A ghetto for children: the story of how a Soviet health resort was turned into a death camp

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

In the summer of 1941 in the Belarusian sanatorium "Krynki" children of primary school age were resting and undergoing treatment. The majority are diagnosed with infantile enuresis. There was a second shift and nothing foreshadowed trouble … War broke out, and in early July the Osipovichi district was occupied by fascist punitive units. The sanatorium for children turned into a ghetto: instead of good doctors and educators, the Nazis came here …

Children's health resort became a concentration camp

In the first days of the war, many parents of schoolchildren who were vacationing in the sanatorium managed to pick up their children before the Nazis took it. Most of the staff, as well as older children, hastily left the institution. However, there was no one to take the Jewish children - their parents by that time were already in the hands of the Nazis. In total, eight Jewish ghettos were organized in the Osipovichi district.

To those children whom the Nazis found within the walls of the sanatorium, they added other Jewish children brought here mainly from the nearest orphanages. Six-pointed stars appeared on the pioneer uniform for the little prisoners - by order of the Nazis, the children sewed them to themselves and the kids on their clothes themselves.

The guys were forced to collect beets and cabbage for the Germans in the surrounding fields, they fed the children with the remains - cabbage leaves and tops. And in winter they were given 100 grams of bread a day.

Jewish children, whom the Nazis kept separate from the rest of the children, lived in the large summer hall of the sanatorium, as if in a corral. This room was cold, uninhabited - before the war, summer events were held here. Little prisoners slept right on the floor. Therefore, when winter came, the captives, already exhausted from hunger and torment, began to get sick. Many of them did not live until spring. Thus, the Soviet children's health resort turned into a mini-concentration camp for Jewish children, among whom, by the way, were very young, one-year-olds.

Every morning, when the guys woke up, they found dead comrades nearby. The Nazis did not take out their bodies right away and generally tried to enter the premises of the children as little as possible: due to the fact that some of the kids suffered from enuresis, there was a smell of urine in the hall, which irritated the already embittered Nazis.

Only occasionally were the children taken out into the courtyard to breathe fresh air. There was a box with food waste, and each time little prisoners rushed to it to get something to eat - for example, potato peelings or leftovers. Children tried to do it quickly and unnoticed, because even for such a "offense" the Nazis punished them. No less cruel than the Nazis was their compatriot Vera Zhdanovich, who was appointed by the Germans as a supply manager in the ghetto, towards children. Not embarrassed by the guys, she had fun with the Germans, arranging parties.

One of the types of punishment for prisoners was the punishment cell located in the basement. It was much colder in it than in the children's room, because the Nazis deliberately threw snow to the children who were sitting there - so that they would suffer more. Many could not stand even two or three days - dead children were "thrown" into the river, under the ice.

Vova Sverdlov was saved only by a miracle

In April 1942, the Nazis decided to destroy everyone who did not die in winter. As Vladimir Sverdlov, who miraculously survived the children's ghetto, later recalled, late one evening the Nazis ordered all the guys to get together and announced that they were being transferred to another place. When they were taken out of the sanatorium, the boy Yasha, walking next to Volodya, quietly whispered to him: “We are not being transferred anywhere. If we moved, it would be during the day. Run! Yasha himself did not run, since he had two kids with him, whom he could not leave. In addition, as comrade Vova explained, with his purely Jewish appearance in the occupied region, one cannot run far. Volodya, on the advice of Yasha, imperceptibly dived into the thickets of weeds that grew by the road, which saved him.

The rest of the children were awaited nearby by the Bobruisk firing squad. They were taken to a dug hole, divided into groups and killed. Moreover, very young children were thrown into the pit alive and already shot from above. This terrible fact will later be established by the investigation, as well as the fact that on April 2, 1942, 84 Jewish children were killed here.

For several days, 11-year-old Volodya Sverdlov wandered through the forest with a damaged leg until he met one of the local residents. Seeing on the boy's clothes a trace of a torn off six-pointed star, the man got scared and drove him away. Vova went into the forest again. He was already almost unconscious when he was found in the forest by a resident of the village of Makarichi Alexandra Zvonnik (later he called her Baba Alesya). Risking her life, and not only her own, but also her own children, she hid Vova at home and nursed him, hiding him from the Nazis throughout the entire period of occupation. She became a second mother to a Jewish boy.

Subsequently, this woman, as well as seven other residents of the Osipovichi district, were awarded the title "Righteous Among the Nations", established by the Israeli memorial institute "Yad Vashem" - for the help provided to Jews during the war.

No other ghetto prisoners survived

Volodya was the only one who left the walls of this Jewish ghetto and survived. Even before the execution, one of the Jewish guys tried to escape from the sanatorium and he even succeeded. However, after wandering around the forest for several days, he returned. For a while, the children hid him from the Nazis and fed him, but then the child was found. He was taken out of the ghetto and killed.

By the fall of 1942, there were practically no Jews left in this area. The secretary of the underground committee of the CP (b) B district R. Golant in a memo to the secretary of the Bobruisk underground inter-district committee said: "In the Osipovichi district there is a total population of 59 thousand people, there is no Jewish population …".

Parents found Volodya only in 1947. At the beginning of the war, the boy's mother was evacuated, and his father went to the partisans. They were told not to worry about the fate of their son, because the sanatorium with the children, they say, had time to evacuate. And later they were told that all the children of the health resort had died. Fortunately, after the war, the parents, who considered Volodya dead, still found out that he was alive.

By his old age, Vladimir Sverdlov managed to save money for a monument to the children killed in "Krynki". It was installed at the site of their execution 13 years ago. The overwhelming majority of those killed remain unnamed. Only 13 of them were identified. On the initiative of Vladimir Sverdlov, every year a rally in memory of the children who died here began to be held near the Children's Stone (the unofficial name of the monument).

By the way, according to Vladimir Sverdlov, women educators also showed cruelty towards children in the children's ghetto. As you know, there were many such sadists during the war. And there were also fascists in skirts: women who served in the ranks of Nazi Germany