Gleams of Memory

Michael Treister GLEAMS OF MEMORY VISIT TO KGB COVER OF A PARTY-MEMBERSHIP CARD Noah’s Ark Minsk 2013 The printing of this English translation of Gleams of Memory was made possible by Stewart and Chantal Winograd and their sponsors. Contents Historic consultant: Kuzma I. Kozak Heart’s Bitter Memory.................................................................................. 4 The Holocaust and the Jews’ Resistance to the Nazis in Byelorussia ..... 5 Editor: Victor L. Lyaskovsky GLEAMS OF MEMORY ........................................................................... 11 Editor of English Translation: Judy Solway VISIT TO KGB ........................................................................................... 75 Translated from Russian by Victoria Treister COVER OF A PARTY-MEMBERSHIP CARD ...................................... 93 DOCUMENT EXTRACTS ..................................................................... 107 Inventory of Michael Treister’s Publications Used in the Book: ........ 135 [Translator’s notes are in square brackets.] Author’s notes are unbracketed. © 2011 Michael Treister All Rights Reserved. This book has been translated into English with written permission from the author, Michael Treister, and the publisher of the first edition, The Minsk Historical Workshop, represented by Director Kuzma Kozak. The first edition Gleams of Memory. Memoirs, Reflections, Publications was published in 2007 in Minsk, Belarus in Russian and German. For this edition, the chapter “Gleams of Memory” was expanded, and the chapter “Cover of a Par- ty-Membership Card” was added. This is the first English translation of the book, and the translator’s notes have been added to the English translation. 4 Michael Treister Michael Treister 5 Preface force, while there are fewer and fewer eyewitnesses and survivors of the Heart’s Bitter Memory Holocaust in the world. It is exactly for this reason that we must remember everything that It has been 65 years since the Nazis destroyed the people of the happened to the Jews during the Second World War and must pass the Minsk Ghetto. The Minsk Ghetto contained over 100,000 Jewish people. memory of the Holocaust to future generations. It is precisely this pur- It was one of the largest ghettos created by the Nazis in the territories pose that Michael Treister’s memoir serves. of the former Soviet Union. This book was written by Michael Treister, Vice-President of the International Union of Jews, who was a prisoner of President of the International Union of Jews – this ghetto from the first day it was created and who survived due to his Former Nazi Prisoners Academician Efim Gologorsky courage, thirst for life, and many lucky coincidences. This book relates the Minsk Ghetto’s short history and a story of the tragic destinies of its prisoners, who went through all the tortures of hell. Michael Treister was not a passive victim, but one who resisted Author’s Foreword the Nazis. He defended the Motherland and avenged his relatives’ and The Holocaust and the Jews’ Resistance friends’ deaths. This book includes the story of his struggle for survival to the Nazis in Byelorussia in the Minsk Ghetto, as well as his experiences in the partisan detach- ment. The History of mankind is full of tragic massacres, when a whole While hundreds of books have been written on the partisan warfare people was almost totally eliminated, such as the slaughter of Armenians during the Great Patriotic War (World War II), hardly anything is known by Turks, the so-called “social experiments” in Cambodia, the mass po- about its Jewish participants. This memoir helps fill this gap and discred- litical murders in Indonesia and ethnic killings in Rwanda, and, those it the myth that Jews allegedly went to their death obediently, like “a herd which are closer to us, Stalin’s repressions and the Cultural Revolution in to a slaughter-house”. The considerable contribution that Jews made to China. But, even compared to all these outrageous crimes, the Holocaust the fight against the Nazis could have been even greater, had the partisan stands out and occupies a special place in History. command not hindered those Jews who had fled the ghettos from join- The reasons for other massacres were religious hatred, territorial ex- ing partisan detachments. pansion, or fighting for “the happiness of future generations”, but during By profession, Michael Treister is an electrical engineer, but he has the Holocaust Jews were killed only for being Jews, or in other words, undoubted literary talent, distinguished by his passionate and precise just for the mere fact of their existence. style. Such a book cannot fail to rouse the reader’s feelings, as it clearly As Pope John-Paul II said: “The 20th century was a merciless attempt to renders the atmosphere of the place and time that left one no hope of annihilate the Jewish people”. While doing it, the leaders of the Third Reich surviving. did not even try to conceal the real motive for the massacre. Moreover, it was It is necessary to reconstruct the Holocaust’s truthful history in or- declared as one of the fundamental objectives of the Nazi state. der to prevent its recurrence. And it is especially necessary now because It only remains for me to say that some European countries, includ- the events that have taken place in different countries recently make it ing the neutral Switzerland, looked at the tragedy of the Jewish people clear how tenacious the Nazi ideology is. Neo-Nazis and their accom- quite indifferently and that some of them even refused to grant transit plices are trying to “prove” that the tragedy of the Jewish people during visas to Jewish refugees, which could have saved their lives. World War II is obviously exaggerated, if not fabricated. In a number These are the facts that define the Holocaust as an absolutely excep- of countries neo-Fascism and anti-Semitism are breaking out with new tional phenomenon. Its result was the annihilation of six million Jews, 6 Michael Treister Michael Treister 7 which equals 60% of all Jews who lived in Europe before the war. This Another aspect of the Holocaust in Byelorussia was the resistance number does not include those Jews who were killed in action serving in movement of Jews and Jewish participation in the partisan warfare. the Allies’ armies, partisan detachments and Red Army. These losses are The first underground organization was created in the Minsk Ghet- estimated at half a million people. to in August 1941. In order to keep it secret, it consisted of isolated As for Byelorussia, for all the unparalleled nature of the Holo- groups of five to ten people. The main tasks were to help those who caust, the destiny of Byelorussian Jews differs from what we know of were able to fight to flee from the ghetto and to reach the partisan the fate of people in other territories occupied by the Nazis. Between detachments, gather weapons, clothes and medicine, and organize one-fourth and one-third of the pre-war population of Byelorussia the underground printing works. The organizers of the Minsk Ghetto died during the war. That includes 800,000 Jews, almost 97% of the underground were Smolyar, Feldman, Kirkaeshto, Pruslin, Gebelev, Jews who lived in the Byelorussian Republic before the war. In oth- and others. Michael Gebelev was appointed head of the underground er words, only two to three Jews out of every hundred, survived the communist organization operating in the territory of the Minsk occupation. Those who survived managed to flee from ghettos, reach Ghetto in May 1942; in August 1942 he was executed by the Nazis. the partisan regions, and, most important, were admitted to partisan In October 2005 one of the streets in Minsk was named after him. units. There are reasons to believe that only one out of every three to The United Minsk Underground Organization was headed by Issai four people who escaped from the ghetto was admitted by the par- Kazinets, who was also executed in 1942. He was awarded the title of tisans. The rest lie in unidentified graves along the roads leading to Hero of the Soviet Union posthumously. the forests. And there are thousands of such graves. Among those There also were underground organizations in Kopyl, Kletsk, Nes- few who survived, some, mostly kids, were rescued by local people, vizh, Glubokoe, Lakhva, Slonim, Mozyr, Mir, Baranovitchi, and in other risking their own lives and the lives of their families. This was no less ghettos throughout Byelorussia. In many of them Jews offered armed heroic than courage on a battlefield. Yad Veshem, a museum dedicat- resistance to the Nazis. The lists of names of the Jewish participants in ed to preserving the memory of the Holocaust in Jerusalem, awards the partisan warfare in Byelorussia were recently published in We Stood these modest heroes the title of “Righteous among the Nations”. In Shoulder to Shoulder. The lists include the names of those partisans who Byelorussia 700 people have been awarded this title and 50 of them were identified as Jews on the partisans’ documents. However, it is hardly still live. I am sure that there were many more of them, however. This worth mentioning that not everyone was willing to parade his nationali- search started in Byelorussia too late for some of them. ty, because it could mean his death sentence if the document were to get Unlike in other areas, Jews were almost totally annihilated in Bye- into the hands of Germans. lorussia. In Transnistria, Romania, for instance, some prisoners of the Thus, the list of Jewish partisans who lived until Byelorussia was lib- ghettos survived the war. Even some of the prisoner of the frightful con- erated has 7,442 names, including 92 names of the commanders of the centration camps, like Maidanek or Auschwitz, lived until the liberation. partisan brigades, detachments, regiments, and battalions. The second But Byelorussia was already declared Judenfrei, that is, according to the list contains the names of those who were killed in the struggle – 1,023 Nazi definition, “free from Jews”, in October 1943.

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