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

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