Novogrudok: Jews? What Jews?

Novogrudok was a thriving Jewish cultural centre throughout the 19th Century. My great-great-grandparents, Leizer and Dvosya Ilyatovich, brought their family up there, but in 1863 they moved to the larger town of Lida with their three youngest children, including my great-grandfather Shlema-Dovid, who at 5 years old was the youngest.

Leizer and Dvosya had 6 children, possibly more; we do not know what became of any of them, apart of course from Shlema-Dovid (and not much about him). Did any of them stay in Novogrudok?

Neither do we know whether Leizer or Dvosya had any brothers or sisters; they most probably did, as most families at that time had at least four or five children. So we do not know whether there were any of our family who stayed in Novogrudok, and we are most unlikely ever to find out. I have not as yet been able to find any reference to the name Ilyatovich there, although there were certainly several families in Lida.

None of us had previously heard of the town, and until we saw the results of the research we had commissioned we certainly had no idea that we had family from there. Nor did we know what had happened there during the Nazi Occupation in the Second World War.

We soon found out that we were not the only ones who knew nothing. We visited the town museum, and the curator Tamara Vershitskaya told us how she herself had found out.

Around 1990, as the Soviet Union was beginning to open up, she was contacted by an Englishman called Jack Kagan. Jack had been born in Novogrudok, and was 12 when the Germans invaded. He somehow survived in the Forced Labour Camp the Germans set up in the town until, aged 13, he was one of the last remaining Jewish prisoners. He had lost all his immediate family: his mother and sister, who had been taken out and shot in one of the repeated massacres the Germans carried out in the town; and his father, who had been sent to another Concentration Camp where he too perished.

Starving and desperate, over several months the prisoners managed to dig a tunnel over 200 metres long, and during one night in September 1943 they made their bid to escape to the forests; some 200 got out, the only remaining Jews from a population of over 5000. Jack was one of a hundred or so that managed to link up with the Bielski partisan group, and he stayed with them until the end of the War. Now, 45 years later, he wanted to do what he could to honour the memory of those that had been killed.

It was truly shocking to hear Tamara say that, by the time she started to work at the museum, the presence of a Jewish population in the town had completely disappeared from the popular memory. When Jack enquired about whether there was a memorial to the tunnel escape she was nonplussed:

"Tunnel? What tunnel?"
"The one the Jewish prisoners escaped through."
"Jews? What Jews?"

Prior to the War, Jews had formed a substantial proportion of the town's population; now, two generations later, even the curator of the local museum did not know of their existence. Tamara put out a call in the local newspaper, and got over 20 replies that confirmed Jack's account. They have now established a Jewish History section in the museum, and with the agreement of the local authorities have placed memorials in the town to acknowledge the scale of the Holocaust there. She took us to see the courthouse, which the Nazis used to house the Labour Camp. We saw the entrance to the tunnel, under one of the bunks; the line it took is traced by stones across the yard.

You stand there and try to picture the tunnel a few feet under you, 65cm x 65cm in section, with two hundred people crawling through one after the other on their bellies, in the middle of the night, in total silence, not knowing what awaited them at the other end.

As we came away, we could not help wondering whether any of 'our' Ilyatovichs had been caught up in these terrible events.

See individual photos or a slideshow

Read Jack Kagan's account
Hear Jack's testimony on life in the town, and his experiences during the war

Novogrudek: the history of a Jewish shtetl

Streshin - the shtetl of the Levins

Thu 26 May

Before we started this trip none of us had even heard of Streshin. Bella, our guide and a director of the Belarus Jewish Heritage Research Group, had heard of the village, and knew vaguely where it was, but had never been there and knew no details. It is, literally, not on some maps. And yet this turned out to be, for me at least, the most moving visit of the whole trip.

Streshin is a small village on a hill on a bend in the Dniepr, a major river that goes south to Kiev and comes out into the Black Sea at Odessa. We ended our tour there because the research had told us that this was where our Great-grandmother Mikhlya Levin - and all her brothers and sisters - had been born. Mikhlya was born in 1858, her brother Leib in 1861, and in 1867 their father Berko obtained permission to move his family to the town of Gomel, some 80km away to the south, down the Dniepr.

On the way to the village we stopped to pay our respects - once again - at two mass graves, just outside the town of Zhlobin. One of them was for 400 Jews from the village of Streshin, shot on the spot and buried in a pit, during the Nazi occupation in 1942. So our visit started on an unavoidably sombre note.

The mass grave 20km from Streshin

Once in Streshin we met the mayor, and had a chat, and tea and sandwiches. It soon became clear that we were the first people ever to visit the village in search of its - and our own - Jewish heritage.

 Tea with the mayor

The population now numbers no more than a couple of hundred at the most, and was probably no more than a thousand or so at its highest, between the World Wars. There is a little park in front of the town hall, which had been the market-place in the old days, when Streshin was the local agricultural centre.

We tried to imagine Mikhlya and Leib, and all the little Levins, playing in the main street, the market square, and the castle ruins. I swear I half-saw a swish of little skirts disappearing round a corner, and heard a mother's voice calling the children back for dinner, in Yiddish of course . . .

 150 years ago our great-grandmother may have lived in this street

The mayor had arranged a meeting for us with the village's oldest inhabitant, 92 year-old Maria. We asked a stream of questions, which Bella conveyed to her in Belarussian, and Maria came out with a host of recollections of life in the 1920s and 30s that contained many surprises for the mayor and even for her own son. There had been a Jewish majority in the population, and Maria told us that relations between Jews and non-Jews were good on the whole, to the extent that many non-Jews spoke Yiddish rather than Russian in conversation with Jews.

Maria remembers

She recalled the day the Nazis rounded up all the Jews and marched them off; Maria, then around 20 years old, tried to give a friend some food for the journey, but the Nazis would not allow any contact. No-one knew where they were being taken. We, of course, had just seen where they ended up.

The most poignant moment for us was when we asked if she remembered the surnames of any of the Jewish people in the village. Were there any Levins, for instance? "Ach, Goldring, Rivkin, Levin - there were lots of them . . . ".

Berko Levin had taken his family to Gomel, but he had a brother who had at least three sons, who may well have stayed in the village and carried the name on through the generations. Were any of the Levins Maria knew in the 1920s and 30s relatives of ours? Were any of them amongst those marched off by the Germans that fateful day in 1942? Were any of them buried in the pit we had stood beside a few hours earlier?

Bella made a couple of quick phone calls as we walked back to the car, and told us that according to Russian state archives in Moscow, over 200 Jews had been killed in the village, in addition to those buried in the mass grave in Zhlobin.

Now, as a direct consequence of our visit, the Jewish Heritage Research Group will send researchers to Streshin, and will try to interview and record anyone with memories of that period who is willing to speak with them. They hope to set up a commemorative plaque to honour the dead in a suitable place in the village, and also to mark the site of the former Jewish cemetery, now slipping under the waters of the Dniepr.

In this way they hope to rescue for future generations at least some small part of the heritage of a shtetl that had been a quiet centre of Jewish life for two centuries or more, only to be wiped out, like so many others, in the blink of an eye.

See photos: Zhlobin - Streshin

Meeting the Ilitovitches of Gomel

Wed 25 May

Today we saw some of 'our' Gomel with Yevgeny and Vitaly, who together with Vitaly's wife Yelena and son Dmitry are the only known members of the Ilitovitch family still living in the town. There may possibly be Levins here but we have not managed to find traces of any yet.

Vitaly and Evgeny - the last Ilitovitches in Gomel?

Yevgeny's mother Riva (Revekka) - Vitaly's grandmother - was one of the daughters of Shmuil Ilitovitch and Hodel Faigin; Shmuil was the older brother of Zlata (Sarah) - my grandmother - and Myer, the grandfather of Ralph and Mark. Dan's mother Raya (Ruth) was the eldest of Shmuil and Hodel's children - so, if you've followed us this far, Yevgeny is a first cousin to Dan, and second cousin to Ralph, Mark and me; Vitaly is a second cousin to Dan, and third cousin to the rest of us. So far as we're concerned, we're all cousins.

Ilitovitch re-United: grandsons of Zlata (myself), Shmuil (Dan, Evgeny), Myer (Mark, Ralph), and great-grandson of Shmuil (Vitaly)

Shmuil and Hodel had 6 children: Raya, Sheldon (we don't know his Jewish name at the moment), Leib (Leonard), Riva, Mikhlya and Shmuil. There were also 2 more who died in childhood. Shmuil died in 1919, and we think that possibly baby Shmuil was born after he died, and may have been named for him.

When Hodel died in 1921, Hodel's brother Aron took charge of the children. In 1923 he emigrated to America, taking the 3 oldest children with him, and placing the 3 youngest in an orphanage in Gomel. We presume that Aron Faigin signed the papers for the orphanage, because throughout their lives Riva and Mikhlya were known by the patronymic 'Aronovna' - 'daughter of Aron'. We have just visited Riva's grave with Yevgeny and Vitaly; 'Aronovna' is inscribed on her tombstone.

Riva (Rebecca) was the daughter of Shmuil, but throughout her life bore the patronymic 'Aronovna'

Now, thanks to the contacts we have managed to establish between cousins on either side of the Atlantic, we were able to explain to Yevgeny and Vitaly how these tragic and complicated circumstances came about. It was a very affecting moment, and I have now been in this position four times - with Yevgeny yesterday and Vitaly today, with Yevgeny's brother Sasha in Israel, and with Mikhlya's grandson Boris, now in London, who came with us on our Jewish East End walk a while back. (Sasha unfortunately died a few months ago after a long illness.)

We met at 11, and parted at 6. Yevgeny and Vitaly speak no English, and we speak no Russian; alright, I confess, I speak 6 words, badly - I haven't looked at the language for 45 years. However Bella, our guide and interpreter, somehow managed to take in all the complexities and keep the conversation going between all six of us for seven hours solid, making no small contribution herself.

Bella at work

We gave Yevgeny and Vitaly an album of photos of the various strands of the Ilitovitch clan; hopefully they will be able to make sense of the captions, which I wrote in English, of course. The photos are available online - I suggest you choose slow or medium speed, and full-screen. Yevgeny gave us a stack of photos, which we will scan and return to him by some devious route, as no-one seems to trust the Belarus postal system . . .

Towards the end of an extended lunch at a traditional Belarus restaurant, they asked how many relatives we had. When Ralph said "hundreds" (he actually said 1200, but let's not exaggerate), their jaws dropped in amazement. We have discovered relatives in the place our grandparents left over 100 years ago, and they - whose grandparents stayed - have discovered that they have relatives literally all over the world. If the greetings in the morning were emotional, the partings in the afternoon were doubly, trebly so.

There is much more to tell of today's visit, of synagogues and cemeteries, war and evacuation, pogroms and partisans, Jewish family life in the Soviet Union, and of course - overshadowing everything - the holocaust. But we'll leave that for another day.

See photos: Gomel

Destination Gomel

Tue 24 May

Gomel - myth or reality?

We had long thought that our Iliatovitch/Gitovitch family came from Gomel. Parents and grandparents spoke of it - though not very often - and the town took on something of a mythical character for us. So this journey was originally planned as a visit to Gomel. We even hoped to fly straight there, maybe via the Belarus capital Minsk. Fortunately we didn't manage to sort out a route, as the research has led us to a succession of other places across the west and south of the country.

Mikhlya Levin's family was from Streshin, a shtetl some 50km from Gomel. Dovid Iliatovitch was from Lida, in the north-west, and all their children were born there. At some point after 1891 they moved to Gomel, possibly after the death of Dovid, presumably so that Mikhlya could be nearer to her own family, including brother Leib (Leibisch).

We now know that 2 of Mikhlya and Leib's brothers, Itzka and Aron, both had children born in Gomel, between 1890 and 1907. Will we find any trace of them, or their descendants?

The Shraibmans of Pinsk

Mon 23 May

This afternoon I have seen the house where my grandfather Moshe Shraibman's brother Dovid was living with his wife Braina between 1912 and 1932. We were told the house was well-known as the 'Shraibman house', and served as a house of prayer as well as a home - it was probably a 'shtibl', an informal synagogue in a private house.  We know that Moshe's father Nevach (Noah) was a teacher of some sort - did he teach here? Did he live here? Did Moshe live here?

The 'Shraibman House' in Pinsk

We also went to a couple of other streets with family connections, including where Moshe's brother Menachem was living in 1912 - we don't know exactly where in the street the house was, but it seems to have been known as 'the coppersmith's house'. Was he a coppersmith?

We then went to see the site of the old Jewish Cemetery, where my Great-grandmother - Moshe's mother Shprintza - and at least two other family members are buried. The cemetery alas is no longer to be seen. It has been re-purposed, according to a local law that allows the authorities to re-designate burial land that has not been in use for a certain number of years. As our guide Bella so delicately put it, "they've built a kindergarten on the bones of Jews". Including those of Shprintza, Chaim, and Chana-Braina Shraibman.

The kindergarten in Pinsk - formerly the Jewish cemetery, where my great-grandmother and other Shraibmans are buried

I should point out that none of us knew of the existence of any of the people mentioned here until a week ago, when we received the research report from the Belarus Jewish Heritage Research Group. Now some of them are beginning to take on form and substance for us as we learn more about them and their lives.

We were met by Yosef Liberman, the President of the Pinsk Jewish Community, who took us round the Jewish area of Pinsk, showing us amongst other things a study group in a synagogue (very informal!) and the community's mikvah (ritual baths), which are apparently still in regular use.

Yosif also gave us a chilling document, listing the names of 16 Pinsk Shraibmans known to have been victims of the Holocaust. Up to 4 of the names may correspond to family members who appear in our research report - in other words, they could be our Shraibmans. However the reports are necessarily incomplete, and my feeling is that there may well be many more.

Yosif asked if we could help one of his projects by providing photographs of Shraibmans in emigration for an exhibition he is planning. I think I could probably find one or two for him.

See photos: Pinsk

Where were they from?

Sun 22 May

Yesterday and today we have been in Lida, where my Grandmother Zlata (Sarah) was born in 1886, and Novogrudok, where her father Shlema-Dovid was born in 1858. His father, Leizer Iliatovitch, obtained permission from the authorities to move his family to Lida in 1863. Both towns had flourishing Jewish populations in the mid-19th century.

The records we have found show that Shmuil, the son of Shlema-Dovid and Mikhlya Levin, was born in Lida in 1881, and their last son known to us, Hirsch (Harry), was also born there, in 1891. In between came Zlata and Myer, though we have not found the records for them.

Granny was born in Lida, not Gomel

Shlema-Dovid must have died at some time between 1891 and 1906, as in that year Mikhlya re-married. Her new husband was Abram-Lieb Shushan, aged 60, and they married in Gomel; she was 48. Presumably he died within a few years of the wedding, as by 1911 we know she was living in London with her sons Myer and Harry.

Mikhlya's family, meanwhile, were from a small shtetl near Gomel called Streshin. Her father Berka got permission to move his family to Gomel in 1867, by which time he had 6 children, of whom Mikhlya was the third. At some point Mikhlya from Gomel met Shlema-Dovid from Lida, but there is no information about their marriage. As suggested above, it appears that all their children were born in Lida. We will be in Gomel on Tuesday and Wednesday, and hope to visit Streshin on Thursday.

Tomorrow (Monday) we go to Pinsk, to chase up my grandfather, Moshe Shraibman.

See photos: Lida - Novogrudok

Receiving the reports

Belarus trip: Day 1
Fri 20 May

Straight from the airport to Minsk, and the office of the Jewish Heritage Research Group, where we met Yuri, who has been leading the research and organising the visit for us.

He handed us the reports on the Iliatovitch and Levin families, which had only just been given to him by the genealogist. He had not even had a chance to glance through them before we arrived, so all five of us - Ralph, Mark, Dan, myself and Yuri - were looking at them for the first time, trying to make sense of them.

Yuri has just received the reports from his researchers.

A number of things struck us as we worked our way through the material. First - they definitely have found the right people! Second, not all our direct ancestors appear in the records. This can be quite disconcerting - where's my Granny? - but is understandable when you consider that this area has been through a never-ending succession of wars and revolutions over the last 150 years, and has been ruled or occupied by the Tsarist Empire, Germany, Poland and the Soviet Union, before becoming an independent state in 1992. And of course most of the Jewish communities were wiped out in the Holocaust. So to hear that many records are missing is not such a surprise.

Nevertheless the reports are indeed full of surprises. My Great-grandfather, for instance - also of many of you - is named throughout as 'Shlema-Dovid' Iliatovitch. He appears to have had 5 brothers and sisters, but there is no record, here at least, of any descendants for any of them.

Mikhlya Levin, my Great-grandmother, was also one of 6 siblings, of whom two are recorded with children. Their son Shmuil Iliatovitch and his wife 'Goda' (Hodel to us) had a further 2 children whose names were previously unknown to us, and who must have died young.

The family trees reconstructed for both the Iliatovitch and Levin families go back to just before the turn of the 19th century. So there's quite a bit of history to explore!