Escape from hell

Four months of preparation, light from a police spotlight: the story of a unique escape

In September 1943, 227 prisoners of the Novogrudok ghetto escaped through a tunnel dug underground. It was the largest and most successful escape from a place of forced detention of civilians in Nazi-occupied European territory.

Model of Novogrudok ghetto

During the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945, the Nazis created 56 ghettos in Grodno Region. In places of forced detention, at least 105,000 people were shot and more than 26,000 people were deported to death camps in Germany and other countries during the three years of occupation. 
As part of the investigation into the criminal case of the genocide of the Belarusian people during the Great Patriotic War, initiated by the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Republic of Belarus, another 31 previously unknown places of forced detention of women, children and the elderly were discovered on the territory of Belarus. 
Before the war, Novogrudok was an important Jewish centre with a population of 20,000 people, of whom more than half (63 percent) were Jews. They worked as teachers, doctors, craftsmen…

Execution to the strains of Strauss waltz 

After occupying the city on July 4th, 1941, the Nazis’ first act was to create a special administrative body — a Judenrat (‘Jewish council’) — and issue an order obliging all Jews aged 14 to 60 to work for the needs of Hitler’s Germany.
The first demonstrative execution in the city took place 22 days after the start of the occupation. It was district commissioner Traub’s response to a request from local residents of Jewish origin to be allowed not to work on Saturdays. One hundred Jews were driven to the central square, and every second one was shot to death to the strains of a Strauss waltz.
Soon the Nazis set up two ghettos — on Peresetskaya and Kopylskaya (now Minskaya) streets. Each person had just over half a metre of space. The prisoners were housed on three-tiered bunks. Only those who worked were given 150g of ersatz bread a day. The rest received half-rotten potatoes and swedes.

None of these barefoot boys will ever become adults, go to school, get married or become fathers… Photo from 1937–1939.

They dug with their hands, spoons, nails

Tuvia Bielski, the eldest of the Bielski brothers, even before the Germans came to the town, gathered the family council, at which a unanimous decision was made: they must not go to the ghetto, they must hide in the forest. At that time, there were no thoughts of active armed resistance to the fascists; there was only a desire to save their relatives. Later, in the vicinity of Novogrudok, the Bielski brothers began to build dugouts and establish a way of life. Jews from all over the district learned that there was a camp in the forest. This is how a Jewish partisan detachment appeared, which gave shelter to those fleeing from death. 
The commander of the detachment, Tuvia Bielski, realising the full tragedy of the situation in the ghetto, sent his Belarusian friend Kostya Kozlovsky to Novogrudok with a note: ‘Go to the forest. You can live in the forest. I do not promise that you will stay alive. But if you die, you will die as people’. 
Thus, a decision was made in the ghetto to secretly dig a tunnel. An organisational committee was created, and the chairman of the Judenrat, Daniel Ostashinsky, participated in the development of the escape plan. It took approximately four months to build the saving exit from hell, which was more than 200m long. 
To be able to breathe underground, the men drilled holes outwards through the earthen walls every 10m and inserted pieces of pipe. And to understand the direction in which they were digging, they pushed sticks marked with paint into these pipes and looked from the attic. 
The following fact is also striking: the electricians managed to run electricity underground — powered from the police spotlight. Before the escape, they organised several test shutdowns of the street lighting to see how quickly the guards would react and fix the fault.
On the night of September 26th, even those who had no intention of escaping went down into the tunnel. It was necessary to crawl 200m in a narrow space of 70 by 70cm. The most terrifying thing was to fall behind the person in front of you, so people crawled, wearing their hands and knees, wrapped in rags, to the point of bleeding.
13-year-old Idel Kagan could not walk. A few months before the tunnel construction began the boy had tried to escape from the ghetto, lay in a field for three days and froze his toes. He was returned to the ghetto, but not shot, as they apparently considered that he would not survive anyway. A dentist acquaintance had to amputate several of his toes. Idel lay without getting up, but when the time came to escape, he managed to overcome the path through the tunnel, survive the raids and find a partisan detachment.
The escape was organised so precisely that within an hour there was no one left in the barracks. The guards who arrived later discovered the entrance to the tunnel… The next day they were arrested and sent to a concentration camp.

   

Jerusalem in the woods  

There were 227 of those who managed to escape from the ghetto through the tunnel, and more than 1,300 Jews who managed to survive and live until the end of the war thanks to the Jewish partisan detachment of the Bielski brothers. The detachment was often called the ‘Jerusalem in the woods’.
In the forest family camp, they set up workshops, a bakery, laundry, hospital and school, and even built a synagogue. The National Archives contain documents with correspondence from commanders of partisan detachments with Tuvia Bielski — with requests to repair watches, send a shoemaker or doctor, make rifle butts, shoe a horse… 
A combat group in the detachment consisted of 150 people. The fighters, together with other detachments, participated in operations — the National Archives hold documents confirming these facts. Tuvia Bielski’s detachment existed until July 1944, when Novogrudok Region was liberated from the Germans during Operation Bagration. The brothers lined up their people in columns and led them out of the forest into the city. One of the brothers, Asael Bielski, went to the front with the Red Army. He died shortly before the end of the war.
In 2019, near the Museum of Jewish Resistance established in Novogrudok in 2007, a Wall of Remembrance was opened, which bears the names of those whose spirit and will to freedom were not broken by the Nazis.

In museum hall

By Galina Trofimenko

Photos by Olga Pisar and from the archive of the Novogrudok Museum of History and Local Lore