A new monument to the victims of Nazism has been erected in the Horadok district
Gorodok District celebrates the 77th anniversary of its liberation from Nazi invaders on December 24. On the eve of this significant date, a new monument to the victims of Nazism was erected at the site where Nazis shot about 2,000 civilians in the autumn of 1941.
Mark Krivichkin near the monument to the victims of Nazism at the site where Nazis shot about 2,000 Jews of the Gorodok ghetto in the autumn of 1941.
German troops occupied Gorodok on July 9, 1941. Almost immediately, all Jews were ordered, under threat of death, to sew a yellow patch onto their clothes, which could not be removed. A few weeks later, in early August, the Nazis carried out their first "action" (as they called mass killings).
"Even before the ghetto was established, the Nazis gathered young, strong men up to 50 years old and some young women, and under the pretext of sending them to work, took them away and shot them near the village of Berezovka, thereby depriving the Jewish community of those who could lead the resistance," said Mark Krivichkin, a resident of Gorodok and an activist of the local Jewish community.
In August 1941, the Germans herded the survivors into a ghetto on the outskirts of the city, where there were about 2,000 prisoners. For two months, they were taken out in groups to Vorobyovy Gory tract (a favorite resting place for Gorodok residents before the war) and shot there. The doomed people were forced to dig their own graves. In mid-October 1941, the ghetto was completely destroyed.
An eyewitness to those terrible events, S. Kozlov, wrote in the newspaper "Boevaya Trevoga" (Combat Alert) on December 30, 1943: "At dawn, I entered the city... A column of people was moving along Sovetskaya Street. It stretched for hundreds of meters, and its tail had not yet left the camp. There were gray-haired women, young girls, women with infants. Thin, gloomy, they could barely move their legs... The prisoners lived on water alone because they were not given bread. Many could not endure and died of hunger."
Until the end of the occupation, members of the resistance and those dissatisfied with the "new order" were shot in the same place. At the end of December 1943, after the liberation of Gorodok, a commission of representatives from the district authorities, the 11th Guards Army, and city residents inspected the site of the mass killings in Vorobyovy Gory. The grave was 12 meters long and 4 meters wide.
The names of about 450 residents of Gorodok killed between August and October 1941 have been identified, but the number of casualties was higher. Some survived thanks to the help of partisans and local residents.
In the second half of the 1960s, surviving Jews who returned to Gorodok erected monuments at the sites of mass executions in Berezovka and Vorobyovy Gory at their own expense. In 1983, a memorial to the victims of genocide was opened in Berezovka on the site of the old monument with budget funds, and a new granite monument was erected in the Vorobyovy Gory tract on the eve of the 77th anniversary of liberation. The monument bears an inscription in three languages – Russian, English, and Hebrew: "To the victims of Nazism. In the autumn of 1941, the Nazis shot about 2,000 Jews from the Gorodok ghetto."
The installation was funded by the Simon Mark Lazarus Foundation, established to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust victims. The foundation pays for the creation of memorials at mass murder sites, and there are about 500 of them across the country.