Skidel Page 3

     After downing a goodly amount of hooch, the police traitors used defenseless Jewish women and children as targets. Policeman Konstantin Mozolevskii shot dozens. The corpses were buried on the spot by the condemned. No one can say how many human bodies the grounds of the ghetto received.
     In 1942 all prisoners of the Skidel ghetto were driven to the central square, where peasant carts stood at the ready. The order was given to load the seized household belongings onto the carts, and anyone unable to move, mainly the elderly and children, also was placed on the carts. Separated groups of columns were cordoned with ropes, which the people farthest out held at lowered hand level. Going outside the rope was considered an attempted escape, and anyone who did so was shot by the convoy. And so thousands of people traveled on their final journey to the Kolbasino Concentration Camp, where a fate like that of the Grodno Jews awaited them. Those who fell on the 40-kilometer road were shot, with the corpses of the unfortunate strewn from Skidel to Kolbasino. Only a few individuals were able to escape the Kolbasino Concentration Camp.
     The Nazis took harsh reprisals against those who fled the ghetto and those who hid Jews. But in many of our people a sense of compassion and mercy held sway over the sense of fear. For example, Anton Yaskelevich, a resident of a farm near the village of Yaskilevichi in Grodnenskii Raion, gave shelter to the family of a Jew who was fleeing the Kolbasino Concentration Camp. Unfortunately, the Nazis found the fugitives, and shot him and his wife. We know that Nikolai Uminskii was shot for concealing a Jewish woman.
     On learning what fate awaited the prisoners of the Kolbasino ghetto, they could not simply resign themselves to their situation. An anti-Nazi organization, formed in the first half of the 1940s and consisting of I. Khmel'nik, L. Lipskii, I. Reizner, K. Lyubich, Ye. Chapnik, and others, began to look for a way out. They distributed reports from Sovinformbyuro [the Soviet Information Bureau], and readied groups for an escape from the ghetto.
     At the very end of 1942 and in 1943 the planned, systematic liquidation of the Kolbasino ghetto began. Thousands were sent to the Auschwitz and Treblinka death camps. The commandant of the Kolbasino camp, the sadist Karl Rintzner, announced to the ghetto prisoners that they could not spend the winter in that camp because of the cold and disease, and they therefore would have to move to a different location where, they were told, normal living and working conditions would be created. This was a diabolical plan that preyed on the naive faith of the emaciated, weakened people that they would somehow survive. The prisoners began to be sent to the death camps. The Nazis drew up a clear-cut procedure for their action. At night the people were driven in a reinforced convoy with German shepherd dogs to the Lososno Railroad Station. Karl Rintzner forced his victims to sing the Jewish song "Idl mitn fild." The sick and elderly who lagged were shot. At the station the prisoners were shoved into freight cars that were packed even before the order came down, and the trains were dispatched on the final journey of those gentle people, who were guilty of nothing. The train arrived at Treblinka the next day, and at Auschwitz after 2-3 days. Many died en route, and anyone who made it all the way was sent to the crematorium straightaway. This is how the tragic journey of the Skidelian Jews ended 55 years ago in 1943.
     Today, paying tribute to the victims of the Nazi genocide, at the initiative of the veteran's organization the City Council of Deputies has commemorated its fellow citizens, among them 2330 of the Jewish nationality, by placing a memorial plaque at the foot of the sculptural monument/obelisk at the communal grave of Soviet soldiers, partisans, and members of the underground who died during the war. A memorial sign will be mounted at the site of the Skidelian ghetto.

     In the photos: the sculptural monument/obelisk where the memorial plaque has been placed; memorial plaque on which the names of war victims are recorded. Photos by the author [signed] Il'ya Borisov, chairman of the Veteran's Organization of the Skidelian City Council of Deputies, Grodnenskii Raion. Il'ya Aleksandrovich Borisov, 36a Shchyogoleva Street, Skidel, Grodnenskii Raion, Grodno Oblast, 231761, Belarus', tel. 99-57-38.

IN MEMORY OF OUR FELLOW COUNTRYMEN WHO DIED ON THE FRONT DURING THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR, WHO VANISHED WITHOUT TRACE, WHO WERE TORTURED IN NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMPS, AND WHO WERE EXECUTED.

Compiled by Linda Hugle
Updated January 2009
Copyright ©1998 Linda Hugle