KARTUZ-BEREZA 1993 YZKOR
Chapter VIII - C
AFTER
LIBERATION
By
Tzipora Brener
My dad arrived from
Tshiliabinsk to visit us for some weeks. He had also traveled to Bereza and
sent us our belongings that were kept there. He returned from a Bereza that had
been totally destroyed. I realized that his hair was completely gray and he was
sunk into a deep sadness. He did not speak and refused to tell us what he saw
in Bereza. However, little by little, he began to open his heart and to tell
us. Half of the town was set on fire, and the houses on one side of the road
and the market burned down. After the Germans set the wonderful Beth Ha'medresh
of the Chevra Kadisha on fire, it spread to the whole town and all wooden small
houses also burned down. Of Ghetto "A" it
was ruined, it embraced several streets and was for "useful Jews"
while Ghetto "B" was for "Jews of whom you could not take out
any profit". Under the green small trees of Bereza there are no longer any
Moisheles or Shloimeles. Not a single word in Yiddish is heard and there are no
Jewish prayers in the Beth Medresh or in the cemetery....
My father told of the terrible cemetery in the
Dad
was wandering around the ruins of the place in which he was born, grew up,
married, formed a family, and maintained, with great effort, a worthy life. All
that was left of our house was the base of the terrace, a gray stain of cement,
like a dead stone...
I
heard from the mouth of a former partisan, my friend Moshe TUCHMAN, more
details about the annihilation of the Jews of Bereza. He escaped from the
Ghetto, as a refugee and fought against the Germans as a partisan, in the
forests of Polisie. Jewish partisans together with Russians and White Russians
derailed German freight cars on the tracks of the train and they killed Nazi
gendarmes in all places that they could.
Partisans suffered, and they tolerated ice, rains, mud, snow, hunger and
illnesses.
Moshe
told me that in Brona Gura, Jews of Bereza were transported to the train, Nazis
made them enter into the boxcars on one side and they threw them out on the
other side, directly into the mass graves that were already prepared. Then the
Nazis shot and killed them. The empty boxcars littered with clothes of the
martyrs, returned to Bluden, the railroad station of Bereza... Only a few were
able to survive and to leave the mass graves. A woman with her baby in arms who
was not reached by the shots, left among the fire of the night. Before the
complete liquidation of the Ghetto, a lot of people committed suicide, without
waiting to be killed by the Germans. HERTZEN hanged his children and then
himself. The teacher Rachel SHAPIRA poisoned her daughter, her husband and
herself with cyanide.
There
were also rebellions against the Germans. Jews dug a tunnel to leave the Ghetto
in the event of emergency, but without success. People suffocated due to the
smoke when fire annihilated Bereza. Some
traveled to Pruzhany that had been annexed by the Third Reich, with the false
hope of being in their service.
Beside the ruins of
the monastery of Kartuz Bereza, Germans shot any Poles who had given refuge to
Jews. In the house of the pharmacist of
the town refugee Leitshe KAZIRSKY, one of the most beautiful girls of the town
was killed. They also killed those that studied Torah, those that gave refuge
to Taibele KAPLAN and to all the Jewish women that tried to save their
lives.
Some Jewish youths of Bereza were able
to escape to the forests, some escaped to
We, the Jewish
survivors of Bereza both in
(From
the book by Fanny Bund "The first half of my life",
Ed.
Y. L. PERETZ, TEL AVIV,1989, Pages 132/137}