Mike Levy, a writer from Cambridge, England joined the Israeli group led by Zvi Shefet to Slonim. After visiting Minsk and touring the sites of its tragic Jewish history, the party set off for the three-hour journey to Slonim.
Thursday 24th July 2008
With a first glimpse of the distant town of Slonim, the coach found its way to our first stop: the memorial at Czepelova, a clearing in the middle of the forest around 8km from Slonim. Czepelova feels incredibly remote. It is poorly signposted and not easy to find. What is there? Two memorial stones, each bedecked by plastic bouquets, mark the spot where 10,000 Jewish inhabitants were marched from the ghetto in Slonim to be shot in a mass grave. This took place in November 1941 – Black Friday. Most were marched to the spot, those that couldn’t walk – the old and the sick – were brought to their deaths by truck. Mothers carrying small children or babies were thrown in the River Shchara and drowned. The two memorial stones are flanked on one side by a series of small white posts. These mark out the large rectangular area where the burial pits were located. Mr Shefet led a moving Kaddish service and I thought about the lost members of my wife’s family – especially the two little girls, Blumey and Liebe, who may well have perished in the Aktion. A little white butterfly flew over the site as Mr Shefet recited the prayer and, perhaps romantically, imagined the spirit of the many children who lost their lives in this terrible place.
The visit over, a few tears shed and thoughts of our dear lost families in our minds, we headed back to the town of Slonim. Though I had been here once before (for a day in 1997), I had a real sense of excited anticipation as we entered the suburbs of the very attractive little town on the banks of the Shchara and its canal built by a wealthy Polish/Lithuanian count, Kazimierz Oginski, in the 18th century. Most of the town consists of Soviet era apartment blocks (well maintained and by no means depressing), some very spruce in their recently applied coats of yellow paint. There are some streets still bordered by old wooden houses, memories of a more traditional pre-war town. Rising above everything was the glistening onion dome of the blue and white Orthodox church recently reconstructed (after being demolished in the Soviet era). The hotel Shchara – a spruce three-storey block – lies that the end of what once was the Paradnah and is now a tree-lined boulevard with a model of a Soviet tank at one end, and a statue of Lenin at the other. The hot afternoon was given over to a search for ice creams and a snack – both purchased in the nearby little supermarket where the assistants smiled shyly at my attempts to recall my schoolboy Russian from 45 years before. The locals were very surprised to see visitors to their little town – especially speaking a language they could not identify (Hebrew). The hotel was very clean but lacking frills though each room did have a fridge (but alas no air conditioning to cool the sweltering nights). There was a tiny badly lit bar/restaurant and a small reception booth. The hotel was perfectly comfortable though the Soviet style service was ‘quaint’ to say the least.
The afternoon ended with a meeting (somewhat chaotic) with the local deputy mayor – a smart young man who didn’t seem to know much about us. There were several other town officials at the meeting and a camera crew from a local TV company.
Our party wanted to know what plans, if any, were afoot to restore the Great Synagogue, now in a very sorry state of disrepair. Only the roof has been recently restored with the initiative of Mr Shefet and his family. The deputy mayor, I thought rather caught out by this question, said that there were no funds at present available to repair the building. Some of our party were upset or angered by this response and the atmosphere grew a little tense. I felt that an opportunity to build some bridges was lost.
After dinner in the hotel we strolled down to the pleasant riverside park for a cooling ice cream. We had one interesting encounter in the park with a group of teenagers one of whom spoke good English. The Israelis in the party were keen to ask if they learnt about the Holocaust and the Jews who once lived in the town. They said they did indeed learn about that period and knew that Jews had once lived in Slonim. It seemed to me that some of the Israelis weren’t convinced by this answer and one said: ‘I wonder if they know what their ancestors did to us’ which I thought unnecessarily combative but I understand that emotions are running high in this town of ghosts. A couple of old Slonim chaps were very interested in us and who we were. When they heard we were mostly from Israel, they pointed out the Great Synagogue and shook their heads in sadness. It seemed to me at least that everyone we met was very friendly and happy to engage in conversations (as much as our limited language would allow).
Friday 25th July
Another very hot day: we were met after breakfast (eggs, cream cheese, cream and butter – all very dairy) by Vitali our English-speaking guide. He does speak excellent English (almost like a native) though he has never been to England or the USA. He works mostly for Russian oil companies in India. In his late 40s or early 50s, he knew nothing at all about the Jewish history of Slonim but was a useful source of information about the town since 1945. Mr Shefet led a brisk walking tour of the town that started with the war memorial now standing where the pre-war park was once located. Next to it was, and still is, a fire station tower. There were, recalled Mr Shefet, two fire brigades in town and both were manned mainly by Jews. Each had its own brass band. We passed houses Mr Shefet remembered from his childhood, the homes where his friends once lived, the house which was the local GP’s surgery and a tax office which before the war was Slonim’s modern cinema. We visited a gym belonging to the town’s medical school. From the outside it is obvious that this was a former synagogue – a large one at that. Where the basketball markings are where the bimah once stood. There are no plaques or anything else to show that this once was a Jewish house of prayer, a once thriving centre of communal life. The Jews have disappeared from Slonim and with them any traces of memory. We were introduced by Vitali to the director of the medical school. He was a very friendly young man who was keen to make connections to medics in the West. He seemed very interested in the history of the building and clearly knew nothing of his origins. I took his name and hoped to keep in contact with him. ‘Next time you come to Slonim you must stay with my family’ he insisted. I felt that he might be a useful bridge to restoring the lost history of the Jews here.
Carrying on our walk, we passed the house of Dr Kaplinsky and a building once occupied by the local Nazi gaulieter. We eventually found our way to the town’s Ethnography Museum – an impressive building on two floors. Its director gave us a rather long and dull account of the early history of Slonim – from archaeological finds to remnants of the town’s occupation under Napoleon (en route to his defeat at Moscow). There was some interesting background (translated to us by Vitali) on Count Oginski who in the 18th century built a large theatre or opera house in this small town. Apparently the great opera stars of the period would come all the way to Slonim to perform in the theatre (long since destroyed). Oginski also built the canal that bears his name – a waterway that joined navigable rivers linking the Baltic to the Black Sea.
For us, the highlight of the visit was the second floor exhibition devoted to the Jews of Slonim. There were a few (very few) artefacts on the religious side: (“Please we need more items of Jewish religious culture’ pleaded the director of the museum.) There are many photos of the town’s ghetto fighters including one of Mr Shefet, who I suspect contributed many of the exhibits of the museum. I showed the director and Vitali the photograph of the little girls on a bridge but she couldn’t identify the location. Time was pressing and Zvi urged us on.
After the museum visit our party split into separate groups: some going to smaller shtetls and those whose family ties were in Slonim itself bundled into a small minibus. We were taken to a monastery (I don’t know which and why though it was very interesting) and then to the first of two killing sites. Petralovitch Hill is not easy to find and is poorly signposted. We stopped by a clutch of newish houses and walked up a very pleasant wooded hill to a monument at the very top. It told us in Hebrew that in this place 21,000 Jews perished – murdered in cold blood as part of the final liquidation of the Slonim ghetto in June/July 1942. The stone memorial, erected by Zvi Shefet and his family, is a testament to the remaining Jews who died on this final assault on innocent unarmed civilians. Here too is a Soviet-era monument to the ‘Soviet citizens killed here during the Great Patriotic War’ – no mention, of course, of Jews. Here also at the opposite end of the hilltop to the Jewish memorial in a large cross. This is in memory of the local priest ((is it Father Adam Sztark??)) who lost his own life trying to save Jewish children hidden in a monastery ((is this the one we visited?)) from their fate. Petralovitch Hill is a very moving place. Once again I thought of the two little girls and asked the breeze if this was their last resting place.
Our penultimate journey was to Spakovo ((check spelling)) another remote killing site deep in a sombre but rather beautiful forest near Slonim. It was here that the killing of Jews in Slonim began on the 17th July 1941. On that black day, the Nazis and their local collaborators rounded up 1200 men from the town. They were mostly intellectuals and community leaders. They were shot to death and buried in a mass grave dug by locals under guard. There are in fact three burial pits in this lonely place: some of for captured Soviet soldiers who suffered the same fate. The mass shooting of Jews here was the first such to be carried out by an Einsatzgruppen death squad. Being the pilot, as it were, Berlin was keen to hear how it all went. Spakovo was to become the model for all such massacres by shooting. Mr Shefet told us that German SS headquarters was very pleased with the efficient way the killings had taken place here. It reminded me how little the general public know about these mass shootings that took place before the mechanised killings of the death camps.
Our final destination of that long hot day was the Slonim Burial Ground back in town. This is where the Jews before the war, were buried in the normal way. They died with dignity and with a memorial tablet to mark their existence. Unfortunately no original memorial stones remain today – they were dug up under Soviet orders and used for building materials in the 1960s. What we can see today is a memorial gateway and six commemorative gravestones. One gives the dates of massacres 1941-44, one is a memorial to the partisan fighters, another to the 35,000 Jews who were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. One stone recalls the final destruction of the Slonim ghetto – burnt and destroyed in six days over a two-week period of mayhem. The memorial gravestones and the gateway were designed and organised by the Shefet family.
At the hilltop at the far end of the cemetery is a small memorial, ohel, to the first Slonim Chassidic rabbis of the Weinberg dynasty. Looking out across this windswept cemetery, bare of its original tombstones, it is hard to understand why the Jews of this town have been so comprehensively forgotten. Some in our party believe it is a sign of anti-Semitism; later I speak to a Belarusian who is equally angry about the destruction of so many Jewish cemeteries under the Soviet authorities in the 1960s. Who is right? In my view I think it is so easy to forget history when it is superseded by new traumas and difficulties. I so admire Zvi and his family – it is partly up to us as Jews to remember our lost families and maybe to help local people learn about what and who they have lost.
After a tough and sombre day, the evening was given over to a special Friday night meal at the hotel. The Israelis had brought candles, wine, even challah. We had two shiurim on the week’s Torah portion and some singing. It was all very uplifting and challenging. We heard that some in our party had had some amazing experiences in the shtetls. In one, a teacher and her pupils came out specially to guide our party and find living witnesses to the events before and during the war. The members of our party were clearly moved by their kindness and concern and I found it a very encouraging sign.
My evening ended with a long talk from Mr Shefet about my wife’s cousin Abraham Bublacki, whom Zvi knew as a neighbour. He didn’t remember Abraham’s sisters or family but remembered him as ‘quite communistic and with red hair’.
He told me the full story of Abraham’s escape into the woods to join the partisans and his subsequent death, not at the hands of the Nazis but shot by fellow partisans in a hostage incident. I was rather shaken by this story but somehow being here with Zvi in the town of Slonim, I felt a little closer to that lost family.
After dinner we all strolled to a little café in the park by the Oginski Canal. The locals were very interested in our presence which was generally welcoming if curious. The Israelis were keen to sing Zionist songs (very loudly) and I could understand why they felt they had to do this in that place. For me though, I was still in a thoughtful mood and not really able to join in the carousing. I couldn’t stop thinking about what we had seen and heard and felt on this momentous day. I felt a little closer to the lost souls who had perished in this place and we all felt the importance of re-building the Great Synagogue as an act of cherished memory.