| Lida Ghetto | |
| Date: | 1941 – September 1943 |
| Location: | Lida |
The Lida Ghetto was a ghetto where the Jewish population of the city of Lida and the surrounding settlements were forcibly concentrated during the Nazi occupation of Belarus in World War II. The ghetto existed from the summer of 1941 until September 1943.[1]
In the first half of the 20th century, Jews made up a significant portion of Lida's population.
On June 27, 1941, following heavy air raids on the city, the Wehrmacht entered Lida. The next day, an Einsatzgruppen unit of the SS arrived, and their first mission was to implement Reinhard Heydrich's "Commissar Order," which called for the immediate execution of Jewish leaders and intellectuals everywhere. SS soldiers gathered a large group of Jews from one part of the city, brought them to Sobalskaya Square, and conducted a selection. Lawyers, engineers, teachers, and other professionals were concentrated, while others were released. 96 members of the intelligentsia were taken out and beaten to death.
About a week after the Wehrmacht entered the city, a number of Jews were summoned to the SS office, which imposed on them the selection of a Jewish Council (Judenrat). 14 representatives were elected to the Judenrat; the teacher Kalman Lichtman was elected as chairman. The Judenrat was tasked with gathering the Jews in impoverished areas on the outskirts of the city, creating an "open ghetto" where Jews could move around with restrictions.[2]
Two weeks later, the Wehrmacht forces moved eastward, and Lida and its surroundings came under the administration of the regional governor (Gebietskommissar) Hermann Hanweg.[3]
The ghetto area included the neighborhood between the railroad and Molodetschno in the north and extended to Postovskaya Street in the south, with the eastern boundary being the Lida River and the western boundary being the current Sovetskaya Street. Jews from all districts (raions) of Lida – from Berezovka (Gordina region), Beilitsa (Gordina region), Selts, and other settlements, totaling about 7,000 Jews, were brought here. The density in the ghetto was high, often with several families living in one apartment.
Jews in the ghetto were subjected to forced labor, which included cleaning the city streets, clearing the ruins left by the German bombings, cutting wood, and more.
The killings of Jews began from the first days of the occupation. On July 3–5, 1941, 275 Jews considered local elites were selected and shot to death. In the early months, the torture of Jews occurred in the prison and during nighttime hours to hide the deeds from the residents. Later, as oppression and persecution increased, the killings took place at a former Soviet firing range near the city.[4] [5]
One of the first mass executions was organized on April 23, 1942. On May 2, 1942, after suffering multiple fractures from torture, nine Jews were shot to death in the cemetery. A week later, on May 8, 1942, an action, a term used by the Germans for the largest mass murder operation at a site, was organized. According to eyewitnesses, on the evening of May 7, the ghetto was surrounded by local police and gendarmes, and the next morning the detainees were brought to a square near the Kaserne. A selection was conducted by the ghetto commander (the "Gebietskommissar") and his deputy. Women, the elderly, the sick, and children were separated from healthy professional men and workers. The sick and elderly who could not stand or march on their own were killed on the spot – in homes and streets of the ghetto. The Jews were marched to a nearby forest and field. Along the way, they were beaten, and those who could not keep up were shot to death.
The sites of the mass killings were, as mentioned, a field and forest about 3 km from the city. The Germans and their Belarusian collaborators shot the Jews with machine guns and rifles near three large pits, after demanding that their victims undress. The first to be killed were the children. They were forcibly separated from their mothers, thrown into the pits, and then grenades were thrown at them. Some of the children were killed with bayonets. The mass burial was carried out over an area of 60 dunams, which included old trenches at the former Soviet firing range and a giant crater created by an explosion of a gunpowder storage.
In total, on May 8, 1942, 5,670 Jews from the ghetto were murdered. On July 2, 1942, an additional 155 Jews were murdered inside basements filled with gunpowder.
In the fall of 1942, 3,000 residents of the ghetto were transported to the Majdanek extermination camp in Poland. In their place, 800 Jews from the Veronovo settlement (Gordina region) and other villages were brought into the ghetto. Together with those who survived in the ghetto, they were placed in 121 houses, in anticipation of their imminent murder.
The ghetto was finally liquidated on September 18, 1943. Some of its residents were transported to the Sobibor extermination camp.
Already in 1941, the Bielski brothers called for Jews from the Lida Ghetto to escape and fight alongside them against the Nazis.[6] A group of ghetto detainees managed to escape with their help in the spring and summer of 1943 and joined their partisan unit.
During the killings of April 23, 1942, a group of young Jews escaped to the forest. The Germans chased after them but failed to capture any of the 20 escapees.[7]
During the Nazi occupation, after persecutions and tortures, about 8,000 Jews were murdered in Lida and the Lida district. The special state committee that was established after the war managed to reconstruct only the names of 342 of the victims.
In Israel the Lida community is commemorated in the Nachalat Yitzhak cemetery.
In 1967, during Soviet rule, an obelisk and a memorial plaque were placed at the mass grave of the 5,670 Jews murdered on May 8, 1942. In 1990, a memorial plaque was placed in Lida in memory of the Holocaust.[8]
In the southwestern outskirts of Lida, in the forest near the village of Ostrobl, more than 6,000 Jews are buried in two mass graves. In 1992, at the initiative of the Society for Memory Preservation led by Tamara Moiseyevna Borodach and with the help of donations from Jewish communities and individuals from Lida, a memorial in the form of two granite wings with inscriptions in Russian and Hebrew was erected: 1992-1942. In this mass grave, 6,700 residents of Lida, victims of the fascist German invaders, were buried.[9]
In the cemetery near Ivia, in the village of Stonbitsi, in the area called Khovanshchina, lie the graves of eight members of the Jewish intelligentsia of Lida, who were executed on May 2, 1942, after suffering torture in the prison yard. They were reburied alongside other city residents.
Every year on May 8 a ceremony is held in the city to commemorate the murdered Jews of the ghetto.