 46.

David Goberman was the head of a large family; he and his wife Esther had four daughters and two sons. In each generation, twins were born in the Goberman family.

One son of David Goberman drowned as a teenager in a small lake, which was right on our street. The second son, Evel Goberman (Evel and my grandmother Liza were twins born in 1906), went through the whole war, he was drafted into the army back in 1939. In the rank of captain, he was a political instructor, deputy commander of the 1st tank battalion of the 20th tank brigade of the First Belorussian Front. He took part in the liberation of Belarus, had many decorations and medals.

Evel Davidovich Goberman, brother of Liza Davidovna Kanonik (Goberman)

After the war, Evel, his wife Fira and their three children, the eldest son Vova, the middle Felix and the youngest daughter Sofa lived on our street Pakgauznaya, at number 4. But in the mid-50’s Evel Goberman, among the thirty-thousand Communists, was sent to work as chairman of the Soviet Belarus collective farm in the Kletsk district of the Minsk region. Being a very intelligent person and a good manager, Evel Goberman brought this weak and lagging collective farm to the front in the agriculture of Belarus. He received the right to annually present the achievements of Belarus agriculture at VDNH in Moscow, where prizes and medals were constantly awarded to the collective farms.

After five years as collective farm chairman, Evel Goberman returned to Minsk and was appointed director of the Minsk brush factory, where he worked for many years until his retirement. Evel Goberman died in Minsk in 1979.

One of the four daughters of David Goberman, Lyuba, was married to a border guard officer, Izossim (Zussya) Shmotkin, they lived at the Domachevo outpost near Brest. Lyuba with her young daughter Esmeralda on the first day of the war managed to evacuate with the other wives of the officers. But they could not go far; the car was bombed near Minsk. Locals declared to the Germans that she was Jewish and the wife of a border guard officer, and she and her daughter were shot. And that same border guard officer, Izossim Shmotkin, returned from the war with the rank of major. Having raised a new family, he lived next door to us at Grushevka, in house No. 48. He and his wife Ida had two children, the eldest son Lenya and daughter Olga, with whom I studied in the same class at school No. 3.

David Goberman with his wife Esther and another daughter Raya got into the ghetto, where they died. The only daughter that escaped from the ghetto was my grandmother Liza, born in 1906, as well as the youngest daughter Rosa, born in 1911, who was with her family in evacuation in Chelyabinsk.

Oddly enough, but the area of the Grushevsky village was completely preserved in the pre-war form, it was never bombed. Perhaps because German railway soldiers were stationed there, serving the Minsk railway junction, some of which also worked at the wagon repair plant. For example, in our school No. 3 (where me and my sister Lilya studied), and this was a new four-story building, built in 1936, there were German barracks. After the war, my father also studied there, graduating from evening school.

…After receiving a certificate from the party archive at the beginning of April 1986, all documents were issued to my father in the Moscow District Executive Committee and in the military registration and enlistment office. A telephone was installed in the house on Grushevka – by the way, this wooden house (see photo 2016) is still standing on Khmelevsky street, No. 7. Father was put on a preferential line for an apartment at the place of work at the radio factory. A year later, they offered an apartment in the city center in an old departmental building of the radio factory, on Kommunisticheskaya street. As it turned out later, Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy, lived in this very house at the time when he worked at the Minsk Radio Plant.

Kanonik’s family house on Grushevka, photo from 2016

In addition to the large ghetto, in Minsk there was another small ghetto. At the end of the summer of 1941, the Germans selected 500 specialists of rare and important specialties from a large ghetto, together with their families, they resettled 3000 people to this small ghetto. Since November 1941, European Jewish specialists also fell there. It was an SS work camp on Shirokaya Street. The camp was constantly replenished also at the expense of Jewish prisoners of war, who were brought from different places. So in August 1942, officer Alexander Aaronovich Pechersky got there with a group of prisoners of war. He spent almost a year in the labor camp, and a month before the destruction of the Minsk ghetto in September 1943, he, as part of a large group of Jewish specialists, was sent to the Sobibor extermination camp with their families.

The extermination camp Sobibor was established in the spring of 1942 in southeastern Poland. A month after arrival, Pechersky became the leader of the only successful uprising in the death camp during the Second World War. After the successful uprising on October 14, 1943, the Nazis killed everyone who remained in the camp and completely destroyed it.

One of the most mysterious and tragic stories of the Minsk ghetto is a story little known to the general public about how, in early October 1943, 26 Jews from several families living on Sukhaya Street hid in a pre-prepared basement-crypt near the cemetery itself. At that time, the last 3,000 Jews remained in the ghetto. The hiding people had a correct calculation – everyone already understood that the Minsk ghetto had only a few days left.

And so it happened, from October 21 to October 23 was the last pogrom, it was a sweep. Hiding in houses, basements and malinas (self-made shelters) did not make sense anymore, since during the last pogrom there was not a single place left where grenades would not fly, and you do not need to do sweeps in the cemetery and look for someone. They stayed there for 9 months, until July 1944. Realizing that the ghetto was already gone, they continued to hide, and only at night they could breathe fresh air and carefully draw water from the nearest well.

There is a wonderful story about these people by Minsk resident Ilya Leonov “263 days in the underground”, as well as “1111 days on the brink of death”.

As you know, tankmen of several armies were liberating Minsk at once, but another military unit did the real sweeping of the city. These were the soldiers of the 132nd border (later the Minsk Order of the Red Star) regiment of the NKVD troops, the rear guard of the army, the Third Belorussian Front.

July 4, 1944, the day after the liberation, while carrying out their work, the soldiers went around the whole city. They found 13 exhausted, ragged people in the Jewish cemetery, in the territory of the former ghetto, looking like the living dead.

After finding this out, the regiment commander, hero of the Civil War, an Odessa Jew, guard colonel Arkady Zakharyevich Khmelyuk ordered that all 13 survivors will be urgently taken to Orsha to the hospital, since there was no hospital in Minsk yet. Father also spoke about this in his memoirs.

Certificates of David Efimovich Kanonik – partizan and war veteran

For cleaning Minsk and its environs, as they caught more than 400 policemen and traitors, this regiment, the only one among the military units of the NKVD, received the honorary name “Minsky”.

In the mid-70s I was drafted into the army precisely in this “Minsky” regiment, military unit 7574, a convoy regiment of internal troops. The military unit was located in the center of Vilnius, and occupied the premises of the former monastery adjacent to the back of the church of Peter and Paul. In the courtyard of the military unit there was a large monument.

Once, during the Victory Day holiday, elderly veteran officers spoke in the assembly hall. One of them told how in July 1944 they liberated Minsk. And on July 4, the day after the liberation, 13 survivors were found in the territory where the Minsk ghetto was located in the cemetery. The story sounded unreasonable, because it was known that the Minsk ghetto ceased to exist in the twenties of October 1943.

Having been demobilized from the army, already at home in Minsk, I told my father about this. And then father said that they were their relatives and neighbors from Sukhaya Street. One of the eldest in this group of 26 Jews was Elya (Israel) Goberman, a cousin of my father’s mother, my grandmother Liza Kanonik (Goberman). Elya Goberman before the war also living on Grushevka in house number 46 and worked as a cabman on his carriage, always harnessed by his favorite horse nicknamed Haver (friend). The horse understood all the Yiddish commands.

Elya and his wife Heyna survived, they were among the 13 that was saved. Three of their daughters died. In December 1942, their youngest six-year-old daughter Maya, born in 1936, fell ill and died in the ghetto. In August 1943, policemen accidentally detained and took to the gas chamber their two eldest daughters, the middle Sonya, born in 1932, and older Fanya, born in 1928. For more than two years of life in the ghetto, the parents managed to protect their daughters who were hiding in the “malinas” when their parents were in forced labor.

Father has told me that Uncle Elya invited him in August 1943 to join them and also hide in this basement. The basement was prepared by the famous Minsk stove-maker Pinya Dobin, a good friend of Elya Goberman. But father refused, as he hoped in the very near future to run away and look for his mother, who was already in the partizan detachment.

After the war, my father often saw the Gobermans, as the three sisters of Uncle Elya, Raya, Nechama and Yokha lived with their families in our neighboring house on Grushevka, in the same house No. 46. The large house was divided into three separate apartments. Uncle Elya and his wife Heyna lived a long life with the dream of Zion, but then it was not possible to realize it. Elya Goberman died in 1973, and Heyna in 1981.

Elya and Hyena Goberman, mid-1950s.

Father is no longer alive. His memories of life in the ghetto were recorded in 1996 by the Steven Spielberg Foundation employees and are preserved in the Jewish Museum in Minsk.

Maya Kanonik (Meisels), wife of David. Photo from 2019. On December 18, she turned 85 years old, she lives in Ashdod. We congratulate her on behalf of the all readers of the website. Mazal Tov!

The children of David Efimovich Kanonik, Lilya and Igor (the author of this story)

Eternal memory to all relatives who died in the Minsk ghetto.

Only memory remains for our generation. Memory is not needed by the dead – memory is needed by the living.

I would like to note that I am not a historian, but I know history.

Igor Kanonik, Haifa (Israel)

Written in 2013–2019.

Translation from the original by Igor Shustin

Published 04/17/2020 11:31

Response

Felix Goberman from Australia sent photos of his father and mother from 1945.

Evel Goberman Fira Goberman

Added 04/20/2020 18:14

Igor Kanonik. Minsk ghetto through the eyes of my father (part 2)

(continued; beginning here)

At the end of 1972, the city authorities began to hatchet a project – how to fill up the “Pit” and dismantle the monument. Everyone already understood that this place was becoming symbolic and anti-Soviet. In their turn, the Jews began to collect signatures under a petition to the city executive committee not to touch the monument. Someone suggested writing the same petition in English, so two parallel notebooks appeared. I saw them at our house on Grushevka when my father went to collect signatures from the Jews. Many were afraid to sign, and my father tried to persuade them.

May 9, 1973 was a big rally at the “Pit”, there were already thousands of people.

At the end of the summer of 1973, the KGB knew about this petition. Most likely because my father and another former ghetto prisoner made an appointment with the chairman of the city executive committee, and they said for what issue they came for and left all their data. From that moment, the authorities launched surveillance of my father. In mid-September, a meeting was scheduled at the city executive committee. One day in early September, when I returned from work, I found out that our house was searched, it immediately became clear what they were looking for. On that day, the KGB officers came to fathers work, took him and drove him home. He was a 6th grade turner by profession, he worked at the motor depot then, he never was a party member. What they could do to him, even checked his locker at work. Everyone, of course, thought that they were looking for some kind of “samizdat” (independent editions)… Fortunately, my father handed over both notebooks to fellow Jews for collecting signatures.

David Kanonik at work in a motor depot, 1973

The appointed day was approaching. On September 15 it was time to go to the city executive committee. My prudent father asked a familiar Russian woman to carry the notebook into the building of the city executive committee. She said at the entrance that she was going to get a job, and she was let in. And father went without anything, only with his passport. Unfortunately, his second colleague did not came, they made an appointment together. Two deputies received my father, they already knew what he was going to talk about, another man in a gray suit was sitting in the corner of the office, but he did not introduce himself.

The conversation lasted more than an hour, father handed them the notebook with a petition full of signatures of Minsk residents, mostly prisoners of the ghetto and their relatives. He told them how he had been in the ghetto from his first day on July 20, 1941 until the beginning of September 1943, when he managed to escape to the partizan detachment. And the fact that almost his whole large family died, including all relatives, its 32 people. At the end of the conversation, they asked him why people do not want creation of a beautiful park on this place, with filling the “Pit”.

Father realized that everything he told them was not interesting. Then he became angry and before leaving he said that if they would break this monument, then they can kill him right there. And that many years will pass, there will be neither them, nor these offices, and the monument will still stand in the “Pit”…

…On the next day, the director of the motor depot told father to work calmly, the question of his dismissal is not even worth the time.

But another question remained, how to hand over the second notebook with a petition in English. So that it reaches at least to the American correspondent in Moscow. Everyone understood that international publicity was needed, that only it could stop this madness in Minsk.

Jewish identity in the USSR began to rise after the victorious Six Day War in June 1967, in which Israel fought a coalition of Arab countries (Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Jordan). The euphoria after this war was long-lasting. New waves of Jewish activities took place also after the “aircraft affair” – attempts to hijack a plane from Leningrad on June 15, 1970 and the arrest of eleven people, almost all of whom were Jews. After the killing of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in September 1972. And after the Mossad operation, carried out on the personal order of the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, with the aim of capturing and eliminating all the terrorists involved in the killing of the athletes.

With publicity, everything was resolved. In early October 1973, the last few families were to leave Minsk, for which all the documents had already been ready. They went to Moscow, and there, at the Dutch embassy, they were supposed to receive the remaining documents and train tickets to Vienna.

On June 10, 1967, the USSR broke off diplomatic relations with Israel. After the victory of Israel in the Six Day War, the Israeli embassy was closed, and the interests of Israel were represented only by the consul, who received at the Embassy of the Netherlands.

The idea was to persuade one of the families to take the notebook with signatures to Moscow and hand it over to the consul. And so it happened. After this family left Moscow, moscow friends called their relatives in Minsk and said that they had escorted them to the train station, and that they had transferred everything as planned.

Literally in these days, on Saturday, October 6, 1973, at two in the afternoon, on the eve of the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, the armies of Egypt and Syria attacked the positions of Israeli troops along the ceasefire line of the previous Six Day War of 1967. This is how began the fourth Arab-Israeli war – the Yom Kippur War.

It was interesting to observe such a picture, as in the Minsk GUM department of radio products on Lenin Street there was a long line of Jews only. Everyone wanted to buy the “Ocean” radio of the Minsk Radio Plant – of course, in order to listen to “enemy voices” and to know the whole truth about the war in Israel. Jews were already aware of what bluffs all Soviet newspapers wrote during the Six Day War. Therefore, no one was going to trust the Soviet newspapers.

I remember it like it was now, on the evening of October 24, 1973, all Jews listened to “enemy voices” – such as the DW, Radio Liberty, and Voice of America. It was the last day of the Yom Kippur War in Israel. Then the “voices” spoke only about this, and also read chapters from the “Gulag Archipelago” by Solzhenitsyn. And suddenly in the middle of the news they say that the Belarusian authorities want to demolish the monument to the Jews who died in the Minsk ghetto. The first monument to the Jewish victims of fascism in the entire Soviet Union, erected by surviving Jews in 1947. They talked about this for several days in a row, and also wrote about it in the newspapers in Israel and in West Germany. It was a real big win.

Now you can only imagine what elevated tones Peter Mironovich Masherov was talking with then chairman of the city executive committee Mikhail Vasilievich Kovalev. And the insult was great – how did it happen that in the midst of the ardent state antisemitism that was generated by the state, ordinary Minsk Jews were able to spin all the Belarusian authorities? As you know, 1973 was the heyday of the era of stagnation in the USSR.

Igor and Lena Kanonik on their wedding day March 1, 1985 near the monument at the “Pit”

A little more about my father. Soon, he went to work at a factory of medicaments, he worked there for a long time. Then he began to work at a radio factory. It was a branch of a radio factory for the production of wooden cases for TVs and radios, which had previously exploded. The explosion occurred due to spontaneous combustion of dust during the second shift on March 10, 1972, in a new workshop that worked for only three months. At fifteen degrees below zero, firefighters flooded everything with water. According to official figures, 106 people died.

My father worked at a radio factory until his retirement in 1989.

My dad, Kanonik David Efimovich, and my mother, Kanonik (Meisels) Maya Izrailevna, lived in the same house on Grushevka, without any luxury. Although then, in December 1973, three months after the scandalous visit to the city executive committee, my father was called to the same executive committee. That time it was the housing department. They said that they knew that he was a prisoner of the Minsk ghetto, and offered him a new three-room apartment. But my father refused, saying that he did not need anything from them. It should be noted that my father never asked anyone to improve his living conditions, it was their initiative.

In the mid-1980s, working at a radio factory, father talked to the chairman of the factory society of war veterans. Father said that he was in the partizans, but the chairman of the society grinned and replied that the Jews were in the ghetto. Then father said that he had been in the Minsk ghetto for more than two years and fled to the partizans. But to the question, where are your documents of the war participant and the partizan of Belarus, my father had nothing to answer. He had to look for witnesses, former partizans, and go to Orsha to the commander of the partizan detachment. The commander did not remember him, probably because he was already very old, but he asked my father to tell him everything that he remembers from the life of the detachment. Father began to tell what he was doing, that he was guarding the hospital on the swamp island, and his mother Elizabetha Davidovna Kanonik (Goberman) was a cook and worked in the hospital. Then the commander remembered. He sent father to the republican party archives, where all the papers were kept. And only after that my father received an extract from the diary of the partizan detachment, in which the meticulous clerk wrote down everything. The certificate clearly stated that on September 5, 1943, Kanonik David Efimovich was arrived to the partizan detachment named after Kirov, the brigade named after Kirov, Minsk region, and in the column “from where he arrived” there were indicated “Minsk ghetto”.

… For the first time, at the beginning of August 1943, father and his mother fled from peat mining along the Mogilev highway, where they were taken daily from the ghetto. The security was weak – one, sometimes two police officers, who were already tired to count Jews (how many were leaving the ghetto and how many were returning). But there was a German post ahead of the road, and my father had no papers. In addition, almost all men and teenagers were forced to take off their pants (this way the Nazis looked for Jews). He had to go back to peat mining. His mother passed all the posts, as she had an “Ausweis” with a note that she lives in the village of Shpakovschina. She already knew how and where to find the partizans. Ausweis was prepared in advance by her husband, my grandfather, Kanonik Efim Yakovlevich, who was connected with the underground in the ghetto and died shortly before that, in early July 1943, in one of the raids at the meat factory. He never managed to take advantage of his “Ausweis”.

Before the war, my grandfather worked at a meat factory, where more than half of the workers were Jews. When all the Jews were driven into the ghetto, the Germans realized that a meat factory would not be able to work without Jews. They selected all the former workers according to the documents of the meat plant and began to take them to work from the ghetto in an organized manner.

In general, in the Minsk ghetto there was an opportunity through the Judenrat (the Jewish administrative body) to ask for any work team. There were a lot of working teams, every day early in the morning, under the supervision of policemen, they were driven out or taken out for various jobs. This made it possible to prolong one’s life and somehow to eat, as the working teams had reasonable amounts of food, and there was a short lunch break. Nobody fed those who remained in the ghetto; they needed to take care of themselves.

Also, almost every day the ghetto prisoners had to hide, so as not to get into the gas chamber during the next round-up. But in the spring of 1943, everything changed. The Germans began to drastically reduce the size of the already melting ghetto, and began to organize pogroms for working teams. For example, you could leave for work in the morning and not return to the ghetto in the evening. Sometimes after work they were immediately taken away for execution.

So for two years, grandfather and father as part of a working team used to leave the ghetto to work at the meat factory. They were officially registered on this working team. Father was there on the last day in early July 1943.

…The Jews at the meat plant noticed that in the middle of the day more police arrived than usual. So many policemen were not required to accompany the Jews back to the ghetto. Grandfather Efim told my father to slip out of the territory in the area of the rear warehouses quickly and quietly, take off the stripes and calmly go to the train station. Father did just that, stayed in the train station until darkness, and close to the night he crawled under the barbed wire into the ghetto area through the region of the Tatar gardens. Arriving home, and in 1943 they already lived at Sukhaya Street, as the territory of the ghetto was gradually reduced and Jews were resettled, he saw his mother sitting and crying. She already knew everything, she was informed that the cars with the workers from the meat plant drove through the ghetto, she thought that they both died. Usually, all working teams walked to and from work at the meat plant, accompanied by police officers. But this last time, after work, all the Jewish workers from the meat factory were transported through the ghetto directly to Tuchinka and immediately shot in the clay quarries of an old brick factory.

The Germans often drove through the territory of the ghetto, entering through the gates on Nemiga Street, along the Respublikanskaya and Opansky streets and leaving through the gates at the railway.

Also in Tuchinka the younger brother of grandfather Efim, Nissim Kanonik, born in 1910, who was on the same working team, was shot. He, like Grandfather Efim, before the war worked at a meat factory. Nissim was drafted into the army and, on July 23, on the day of conscription, he was sent to the front, which was advancing towards Minsk. After the first battles, the remnants of its broken detachment, retreating by forests, came to Minsk, the city was already occupied. Just near Minsk, Nisim met his elder brother Honya Kanonik, born in 1906, who was also drafted into the army on July 23. Honya with the remnants of his military unit went east to the front line. Honya categorically dissuaded Nissim from entering the occupied Minsk. But Nissim was not afraid, he knew the city well, which helped him to get to his house on Chervensky road at night, where his wife Lida and two young sons, Yakov, born in 1936 and Victor, born in 1939, remained.

Honya Yakovlevich Kanonik – one of the first cash messengers in post-war Minsk

It was just the beginning of July, and the commandant’s order to create a Jewish ghetto from July 20 was already hung around the city. All Jews were obliged to move to this area in the center of Minsk. Nissim Kanonik decided to go to the ghetto alone, and his Russian wife Lida with two sons remained in their house on Borisovskaya Street, near Chervensky road. Having slightly corrected her documents, this strong and smart woman survived three years of occupation and saved her children.

Nissim Kanonik with his wife Lida and eldest son Yakov. Photograph of 1937

On the picture from the year 1931 is the father of my father Khaim (Efim) Kanonik, born in 1903. Both were shot in Tuchinka in July 1943 during a round-up at a meat factory. This is how the whole working team was destroyed. Father was there too, but miraculously escaped.

There were many mixed families in the Minsk ghetto, and non-Jewish wives followed their husbands in to the ghetto, taking on all the hardships. They also wore stripes on their clothes and shared the sad fate of all their Jewish relatives.

Translation from the original by Igor Shustin

(to be concluded)

Published 04/15/2020 16:36

Igor Kanonik. The Minsk ghetto through the eyes of my father (part 1)

The story is written in a form where the events of 1941-1944 sometimes overlap with the events of the early 1970s. This is a real and true story of two families, Kanonik and Goberman, of which 32 people died in the Minsk ghetto. History unfolds in two time planes. Oddly enough, the past is connected with the present by the chain of events arising from one another.

The story was written in 2013, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the destruction of the Minsk ghetto, and corrected in 2019. Some photos are published for the first time.

On June 28, 1941, the Germans, not meeting much resistance, entered Minsk. The family of my father, David Kanonik, lived before the war near the Chervensky tract on Krupskaya Street. It was a large area of private houses behind the train station. All lived together in his house: grandfather Efim (Khaim) Yakovlevich Kanonik, born in 1903, grandmother Liza Davidovna Kanonik (maiden name Goberman) born in 1906, the elder sister of my father Luba, born in 1926, my father David, born in 1929, and grandmother Gita, the mother of grandfather Efim. Also in this house lived grandmother Esther, the sister of grandmother Gita. Both of two young children: father’s sister Rita, born in 1931, and brother Marat, born in 1938, died of dysentery before the war.

For several days, the Kanonik’s could not decide whether to leave to the east or stay in Minsk, and left the city only on June 26. Many families who left Minsk on June 23-24 managed to go far, and to cross the bridge over the Berezina River. But father’s family traveled only 40 kilometers when German troops in the uniform of the Red Army were dropped directly onto the refugee column.

My father David Kanonik (1929-1999, died in Israel). He spent more than two years in the ghetto; since September 1943 he was a partizan

Saboteurs told the refugees so that everyone would return to their homes, that in front of the Berezina River, there is no bridge and no opportunity to cross to the opposite bank. The bridge was indeed blown up on June 25 by Soviet military units during the retreat in order to detain the Germans on the Berezina River. Therefore, many refugees, including Jews, turned back to Minsk.

As early as on June 24, the top leaders of the republic and the city, hastily and secretly fled from Minsk to Mogilev, without informing the population that they needed to leave. Their escape caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and first of all the complete destruction of the Jewish population of Minsk and its environs, who ended up in the Minsk ghetto. It was a real betrayal of the city population.

Almost a month later, in mid-July, an order from a military commandant was posted throughout the city. All Jews were ordered to leave their homes and relocate to the ghetto area from July 20.

My father and his family got there and for more than two years they were prisoners of the Minsk ghetto – from July 20, 1941 until the beginning of September 1943. When my father managed to escape to the partizan detachment, the last 3,000 Jews remained in the ghetto. It was a month and a half before the last ghetto destruction action. On the twenties of October 1943, the Minsk ghetto, the largest of two hundred Jewish ghettos in Belarus, ceased to exist.

According to the archives and museums of Germany, about 150 thousand Jews died in Minsk, more than 40 thousand of them were Jews from Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic. Foreigners were clustered in the “Sonderghetto”, a special one inside a larger ghetto. There is a memorial in the park on Sukhaya Street, on the site of an old Jewish cemetery, in the territory of the former ghetto, which is dedicated to the Jews of Europe.

The only place where it is noted that 150 thousand Jews passed through the Minsk ghetto is the Berlin Holocaust Museum. Even on Wikipedia, the data is not accurate.

Of the 250 thousand pre-war population of Minsk, more than 100 thousand were Jews. The Minsk ghetto lasted two years and three months. Throughout this time, all those who died and were killed in small pogroms, which took place almost constantly, were buried in common grave-ditches in the territory of this cemetery. The cemetery existed from the middle of the 19th century; Jews were buried there after the war, until the early 1950s. In the early 1970s, the cemetery was closed, and in 1990 it was razed to the ground.

Father told how after the war they paved cobblestone on Collectornaya street (former Jewish) on the site between the street Nemiga (during the war it was called “Khaimstrasse”) and up to the street Sukhaya, and how they laid a road straight through the graves.

The convoy that left Berlin on November 14, 1941 was the third convoy of European Jews to the Minsk ghetto. The first, according to the German archives, was a convoy train, which left Dusseldorf on November 10, 1941. The second was a convoy from Frankfurt, sent on November 11, 1941.

And today, walking along the old part of Dusseldorf, right at the houses where the Jews lived, you can see copper square tablets. They, like in Berlin, are walled up on the sidewalk with the names of former residents deported to the Minsk ghetto. Later, in the winter of 1941–1942, there were many more trains from Hamburg, Berlin, Bremen, Cologne, Bonn, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt and Vienna – all to the Minsk ghetto.

These data are from Berlin museums and archives in Germany. It is better not to argue about statistics with the German pedants. In Soviet times, the number of Jews who died in the Minsk ghetto was belittled. For example, on the territory of the Khatyn memorial complex, created in 1969, there was a memorial plaque-niche in a long wall (I think it is still in the same place), which lists several streets that entered the Minsk ghetto region, and it says that 75 thousand peaceful Soviet citizens died there.

The Holocaust of Jews in the territories of the former Soviet Union remained a secret for several decades after the end of the war. For ideological and political reasons, the Soviet regime did not recognize the uniqueness and scale of the extermination of Jews by the Nazis. Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union the documentation and perpetuation of the memory of Holocaust victims become possible.

… Father told me that at first they lived in the ghetto on Ostrovsky Street, not far from the entrance gate from the side of Nemiga Street. Almost every day three enormous gas chambers drove into the ghetto; they stopped near a public park on Ostrovsky. There followed a raid on the Jews – those who did not go to work or could not hide in the pre-prepared “malinas.” “Malina” was the name for hiding places under the floor of the house, between the floor and the ground, or for a small secret room, which was obtained after making an extra large wall. Policemen caught all who came across, and driven them into the gas chamber. Cars drove the Jews to “Maly Trostenets” and burned them there.

The first commandant in the Minsk ghetto was Major Richter, he often liked to go around the ghetto, accompanied by policemen and with a whip in his hand. And God forbid if someone does not take off his headgear when he met him, or catch his eye with a poorly sewn armor. These were round yellow stripes on the clothes, front and back, which should have been worn even by children from 12 years old. Later, under the yellow stripes, they forced to sew a small white ones, but only on the chest. Last names and numbers corresponding to the house number in the ghetto were written on these small stripes, since all the houses were numbered. It was a kind of residence permit.

During the next, largest, fourth pogrom (July 28-31, 1942), in which about 30 thousand Jews died, the elder sister of my father Lyuba died. Police officers, as usual, walked the ghetto streets and handed out leaflets. Lyuba told her mother that she would go outside and take the leaflet. Her mother tries to dissuadedher, but Lyuba came out and no one saw her since than…

My father’s sister Lyuba, b. 1926, Photo1939

It turned out that like this the policemen lured people from houses and shelters, where there was still the opportunity to hide.

Also during this pogrom, died grandmother Esther, the sister of grandmother Gita. When everyone who was in the house managed to hide in the “malina”, she closed the hole, laid a rug on top and sat on the bed in the bedroom. She told to the Germans and policemen who entered, in Yiddish that she is blind and can not see nothing. Then a German took her arm and slowly led her out into the street towards the gas chamber. And thus Esther left, taking away the danger from her family…

July 28, on the first day of the great pogrom, my father and grandfather Efim, as part of the work team, managed to leave the ghetto to work at a meat factory early in the morning. On the way to work, a group of Jews was constantly accompanied by several policemen. They met a large convoy of Ukrainian policemen (from July 10, 1941, several convoys of the 1st Ukrainian police battalion stationed in Minsk), which marched towards the ghetto. Soon after, shots were heard from the ghetto.

By the end of the working day, all Jews were informed that they will not return to the ghetto, but remain at work for the night. The same way they spent the next two nights. The pogrom in the ghetto ended at exactly three in the afternoon on July 31. When father and grandfather returned to the ghetto in the evening, they realized that only mother, Liza, was alive, but the sister and two grandmothers were gone. This was the fourth large pogrom planned by the Germans.

Liza Kanonik (Goberman) born in 1906, my father’s mother. She escaped from the ghetto in early August 1943. Almost a year was a cook and worked in the hospital of the partizan detachment. Photo taken in 1946

It is officially known that in Maly Trostenets, the Germans killed 206,500 people, and more than half of them are prisoners of the Minsk ghetto. It is also known that this figure is greatly underestimated.

The outstanding German intellectual-historian Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm in his book “Operational Group A of the Security Police and SD 1941–1942 ”confirms and reliably states that in 1942, 1,000 Jewish transports (railroad cars) were observed in the vicinity of Minsk. This German historian claims that the number of foreign Jews deported to the Minsk region in 1942 is, according to conservative estimates, 75 thousand people. Most of these European Jews, bypassing the Minsk ghetto, went directly to the extermination camp Maly Trostenets.

But even earlier there was a third big pogrom. There was a large sand pit in the ghetto. And it was there that in 1947, with funds raised by surviving Jews, one of the first monuments to the victims of the Holocaust was erected on the territory of the entire Soviet Union. The inscription on it was made in Yiddish. But at that time, for well-known reasons, they could not write on the monument that these 5,000 Jews were the victims of the third pogrom, organized on the Jewish holiday of Purim on March 2, 1942.

The pogrom began by shooting 200 children of the orphanage, along with teachers and medical workers. The orphanage was located on Ratomskaya Street (later Melnikaite) next to the quarry. The Gauleiter of Belarus Wilhelm Kube was present when they were shooting the children, he threw candy to them. After the execution of 5,000 Jews, the Germans did not allow the quarry to fall asleep for several days. Father said that after the execution, the snow fell, and the executed Jews lay for several days, covered with snow.

Unfortunately, even in 2000, when the “Pit” Memorial was created on this site, they also forgot or did not want to indicate the total number of Jews who died in the Minsk ghetto.

There was one more place of mass executions of Jews from the ghetto – the victims of the first two large pogroms were mostly shot there. The first big pogrom, dedicated to the holiday and due to the lack of space for the resettlement of European Jews, took place on November 7, 1941. The Germans “loved and tried” to organize large-scale pogroms for the Soviet or Jewish holidays. They forced the Jews to form columns and walk along the central square of the ghetto, Yubileynaya square, as in a demonstration. These columns immediately after the “parade” drove to Tuchinka. Thus perished 12 thousand Jews.

The second big pogrom, connected with the urgent preparation of a place for the resettlement of European Jews (“sonderghetto”), took place on November 20, 1941, in which another 20 thousand Minsk Jews died. All this happened in the village of Tuchinka, in clay quarries on the territory of three old brick factories. Over 30 thousand Jews were shot there on the outskirts of Minsk during the existence of the ghetto.

Unfortunately, in the postwar years this place was forgotten. Perhaps one of the reasons for oblivion is that before the war, the 6th NKVD colony was located next to Tuchinka. That is, both Germans and Chekists inherited there. Today it is a territory near Kharkovskaya Street, in the direction of the Calvary Cemetery. A modern Tuchinka park barely overlapes this territory.

All the surviving ghetto prisoners had a peculiar psychological syndrome for 25 years after the war. They walked around the streets where the ghetto was. They didn’t tell anyone about this, and in general they tried not to touch the ghetto subject. Of course, the postwar state policy contributed to this. Persecution of Jews in the late 1940s. The murder of Solomon Mikhoels in Minsk in January 1948 (there were rumors in Minsk that the death of Mikhoels was an officially organized murder). Destruction of Jewish culture, August 12, 1952 in the cellars of the Lubyanka were shot 13 members of the JAC – the “Jewish Antifascist Committee.” An anti-cosmopolitan company that acquired anti-Semitic forms. The “doctors’ plot” at the beginning of 1953. And state antisemitism, which intensified in the late 1960s and in the 1970s.

How did Minsk Jews manage to perpetuate the memory of their fellow compatriots in the years when no one wanted to hear about the Holocaust?

The first organized Jewish rally at the Pit took place on Victory Day in 1969. Fifty people gathered, mostly Jews who lived close to the Pit, and their relatives. My father’s brother Edik Goberman, born in 1945, lived with his family in Zaslavsky Lane.

Not many Minsk residents know that the first two flower beds on both sides of the monument were made by Jews living near the Pit. But in front of the round flowerbeds, two large flowerbeds were made in the form of Magen David, this was in the early May 1969. These flower beds did not stand even a day, there even did not manage to put flowers. It remained a mystery how the KGB found out about them, but in the evening of the same day four persons in gray suits immediately went to the house of the organizer of these community workers in the Pit.

In the courtyard, where the Chekists entered, stood dozens of shovels and a rakes. KGB officers said they were aware that work was underway at the Pit to clear the area. And then it sounded in an imperative tone: “Get rid of these flower beds of yours until the morning!”

It had to redo the six-pointed flower beds into round ones at night. And when on May 9, 1969, the Jews first rallied at the Pit, everyone saw two round flower beds with flowers.

A few words about the organizer of the community workers. This was one of the first Minsk Zionists, everyone called him Feldman, perhaps this was not his real last name. According to the stories of his former neighbors, he was like a bone in the throat for the KGB. At the end of 1972, he was taken to Moscow and put on a plane flying to Vienna, from where he allegedly flew to Israel. In the early 1990s, after almost 20 years, his former neighbors searched for him in Israel, but never succeeded…

During Brezhnev’s time the Jews, who had something to lose, were afraid to come to the “Pit” on Victory Day. I myself have seen many times how Jewish intellectuals walked from Yubileynaya Square down Ratomskaya Street (later Melnikaite) past the market, constantly looking over their shoulder. It was rumored that disguised KGB officers photographed people. But every year more and more Jews came to the Pit.

Translation from the original by Igor Shustin

(to be continued)

Published 04/12/2020 02:19