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DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Maria Gilmovskaya. Full, unedited interview, 2012 ID NY091.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4wk0x ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN TABLE OF CONTENTS ITEM TRANSCRIPT ENGLISH TRANSLATION 2 CITATION & RIGHTS 9 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 1/9 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Maria Gilmovskaya. Full, unedited interview, 2012 ID NY091.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4wk0x ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN TRANSCRIPT ENGLISH TRANSLATION —Today is February 13, 2012. We are in Brooklyn at the Bensonhurst Jewish Community Center, meeting with a veteran of the Great Patriotic War. Please introduce yourself and tell us about your life before the war, your family, and how you spent the war years. My name is Maria Ilyinichna Gilmovskaya, but my real name is Mera. I was born in Western Belorussia [Belarus], in the town of Mir, which was part of Poland before 1939. Mir was quite famous because it was home to a yeshiva where students from around the world would come to study. I was born in a merchant family, if I can call it that. My parents owned a large workshop where they both worked. My family was quite wealthy, so I never lacked anything as a child. There was a seven-year common school in town, but there was no gymnasium, so starting with fifth grade my parents sent me to a gymnasium in Baranovichi. My family was not particularly religious, but we did celebrate all the Jewish holidays. We usually had yeshiva students over; we fed them lunch and dinner twice a week. I graduated from the Baranovichi gymnasium in 1939. When the Soviet army occupied Western Belarus and annexed it, we greeted its arrival with bouquets of flowers and were very happy. When the war started . —Did the Jewish population greet it with flowers or . Everyone did. Almost everyone brought flowers because we saw the Red Army’s arrival as a liberation. At that time there were already rumors that war was going to break out soon, so we were very happy. It turns out that we were off the mark . things didn’t turn out so well for my family—our property was plundered. We had a big house. It was confiscated to house the first secretary of the district party committee. My family consisted of my father, mother, me and two sisters, one older and one younger. My older sister had already finished the gymnasium and was teaching German in a school. I was the rebel of the family and always wanted to do things my way and not the way my parents wanted. In our town there was a branch of the Jewish organization Shomer, which was attended by some of my friends. So I joined as well. When I was studying at the public gymnasium, my membership in this organization was discovered and I was expelled. My parents then sent me to a private gymnasium, which I finished after six years in 1939. I was in Baranovichi when the war began. The Germans arrived there on the very first day of the war. I didn’t have any relatives or friends there, so I traveled back to my native Mir. On the 8th of November, 1941 . There were about 5,000 Jews in our town. On November 8, 1941, the first pogrom began, and more than 2,000 Jews were killed. The survivors were imprisoned in the Mir Castle. The castle had been built in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Our life there was extremely difficult. The castle was ancient and had very little in the way of living quarters, so the few habitable rooms were filled with forty to fifty people each. All the surviving Jews were taken to the castle, which was turned into a ghetto. The castle walls were 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 2/9 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Maria Gilmovskaya. Full, unedited interview, 2012 ID NY091.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4wk0x ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN two meters thick because it was a fourteenth-fifteenth century fortification. It had spiral staircases, tiny windows, and one large well in the center of the building. Life was brutal there. However, as they say, a miracle occurred. It turned out that one Jew from Krakow by the name of Oswald managed to pass himself off as a Volksdeutsche to get a job in the police. He managed to get in touch with the administrator of our ghetto . It’s a long story how it all happened, but he began supplying us with weapons. After the first pogrom, about a hundred young people, including me and two other young women, knew that we would be killed sooner or later, but we decided that we would not be driven to the pits like sheep. We decided to arm ourselves. Oswald began supplying us with weapons, but there were very few weapons available. This went on for several months. Then Oswald found out that everyone in the ghetto would be killed on August 22. —August 22 of which year? 1942. He told us that the few weapons we had would not be enough to resist the Germans and started trying to convince the leaders of our small youth group to escape the ghetto and join the partisans. Partisan groups were only just starting to form in Belorussia, and especially in Western Belorussia. A tunnel was dug out and about a hundred young people left the castle on August 22. The secret became reality. Other inhabitants of the ghetto followed us out. We reached the nearest forest, but a great tragedy took place there. Those who had brought some weapons with them went onward. But we couldn’t take everyone, so elderly people, old women, mothers, and children were left behind. Some parents started to slit their veins and hang themselves right in front of our eyes. We went further into the forest, while the rest of the people returned to the ghetto. The next day the ghetto was destroyed and everyone who lived there was murdered. Here is how things unfolded from there. We went deeper into the forest. The Germans found out about our escape and surrounded us, but the few weapons we had were enough to break through their small blockade, and we managed to escape. We wound up in the Naliboki Forest, where we split up into small groups. There we once again experienced a great disaster: bandits, of which there were plenty, threw a grenade into one of our dugouts, killing thirty-four people including all our leaders. We split up into small groups and went further into the forest. I ended up in a detachment that, to my misfortune, was led by the same first secretary of the district party committee. When he saw my name in the list of new arrivals, he accused me of being a German spy and ordered my execution. I wasn’t told anything and was taken away with five other fighters, ostensibly on a mission to disarm some hostile people in a nearby village. When we had traveled away from the group, I was given a broken rifle . One of the fighters escorting me turned out to be a decent man. He turned to me and said, “Young lady, please go and find your own people,” and let me go. I only found out what had happened in 1944, after Belorussia was liberated. I met 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 3/9 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Maria Gilmovskaya. Full, unedited interview, 2012 ID NY091.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4wk0x ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN the young man who had essentially saved my life. —And where did you go to find “your own people”? We had split up into groups, and there were some Jewish groups in a certain location. But I didn't do that. I joined a different nearby group, led by Buchkalov, and was assigned to a sabotage company. I was the only woman. Our commander was a young Jewish man from the Volozhin Ghetto named Leon Liberman. His father, mother, and two brothers had all died in the ghetto, but he had joined the partisans. He wasn’t accepted right away, but that’s a long story . So I was in a saboteur squad, which derailed trains filled with soldiers and equipment. This was part of the so-called rail war; we would place mines under the train tracks, destroy the railway, and prevent the Germans from advancing further east. I participated in the derailing of eleven trains filled with soldiers and equipment. I became quite good at planting mines and was often assigned that task. I have several stories about blowing up enemy trains, so if you’d like, I can tell you one of them. I went up to the railroad tracks. I had two others with me for protection, while the rest of the group was waiting about 200 meters away. I had to place the mine on my own, I'm not sure whether my two guards got scared or what . Anyways, they left me alone up there on the railroad track. Two Belarusian policemen dressed in German trench coats were walking along the track. One came up to me, but I didn’t see him approaching because I thought I was being guarded. One of them picked me up by the back of my jacket, saw what I was doing, took away my mine, and started to lead me away. I don’t know if he took pity on me because I was a young girl or what, but he shoved me off the railroad embankment and I rolled down the hill and managed to stay alive.