to Himmler. They were to become slaves for the Germans.*
*FACT: Lebensraum was a plan, conceived by Hitler, in which those deemed nonAryan would be exterminated or expelled to make way for German colonists, while the citizens who remained would be subject to forced Germanization. This information is widely available, from such sources as Bolshevik System of Power in Belarus by M. Kasciuk, Minsk, Publishing house Ekaperspektyva and Belarus; and From Soviet Rule to Nuclear Catastrophe by David R. Marples, New York, 1996 St. Martin’s Press. Much of this information is available at the State Memorial Complex in Khatyn. (Khatyn’s entire population was murdered and the town burned to the ground by the Nazis early in 1941 as part of the policy of genocide.) In addition, much of the information concerning the Belarus genocide is available from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC and its website.
What many people don’t realize is that when Germany first attacked, about 40 percent of Belarusians were Jews. You can say what you like about Stalin, but at least he didn’t select the Jews for special treatment. He was equally cruel to us all. However, by the time the war was over, less than 1 percent of the population of Belarus was Jewish. I don’t have to tell you what happened, but let me fill you in on a few details from someone who lived through it. What I’m about to tell you may sound a bit like a history lesson, but you’ve got to understand what happened to me before I arrived in Canada, in order for you to believe me when I tell you I would sooner die than betray my country.
The Germans attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Six days later on June 28, they entered Minsk and within hours had rounded up some 40,000 men and boys between the ages of 15 and 45. Almost all were Jews, although there were a few Soviet POWs and some non-Jewish civilians who had run afoul of German authority for one reason or another.
For four days and nights the 40,000 were kept herded like cattle in a field surrounded by machine guns and floodlights. No food, no shelter, no water. On the fifth day, all Jewish members of the intelligentsia were ordered to step forward. About 2,000 men did so, believing they would be freed. Instead, they were taken to a nearby woods and shot. Within days the murder of Jews and others, singly or in groups, became a daily occurrence.
In late July the Germans established a ghetto in the northwestern part of Minsk into which were immediately crowded some 80,000 people. For awhile some of the Jews were forced to work in slave labour camps and factories. Living conditions were unspeakable. Each person was allotted 1.5 square metres of living space. Children none. The ghetto was surrounded by thick rows of barbed wire with watchtowers erected at strategic locations. Anyone approaching the wire was shot on sight.
Tens of thousands of people lived among bombed-out ruins with almost no hygienic facilities and little, if any, food. Disease was rampant, as was torture and mass murder.
Thousands froze or starved to death. On the July 21, 1941, a group of 45 Jews were roped together and 30 Russian prisoners were ordered to bury them alive. The Russians refused, so all were shot.*
*FACT: This is well documented. Source: US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Himmler himself came to Minsk on August 15, 1941 to watch as 100 Jews were shot. We now know that he was so sickened by the sight he ordered that more efficient and humane methods of solving the “Jewish problem” be devised. More humane, not for the Jews, but for those who had to do the killing! It was from that little bout of nausea that the idea of the gas chambers was born.
It wasn’t just the Jews; I watched with unremitting horror and despair one frighteningly cold night in January, 1942 as 6,000 Russian POWs were marched out of the ghetto without coats or hats, ordered to lie down on the side of the road, and not to move. They lay there until they froze to death.*
*FACT: The accounts concerning Russian POWs are accurate. According to Nazi statistics, between the occupation of Minsk and February 1, 1943, 86,623 Jews were killed in the ghetto. Source: US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Yes, I said, I saw this atrocity because I was a “guest” of the Minsk Ghetto, then the nearby Opera House slave labour camp from early August of 1941 until the following March. But I won’t burden you with more details of the brutality of which men are capable. Similar atrocities have been well documented in other ghettos, concentration camps, and extermination camps.
Most historians agree that of the well over 100,000 people forced into the Minsk Ghetto, including many transported from Poland and Germany, only a tiny handful were still alive when Minsk was liberated by the Red Army on July 4, 1944. As is only too typical, your wonderful “highly civilized” and ever “compassionate” citizens of the “morally superior” West have paid little, if any, attention to our agony. We were after all, according to Hitler, and I suspect many of you, a relatively inferior Slavic race not really worthy of headlines.
About 10,000 of us did manage to escape, myself included, forming numerous partisan groups whose members killed far more Germans and destroyed a great deal more military equipment, infrastructure and industrial capacity than anything you saw from that pitiful so-called resistance movement in France. Research it. You’ll see what I say is true. In Belarus we were fighting for our very existence. The French, when not jumping into bed with the Nazis or rounding up truckloads of Jews for the ovens, were mostly concerned with settling into some well-aged fromage and a robust Bordeaux. I can tell you this. We didn’t have to chop any hair from the heads of our women when the “supermen” finally left town!
What you’ll find, if you check, is something that to this day makes me very proud of my Belarusian heritage. Once again allow me to give you just a bit more background of what I lived through and the real story of who I am and why I came to Canada.
The history books will tell you that more than 1,000 various partisan groups were formed in Belarus with more than 400,000 of us, including thousands of women, fighting the Nazis. Believe it or not, the records, which by the way are available from the Holocaust Museum in Washington, show that we killed or incapacitated more than half a million German soldiers and blew up 34 armored battle trains, 29 railway stations, 948 military headquarters and destroyed more than 18,000 cars and trucks being used by the Nazis. No other occupied country fought the Germans as hard or as successfully.* Mind you, it was a matter of life or death for us. The Nazis killed many of my fellow partisans and at least a million other Belarusians.
*FACT: Source: US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
It was pure luck and accidental heroism that saved me!
It’s just one of the reasons I have to shake my head with anger and sadness when I read and hear the stories about my “betrayal.” Do you think I would betray my country to help the West whose leaders essentially just stood by while all of this was happening? Not on your life!
And let me tell you something else. There is plenty of evidence that Churchill, Roosevelt and, yes, even your prime minister of the day, Mackenzie King, knew very well what was going on. They understood perfectly well that Hitler planned the greatest act of genocide in the history of the world, but not only did they do nothing, they kept silent at a time when news of what was happening might very well have prompted the United States to enter the war much sooner and thus shorten the conflict and save the lives of millions.*
*FACT: The idea that the Allies knew Germany’s plans for the Jews and the entire Eastern Bloc is very controversial. However, Richard Breitman, Professor, Ph.D., Harvard, author of five books detailing the history of the Holocaust and now director of historical research for the US government agency called Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group, claims that 282 pages of radio intercepts from SS and police commanders in Belarus and Ukraine, taken with other documents, establish that the British knew that Jews were being targeted for atrocities as early as September 1941. This would be more than a year before Britain or the United States publicly
