Newsgroups: alt.revisionism Subject: Holocaust Almanac: Liquidation of the Minsk Ghetto Followup-To: alt.revisionism Organization: The Nizkor Project http://www.nizkor.org Keywords: Minsk,Novitch,Pechersky Archive/File: holocaust/ussa/minsk minsk.001 Last-Modified: 1993/12/03 "On the eve of the liquidation of the Minsk ghetto, in the summer of 1943, there were 6,000 to 8,000 Jews out of the 75,000 who had lived there at the beginning of the German occupation at the end of June 1941. About 500 of them, skilled workers, were kept in the SS labor camp on Shiroka Street, where an additional 100 Jewish prisoners of war from the Soviet army were employed. Before the deportation more Jews were brought from the ghetto to the Shiroka Street labor camp. On September 18, 1943, a transport with 2,000 Jews letMinsk for Sobibor. First Lieutenant Alexander (Sasha) Pechersky, a prisoner of war who was with this transport, wrote: On September 18, all the Jews were ordered to assemble in the courtyard. It was four o'clock in the morning, still dark. We stood in a line to get the 300 grams of break we received for the journey. The courtyard was full of people, but no noise could be heard. Scared children kept close to their mothers. Commander Wat announced to us: `Soon you will be taken to the station. You are going to Germany; there you will work. Hitler has made it possible to grant life to each Jew who will work honestly. You are going with your families.' The women and children were taken to the station in trucks, the men by foot....We were pushed -- seventy people in a freight car... On the fifth day of travelling, we arrived in the evening at an isolated station. A white sign bore the name: Sobibor.... We were kept in the closed freight cards overnight. On September 23, in the morning, a locomotive pushed the train into the camp.... Tired and hungry we left the cars. Oberscharfuhrer Gomerski shouted: `Cabinetmakers and carpenters without families, forward.' Eighty men, most of them war prisoners, reported. We were rushed into a fenced yard inside a barrack... A Jew from the camp who returned from some work approached up. During the conversation I noticed grey smoke rising in the northwest direction and a sharp smell of burning hovering in the air. I asked: `What is burning there?' `They are burning the bodies of your friends who arrived with you,' the Jew answered. I was shocked...." <1> "The Jews from Minsk, who had witnessed mass extermination in their ghetto, as tens of thousands of them were shot in the vicinity of the city from the beginning of German rule, knew nothing about the existence of death camps. The Minsk ghetto was a remote and isolated ghetto. As part of the Soviet Union, the Jews of Minsk had almost no connections with the Jews in the ghettos in Poland itself. The very existence of the death camps and of Sobibor was a secret to them. They came to Sobibor and filed into the gas chambers without knowing what fate awaited them." <2> (Arad) <1> Alexander Pechersky, "Der Ufshtand in Sobibor" (The Uprising in Sobibor), Moscow, 1946, pp. 6-8 <2> Novitch, Miriam, editor, "Sobibor, Martydom and Revolt", New York 1980, p.112, testimony of Yehuda Lerner Work Cited Arad, Yitzhak. BELZEC, SOBIBOR, TREBLINKA - the Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Indiana University Press, 1987. ISBN 0-253-3429-7
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