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3 Killing site(s)
Irena M.: "I took some fish to the prisoners in the ghetto, because I knew many children inside the ghetto. But a German saw what I was doing, so I was beaten." (Witness N°323, interviewed in Slonim, on July 2010)
"In Petralevichevskaya Gora [Petralevichi Hill], which is about 1 km away from Slonim, around 10,102 inhabitants of Slonim were shot and buried." [Act of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission, RG-22.002M/7021-86]
"There were still about 200 of us who had to stand on the edge of a pit. Luckily, I was in the front row and the other ones were behind me. H. explained that we had to kneel down after he made a sign with his hand. This is how it happened. We were told to sing the ‘Communist Internationale’ in Hebrew and Yiddish. The police officers and the Lithuanians were 25m behind us, drinking and shouting."
[Deposition of Jewish survivor, B162-3410]
Slonim is a city located 190 km southwest of Minsk. Before the German invasion in June 1941, there were probably around 20,000 Jews residing in Slonim, some of whom were refugees from western Poland. The city was under German occupation from 1941 to 1944. The building of the former synagogue is still standing.
The first Aktion against Jews in Slonim took place on July 17, 1941, and was conducted by Einsatzgruppen forces. About 1,200 men were transported out of town into trucks, and shot in the sandpits next to Petralevichy Hill. In September 1941, a ghetto fenced in with barbed-wire was set up, composed of four separate parts: the ghetto on Zhabinka Street, the ghetto on Ulinska Street, the third ghetto on Mikolovska Street, and the fourth ghetto on Podgorna Street. On November 14, 1941, a new Aktion took place, under the supervision of the German Security Police assisted by the Wehrmacht, Latvian and Lithuanian police auxiliaries, and the Belarusian police. According to the testimonies collected by Yahad In - Unum, the Jews were told that they were to be resettled. The elderly, children, and women were driven to the Chepelevskiy fields, to pits prepared in advance by other Jews, and killed. The 7,000 remaining Jews were all forced to work. By the end of 1942, most of the 400 male Jewish workers deported at an earlier date to a labor camp in Mogilev were also killed. At the end of June 1942 and beginning of July, most of the remaining Jews were killed in Slonim, although resistance within the ghetto was organized in cooperation with partisans on the outside. About 500 Jews, mostly skilled workers, were also shot at the end of 1942.
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