Posenichi (Pasianichy) | Brest

Posenichi is a village in Pinsk district, Brest region, southern Belarus. It is located less than 10 km (6mi) from Pinsk, and 170 km (105mi) east of Brest. Previously part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Russian empire and Poland, it has been a Belarusian town since 1939. There is no record of when the Jewish community first settled and started to develop in Posenichi, but in nearby Pinsk, the first records of Jews date from the beginning of the 16^th century. Before the war, a significant part of the population of Pinsk were Jews (a third of the total population according to a witness). They owned some shops, had their own prayer house, school, and cemetery. There was also a mixed school where both Jews and non-Jews studied.

German forces took over Posenichi at the beginning of July 1941. They settled in some of the villagers’ houses. Soon after their arrival, they rounded up all the Jewish men they could find living in the village. 17 of them were taken directly from their house and escorted to a field by the Germans. They were told they were going to be taken for forced labour but in reality, they were made to dig their own mass grave. They were forced to line up next to it and were shot, their bodies falling in or pushed into the mass grave. Around the same time, Jews from Pinsk were also taken to a place in or just outside Posenichi to be shot. It is unclear how many victims there were during this Aktion, or if it happened at the same location as the aforementioned execution. It most likely did. After the execution of the Jewish men from Posenichi, the Jewish women and children were subsequently all rounded up and deported to the ghetto in Pinsk, which was established in spring 1942. The Jews’ houses in Posechini were then robbed by some of the locals and sold to other villagers. The Pinsk ghetto was liquidated from late October to mid November 1942. Thousands of Jews were taken from Pinsk to Posechini to be shot at the same location as the previous execution of the Jewish men from Posechini. 8,000 Jews, mostly women and children, were shot in Posechini. Hundreds were killed each day for over two weeks. Group after group, Jews were taken to the field, forced to dig their own graves and undress, and shot. Once a mass grave was full, the Jews had to fill it in before digging another one. Between 12 and 16 mass graves were dug. Before the Germans were forced to retreat, they opened some of the mass graves to burn all the bodies and therefore destroy the evidence of their crimes. This was part of Operation 1005, a secret operation whose objective was to destroy all evidence of the mass killings. A witness  interviewed by Yahad recalled how they exhumed the bodies, put them in barrels and set fire to them. They then filled up the empty graves with earth and flattened the ground with machines to conceal all traces of them. This lasted for several days. The witness remembers the smell of corpses burning and claims the ashes were sent to Germany to make fertilizer.