1 Execution site(s)
Anna I. remembers: "The Jews were supervised at their work site, the sawmill. They were taken in trucks. I was almost taken to the mass shooting but people were able to testify I wasn’t Jewish." (Witness N°340, interviewed in May, 2010)
"Jews were also required to appear every morning at the municipal government building for work assignments. In November 1941, the Germans established an unfenced Jewish residential district (an ’open ghetto’) in Novomoskovsk, which was located in two large houses on Lesnaia and Kuznechnaia streets. These streets were flooded in the spring by the River Samara and formed, as a result, a kind of island. By the end of December 1941, all the Jews of the town had been moved into the ghetto, those who were reluctant to move being forcibly resettled. There was considerable overcrowding in the ghetto." [Act of the Soviet extraordinary commission; RG-22.002M.7021-89]
Lesnaya is a village situated about 30 kilometers southwest of Baranovichi. About 70 Jews, including a number of refugees from western Poland, lived in the village before the war. It was under German occupation from 1941 to 1944.
By the end of 1942, a ghetto was established in a few buildings surrounded with barbed wire. On March 13, 1943, the Jews were loaded onto lorries and driven away to a nearby forest where they were shot in large graves dug in advance.
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