Posted: 14.04.2022 10:00:00

Real genocide

Victims of Nazism, witnesses of those crimes share inconceivable things. They tell about crimes against humanity that have no statute of limitations...

Last year, the Prosecutor General’s Office opened a criminal case on the fact of the genocide of the Belarusian people during the Great Patriotic War and the post-war period. This summer, for the first time, on June 22nd, we will mark a renewed memorable date — the National Remembrance Day of the Victims of the Great Patriotic War and the Genocide of the Belarusian People for the first time. This important decision, established by a presidential decree, was made precisely so that we do not forget our history. Moreover, during the investigation, hundreds, thousands of new cases of atrocities committed on Belarusian land were discovered. Declassified archival documents, the remains of civilians buried in mass graves, which are still found throughout the country today, have become ‘living proof’ of these very facts. Premiere of the joint project of the Belarus Segodnya Publishing House and the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Republic of Belarus “A car arrived, a dump truck, we didn’t see such trucks before... We looked at the lifting body of the dump truck... There were many children — and when it was unloaded, the whole mountain appeared. Some of them moved their little fingers, hands... We lived in constant atrocity all this time.” It was already the third concentration camp in the open air, in which a young prisoner from the Zhlobin Region tried to survive.

Memories of horrifying images 

By telling the prosecutor about what happened, the witness in the criminal case on the genocide seems to be experiencing those horrors again, “They arrived at night, our village was shelled. Nobody slept, people were suited and booted. There were many people in the village and in our house. People were coming from Proskurni and Oktyabr villages... Everyone was rounded up here... The Germans broke into the house, my aunt with a small child in her arms was immediately shot dead. She had six small children.”
Sick people lay in the cellar of another house. The cellar was just filled with people. The Germans looked and threw a grenade there... 
Now there is a cross in that place. The witness also spoke about the houses of her native village Bolshie Rogi burned right in front of her, and about how the surviving villagers were driven by facists with dogs to Zhlobin, “The square was surrounded by barbed wire. We spent a night under the open sky. In the morning the Germans came and began to sort people. Able-bodied and young people — in one direction... Children were pulled from their mothers hands and thrown just straight... It was... A bunch of children were in the snow. The children were screaming there, and the mothers were screaming here, tearing their hair out… An empty freight train was already standing on the tracks, and we were all rounded up to the train. The doors were closed. And we did not know where they took us. Then they ‘unloaded’ us. In the same way. People just fell out of the train.”
The witness continues, “This crowd, like a herd of animals, was herded into an area fenced with wire. Then we were rounded up again, we walked through the mud. Someone walked, someone fell, someone was killed... It’s too terrifying to imagine. Then we were transferred to the third camp. There was a lot of snow and water. My mother had five of us. Mom broke off a young pine tree and put us on this hummock. Thus, people sat on the bumps in this swamp. There were watch towers around, Germans with machine guns and dogs. It went like this for probably over a week. It was raining and sleet. I remember that my mother stretched some kind of blanket over us... I remember how many people, how many children lay dead there.”


One morning, she says, they woke up, and it was too quiet in the camp, “There were no Germans on the watch towers, and the Russian soldiers arrived! Good Lord, there were so many tears, so many joyful cries! We still did not believe that it was us who had been liberated. We were told that those who can walk, should go. They said to walk the main road and do not touch anything, because it is mined. There were crowds of people. They were walking with joy — they were free! We came to Ozarichi village. It was destroyed too, there was no place to sit on. My mother found a cellar with some frozen potatoes. She found a bunch of straw, made a bed, so we sat there until the morning. In the morning they gave us crackers — so, they fed us.”

61899

This number was engraved on the hand of a child, concentration camp prisoner Yekaterina Dyatlovich (Holubeva). The same number was on a wooden plate, which the girl, like other captives of the Nazis, had to constantly wear on her chest. 
“I don’t remember the beginning of the war. I remember it from the time when we lived in a dugout in the forest, our village was completely burned down. My mother had six children. Three girls and three boys. The oldest was then 10 years old, the youngest was a year old.
When the partisans retreated, the Germans began to drive us out of the forest. We walked in columns. I don’t remember how long we walked. We were herded to a concentration camp in Vitebsk, it was called the Fifth Regiment (Pyatyy polk). They slept there on the ground under the open sky. The barbed wire was around, we were guarded by the Germans with dogs,” says a witness in the Yekaterina Dyatlovich case. 


Then people were divided into groups. They were loaded into wagons (the documents say that it was August 13th, 1942) and they were just taken, “It was a long drive... Then there was the Auschwitz concentration camp. They immediately registered us: they tagged us with numbers. The mothers went first, then the children. I have a number on my left hand — 61899. This is my number. From that time on, we had no last name, no first name, nothing. They fastened boards with the same numbers on us. 
I remember a ditch around us, an iron fence, and barbed wire on top. The elders said that it is electrified. It was done so that no one could escape... I was in the 27th, 26th and 25th barracks. There were some tests in each of them. For example, in the 27th barrack, they took blood from us. Then they said that many wounded soldiers had arrived and that is why they need our blood. Experiments were carried out in another barrack, I also was a test subject in drug trials... When I had to be treated for tuberculosis of both kidneys, the body could no longer take any antibiotics. This was a result of these tests in the concentration camp.”

“My brother fell ill — that’s why he was sent to the crematorium. The crematorium worked 24 hours daily in the concentration camp”

Yekaterina Dyatlovich spoke about the biggest fear of the little prisoners: when in the mornings ‘this cart drove around the barracks’. She told this episode coldly, just like a tongue twister, so as not to burst into tears, “My younger brother Lenya fell ill, so they took him away, burned him in the crematorium... Each time, this cart, this overseer, ‘drove around the barracks’. Most of them were Poles, there were also Germans. However, I have to tell you: where there were the Germans, it was less harsh and there were not so many beatings. On the contrary, the Poles abused the children very much, they were severely beaten.


And in the morning these Poles drove along the aisles between the bunk beds... My brother fell ill, the Pole saw him when he was lying. She grabbed his legs and put him in this carriage. Sick children or those left without parental care shared the same fate. Everyone was put into this carriage and taken to the crematorium. The crematorium worked 24 hours daily in the concentration camp... When the wind was from the other side, it was impossible to breathe in the barracks. Therefore, they took Lenya and another brother, Volodya. He got sick too.”
In 1943, the witness continues, they were told that their clothes were worn out, they would give them new ones, and then they were taken to some room, “They said that we have to choose clothes here. Mothers were sent in the other direction. We didn’t see them again. If you only knew what the scream was! What a howl!.. So many years have passed. I am already 83 years old, although, even now these terrible cries are in my head... They burned my mother in the crematorium and I don’t remember her face...”

Human shield

More than 546 thousand people were exterminated in the Trostenets death zone.
Nazi concentration camps were one of the main places of extermination of the Belarusian people. Trostenets is the largest camp in Belarus. Everything is intertwined here: the destruction of the civilian population and prisoners of war, pre-planned murder and spontaneous executions of people of different nationalities and religions.
Ozarichi is a complex of three camps located on the territory of the modern Kalinkovichi district. The ‘incapacitated residents’ of the front line were driven there, mainly the elderly, women and children.
Torture and executions have been widely practiced in the camps, prisoners were starved, and centres of typhus infection appeared.
In a short period, more than 20 thousand people died out of a total of 50 thousand prisoners rounded up in Ozarichi.
We will present you with many other facts of crimes, evidence that the genocide, the cruelty of the Germans is part of the fascist ideology. The cruel desire of some to be superior to others.
So, what is happening today? In fact, the aggressors pursue the same goals. Only the methods of warfare have changed, it has become a hybrid one.

By Lyudmila Gladkaya