WWII guerilla fighter recalls rounding up of Jews in Minsk Ghetto скачать в хорошем качестве

WWII guerilla fighter recalls rounding up of Jews in Minsk Ghetto

Shotlist Mikhail Treister, guerilla fighter and Minsk Ghetto prisoner, speaking Russian: "On June 24th Minsk was bombed, it was the first and the only serious bombing. It happened two days after the war began. Four days later, on June 28th, German tanks showed up in Minsk. There was basically anarchy in the city. The government and the Central Communist Party Committee, fled to Mogilev on the night of the 24th, and then further east, headed by Panteleymon Ponomarenko, former secretary of the Belarusian Communist Party. "I now got to see what anarchy was. For four days people were looting stores, factories, warehouses. The city was on fire. Basically the whole central area was destroyed. Wooden buildings on the outskirts were burning too. And firefighters, instead of putting out fires, would come and load their vehicles with flour, potatoes, salt, sugar, and go home. I saw it all with my own eyes and even participated, because we didn't know what would happen in the future, so I took some things too. I ended up with a box of hand soap, a little bit of cod and a bottle of some aromatized alcohol. "When the first Germans showed up, they put up flyers ordering us to stop looting, threatening to shoot people otherwise. When several people were shot dead right there on the spot, robberies stopped, and the so called new order was instituted. They began to register all Jews and educated people (intelligentsia). Even before a ghetto was organized, they had gathered men. And some time around the 19th of July, about three weeks after the Germans entered Minsk, they put up flyers in two languages on ruined walls, because the whole city was in ruins after the bombing on the 24th. I guess, there were also flyers in German, but I only saw the ones in Russian and Belarusian... It said in Belarusian that all Jews had to move to a special district within five days. They set apart about forty streets and little sidestreets for the ghetto. And every Jew found outside the ghetto was going to be shot dead on the spot. They didn't have any other types of punishment. No detention, no court hearings, no investigations..." Story Mikhail Treister, who was a prisoner in the Minsk Ghetto, recalls the Belarusian capital in the days of the Nazi occupation. FreeVideo.RT.com