1 Execution site(s)
Praskova T., born in 1931: “When the war began, I lived in Kostyuchkovo. My family was in Orsha, where we lived in a camp as refugees because we had been expelled. We went to Lenino to visit family. When we came back, we passed in front of a grave in which the Jews had been shot, men were filling it in. I didn’t see a lot of details because I was frightened.” (Witness N°648, interviewed in Lenino, on June 19, 2013).
Lenino is located about 20km west of Slutsk. Until 1917, the village was called Romanovo. German forces occupied the settlement at the end of June 1941. Owing to the rapid German advance, only a few Jews were able to evacuate to the East. Fewer than 100 Jews remained in Lenino at the start of the occupation.
In September 1941, the local authority was placed under the control of a German civil administration. Immediately after the occupation of the settlement, the Ortskommandantur ordered the registration and marking of the Jews and subjected them to various forms of hard labor. In late July 1941, all the Jews of the village and from the surrounding area, about 100 people, were resettled in a ghetto located on a single street that led to the cemetery. Local police guarded the ghetto, which was surrounded by barbed wire on one side and enclosed by a river and a swamp on the other. After some time, 20 more people were added, bringing the ghetto population to 1200. On June 12, 1942, the Germans and local police shot the remaining 70 or 80 Jews (mostly women, children, and the elderly) in pits that had been prepared 2km to the east of the village.
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