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