Professor Breitman says, “the British knew a lot about the shootings in the Soviet Union and had concluded that it was perfectly obvious that the Nazis were executing every Jew they could get their hands on.” Source: Dr. Breitman’s book Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew, available from the US Holocaust Museum, Washington. While Dr. Breitman doesn’t state this, other historians suspect the British were reluctant to let the Nazis know they had broken their codes.
I’m telling you all of this so that you will understand why it would be unthinkable for me to betray the country of my birth. A country I fought for. A country I loved and still love. A sad and tragic country betrayed and abandoned by all, but most of all betrayed by the great civilizations of the West. Mine is a country of brave and noble people on whom all of you turned your backs.
Shame on all who knew!
[There is a slight gap in the tape here, some background noise, and then the voice returns.]
“Sorry, I dropped my notes, but let me continue.”
As I watched and suffered the horror of the Minsk Ghetto and the slave labour camps and even more so as I fought against the Nazis as a member of The Mstitel Partisan Party,* I made a pact with God that if He would allow me to live and let us defeat the Nazis, I would spend the rest of my life helping to rebuild my poor shattered country. I must confess that dreams of endless retribution against the Nazis who carried out the carnage continue to dance through my head even to this day. And unlike some of your more recent prime ministers, I make no apologies for my thoughts or the hate that sustained me during the darkest days.
*FACT: Mstitel means “Avenger.” Leonid Smilovitsky, Ph.D., researcher, Diaspora Research Institute, Tel Aviv University, refers to this group of partisans in a 1995 article which first appeared in the publication Shvut entitled “Minsk Ghetto: An Issue of Jewish Resistance.”
As you now know, my prayers were answered. God did allow us to defeat Hitler and me to live. He did even more. It was His hand that guided me as I struck at the very heart of the beasts destroying my country. He helped me remove a terrible scourge from Belarus— to wipe a Satan from the face of the earth.
Generalkommissar Wilhelm Kube
“Satan!”
IN MINSK, Satan’s name was Wilhelm Kube, Generalkommissar Kube—General Commissar for Belarus with his headquarters in Minsk. A rabid and vile Nazi from the earliest days of the Party and incongruously, superintendent of the Lutheran Church in Brandenburg and head of the Berlin synod of the Lutheran Church. A man of God, indeed!*
*FACT: This information is accurate. Source: Ernst Klee, Das Personen-lexikon zum Dritten Reich (Fischer Verlag 2005).
When not busy saving souls in Berlin and Brandenburg, Herr Kube was busy destroying lives by the thousands in the Minsk Ghetto, a job he appeared to relish. On July 31,1942, the good General boasted in writing to the Nazi High Command that he had personally overseen the killing of 55,000 Jews in Belarus in the preceding 10 weeks, including several thousand German Jews. He expressed hope that all the Jews of Belarus would be completely liquidated as soon as the German Wehrmacht no longer needed their labour.*
*FACT: Source: US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
His worst atrocity occurred on March 2, 1942, when 5,000 Jews were murdered to mark the Jewish festival of Purim. While it is almost too horrible for me to relate even today, I must tell you the following terrible atrocity since it played a significant role in determining my fate.
[Here there is a long pause on the tape. At first I thought there was a technical problem, but he picked up his narrative again with a trembling voice.]
How could I ever forget the evening of the Purim slaughter? I had seen a large group of slaves forced to dig a deep pit at the Ratomskaya Street ravine in the center of the ghetto, which I presumed was to accommodate the bodies of some of those who had been shot that afternoon. I didn’t see what followed, but relate here only what was told to me by dozens of those forced to watch.
The SS had apparently decided the small school that was being used as an orphanage needed to be cleaned out in order to make way for a new batch of children on their way from Poland. So all of the Minsk Ghetto children, some as young as two and still in diapers, were herded by men with submachine guns out of the orphanage, down the street, and thrown into the pit.
As those poor little children screamed in terror, some crying for their dead mothers, that great man of God, Generalkommissar Wilhelm Kube, dressed, as usual, in an immaculate uniform, arrived on the scene with a group of laughing SS officers. Kube reached into his pocket, pulled out a handful of candies, and tossed them to the terrified children below. Then waving cheerily at them, he ordered the pit to be filled and the children buried alive.*
*FACT: This atrocity is confirmed by Ernst Klee in Das Personen-lexikon zum Dritten Reich (Fischer Verlag 2005), page 346, as well as by M. Gilbert in The Holocaust, page 297, Fontana/Collins, 1987, and Reidlinger 1960 as quoted in Turonek 1989, page 118.
I could hear their screams several blocks away as I sorted through a room full of looted Jewish property in what was once one of the most beautiful opera houses in Europe.
You can hear the sadness in my voice as I tell you this. It still provides nightmares. When you are faced with daily horror and unspeakable conditions such as existed in the Minsk Ghetto, you either develop an ability to block everything out or you die. You shut down a part of your brain. The more you endure, the more layers of a cocoon of denial you wrap around your soul. A dozen women machine-gunned on the street—the shock, the revulsion, and the rage get buried deeper and deeper. A body still twitching from the hangman’s noose—thank God it’s not me! Move on!
Nothing matters but your own survival. But children? How do you ever get used to the sight, or as with me, the sounds of terrified, helpless children being buried alive? There is no blanket of denial thick or heavy enough to repress those memories for long. Believe me, I know. Oh, how I know.
Many concentration camp survivors say they still feel vestiges of guilt. Why did they live when millions around them died? I have no such feeling. I have many painful memories that still haunt me, but no guilt. My guilt was cleansed by Satan’s blood!
Until the night of the Purim slaughter I now realize that I was in a state of shock. A zombie, I think, is how some would describe it. It’s a wonder I could function at all when you consider what happened.
The Rahachow Slaughter
THE GERMANS CAME TO RAHACHOW the morning of August 4, 1941, rounded up almost everyone over the age of 50, more than a thousand people, including my mother, father and two uncles, took them into the nearby woods and shot them. Those of us like myself, young and strong enough to work in their slave camps and factories, were forced to lie in the streets where we could hear the machine guns, then as the last bullet found its mark we were handed shovels and ordered to bury the dead.
I found my mother’s poor shattered body amidst the carnage and as l laid her gently in the shallow grave I had dug, an SS officer shouting “schnell, schnell” jabbed me viciously in the ribs with his rifle barrel as he urged by to hurry, hurry. I could not find my father or uncles. Perhaps because of the tears that obscured my eyesight.
The Nazis quickly discovered that thanks to a schoolteacher
