[Page 177]

The first month of the year 1943 was also the last month of life for the provincial Jews. The transit camps were being emptied: transport after transport of death-trains went off to Treblinka. At the end of the month these camps were dissolved. The cruel “ Aktion,” directed by Fritz Friedl – the Gestapo official responsible for the Judenrat – was completed.

At the end of the month the last two provincial settlements, Yashinovka and Pruzhany, were also liquidated. For several more weeks a few thousand Jews still remained in Grodno. The Białystok District had become “judenrein.” In a tragic, inhuman manner, the ethnographic structure of the Białystok region had been transformed. Centuries-old Jewish settlements were wiped from the surface of the earth.

Almost every Białystoker asked the same question: How much longer? How much longer would the isolated Białystok island be able to maintain its existence? The fact that all around, everywhere, there were no more Jews at all marked Białystok as the next target for the great catastrophe. Everyone felt this.

There was no agreement about the timing. The best people in the community knew what was coming and were preparing their armed response to the German child-murderers.

The Judenrat gave its own accounting of the situation. It gradually accustomed the population to the idea that the ghetto was too large, and that this was a danger. And the people already understood that if a danger is “too great,” it will be no surprise if the danger is removed by “reducing” the ghetto.

“Reducing” meant Treblinka – and that Treblinka meant death had been known in the Białystoker ghetto since January 1943. Thus the population was strung along. Thus the Judenrat retreated from one position after another, until the final position, with its back against the abyss of annihilation.

The Judenrat, faithful to its consistent policy of “work saves,” continued to enlarge the ranks of those employed in the ghetto. Its efforts were directed first of all toward integrating into the labor process those skilled workers among the laborers outside the ghetto who had lost their jobs after November 1942.

The Judenrat now called upon tanners to register for work in the ghetto tannery on Yurovtser [Jurowiecka] Street No. 23. The same applied to locksmiths, carpenters, electricians, and vulcanizers who were not yet employed. The municipal workshops of the industrial department of the Judenrat organized vocational courses for young people: carpentry, painting, masonry, joinery, and tailoring. The young students had to bring their own tools and also provide confirmation from the Jewish labor department that they were exempt from work duty during the time of the course.

Characteristic of Jewish employment at that time was the organization, by the Jewish labor department, of a group of sixty women who were sent outside the ghetto to clean the streets of snow and mud. For this work they received 15 pfennigs an hour and 380 grams of bread a day.

The demand by the German authorities for free, or almost free, slave-like Jewish labor was consistently high. This applied both to specialists and to unregistered manual laborers. The conditions and the treatment of Jewish laborers in many German workplaces outside the ghetto – especially in the so-called forced-labor– were often inhuman. They tormented and beat people. Among these workplaces, the firm “Kirchhoff,” which built highways and roads, had the most tragic reputation. It is no wonder that Jews went to forced labor very unwillingly.

The wealthier ones often bought themselves out and made use of the newly arisen ghetto invention and “institution” known as malokhim [“angels”]. A malekh was a man who, for a certain sum of money (about 4 marks a day), took the place of the person summoned for forced labor. He sold his labor on the other man's behalf. The malekh collected the daily wage, the blows, and the humiliation from the German “employer.”

Jewish workers did not come willingly to bad work sites and often arrived late; under such slave-like conditions their labor was not productive. The Germans became angry, threatened Barash, threatened the workers – and not only threatened. The fascist “lawgivers” permitted the use of corporal punishment.

Beatings occurred in two forms: unofficial and official. Unofficially, they were beaten by a master, by a Polish overseer, and sometimes even by a Jewish foreman.

The most common form of unofficial beating consisted of ordinary slaps, blows with a stick to the head or the shoulders, or a kick to the backside. Officially, one received blows for more serious offenses against the German code of labor discipline, for theft, and so on. In such cases a report was sent to the German security police, and the Jewish “offender” fell into the hands of the Gestapo on Sienkiewicza Street No. 15, or into the hands of the Kripo (criminal police) on Warszawska Street No. 50.

Jewish “experts” in Białystok were not in agreement as to which was worse – to fall into the hands of the Gestapo or of the Kripo. In the first months of the occupation, the worst terror clearly came from “Number Fifteen,” where a Polish criminal and German servant, Prokapowicz, raged and tyrannized over the prisoners.

What both institutions had in common was that the beatings there were considered “legal” – that is, the number of blows was fixed in advance by a police official.

[Page 178]

And the beatings were not administered in a fit of anger, but with cold, calculated cruelty.

Receiving a flogging was no Jewish “privilege.” Polish and Belarusian workers were beaten with no less brutality. From time to time, “for pedagogical reasons,” the names of the flogged Jews and the nature of their “offense” were made public.

In January 1943 the Judenrat published such a German communiqué concerning the flogging of Jews:

Announcement No. 383

To all workers outside the ghetto!

The Labor Office announces that the following persons have been flogged by the authorities:

1. For leaving the ghetto without personal documents:
   1. Note Yitzhak, Chmielna 10
   2. Nusboym Mordekhay, Smolna 12
2. For not appearing for forced labor:
   3. Nashelski Israel, Polna 19, a baker
3. For not going to work at the designated workplaces:
   4. Dinershteyn Meylekh, Nayvelt [Nowy Świat] 12 (New Construction Office)
   5. Nisenboym Hirsh, Fabryczna 39 (Zhelone)
   6. Polanski Avraham, Białostoczaner 16 (Reichsbahn)
   7. Tsitrinenberg Ludwig, Fabryczna 13 (Schwerendt)
   8. Kantorovitsh Gershon, Chmielna 19 (New Construction Office)
   9. Kadish Yitskhok, Kupiecka 22 (New Construction Office)
   10. Rosenberg Fishel, Giełdowa 11 (Zhelone)

For any further leaving of the ghetto without documents, or for failing to appear at the designated workplace, a significantly harsher punishment will be imposed. We warn that such offenses may result in sanctions against the entire ghetto.

Labor Department of the Judenrat
Białystok, January 28, 1943

Reports of murder-Aktionen and of the destruction of entire Jewish communities did not cease to disturb people's minds. Like a thunderbolt came the terrible news of the annihilation of Yashinovke [Jasionówka] and, above all, of the destruction of Pruzhany, where four and a half thousand Białystoker Jews had been living since the deportation in the autumn of 1941. In Grodno the “Aktionen” had practically never stopped. These were among the Jewish communities in the Białystok District whose inviolability the Germans had “guaranteed,” according to Barash, during the fateful days at the end of October 1942. Murky rumors circulated about slaughters in Baranovitsh [Baranowicze] and other more distant regions.

By January 1943, organized groups – smaller and larger – were already active in the Białystok ghetto. But the broader public – mostly young factory workers, whom the underground organizations had not yet reached – also seethed with the determination not to go like calves to the slaughter. This was the slogan with which Białystok, which no longer believed Barash, was preparing to face the approaching danger.

On February 3, 1943, an unknown author, a collaborator of Mersik, recorded that several people had told him about a Polish proclamation they had read, in which the heroism of the Jewish Zelbstshuts [self-defense] in Warsaw was described – the battle they fought on January 19, 1943, against the German gendarmes. During the fighting, the Jews displayed extraordinary courage and self-sacrifice, thereby wiping away their “stain of cowardice.” The proclamation ended with the following words:

“The wondrous heroism of the Jews of Warsaw must serve us Poles as an example.”

The author of this note remarks that, according to the information he had gathered, this Jewish armed resistance had triggered a new evacuation of several thousand Jewish workers, and that the echo of these battles made a strong impression in Białystok, which was now living through terrifying days of pogrom-fear.

The mood and feelings in the ghetto on the eve of the terrible, massive murder-Aktion are conveyed in the final paragraph of the note: “The pain of helplessness and the constricting sense of responsibility for the potentially catastrophic consequences of organized resistance weighed unbearably on people's minds and sharpened even further the feeling of despair – our torments as the condemned.”

It should be noted, in the margin of this document, that the armed Jewish action in Warsaw in January 1943 – which created favorable psychological conditions for the great, heroic struggle of the Warsaw ghetto on April 19, 1943 – encouraged the acts of resistance in the Białystoker ghetto in February 1943. It also indirectly influenced the Białystoker ghetto uprising and the Białystoker Jewish partisan movement.

Mordechai Tenenbaum-Tamaroff

[Page 179]

While Warsaw had several partisan or social clandestine ghetto archives, from Białystok no other such archive is known to us (at least until now) except for Mersik's archive, established through the initiative and active collaboration of Mordechai Tenenbaum-Tamaroff, one of the principal organizers and leaders of the Białystok ghetto uprising.

This archive is invaluable and constitutes the only primary source for the history of the Białystoker ghetto. Both the authenticity and the reliability of its documents are beyond doubt. Among the collaborators on the archive, apart from M. Tenenbaum and Hersh (Tsvi) Mersik, there were others as well (probably also Pesach Kaplan and Rafael Gutman). The documents were written in various languages (Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, and German). The most important among them are, without doubt, the diaries and materials of M. Tenenbaum, the protocols of the Białystoker Judenrat, the Judenrat reports, and the materials concerning Treblinka.

The materials are not limited to the Białystok ghetto. They also relate to the Warsaw ghetto and to various towns and townlets in the Białystok district. They also contain materials from the Polish underground (Głos Warszawy, the organ of the P.P.R. - Polska Partia Robotnicza) as well as documents surreptitiously stolen from the Białystok Gestapo. The documents were written and collected chiefly after the destruction of the Białystok province (November 1942), with the latest dating from April 1943. Earlier documents, however, are also present. Much uncertainty still remains regarding the authorship of certain documents, as well as the date and place at which the archive was buried.

Two days before the February murder-Aktion in Białystok in 1943, having no certainty whether he and his close comrades who knew the secret of the clandestine archive would survive, Tamaroff planned to transfer the archive outside the ghetto and to hand the materials over to Bronka Vinitska [Winicka]. Whether this plan was carried out before the first murder-Aktion, we do not know. In all likelihood, the archive remained in the ghetto at that time. Bronka Vinicka had been Tamaroff's liaison outside the ghetto, and from Tamaroff's notes it emerges that her task had been to safeguard the archive.

As mentioned, the main burden of collecting historical materials (documents and witness testimonies) rested on the shoulders of Tsvi Mersik. This twenty-six-year-old young man found himself together with Mordechai Tenenbaum in Vilna at the moment of the outbreak of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union.

According to Tenenbaum's view, that city had the tragic distinction of being the first place in Europe where the Germans, together with Lithuanian fascists, carried out their mass murders of the Jewish population.

From there the German term Aktion spread throughout the Jewish settlements of Central and Eastern Europe – a disguised name for mass crimes against Jews on a state scale, according to a state plan and carried out by state functionaries.

Both Mersik and Tenenbaum were caught up in the Aktionen, which followed one after another almost without interruption. Tsipora Birman, who endured the Vilna inferno together with them, relates that Mersik was taken out to be killed three times. Each time he tore himself free; they shot after him, they seized him, but the force of his will to remain alive prevailed, and he tore himself free. As for Tamaroff, he ran across rooftops and escaped.

With the help of a German soldier, a certain Anton Schmidt, Tamaroff, Mersik, and the remaining survivors among their comrades succeeded in escaping from Vilna to the temporarily quieter Białystok. In the spring of 1942, Tamaroff left for Warsaw. Mersik took the initiative to create agricultural work for the youth. The Białystok Judenrat accepted this proposal. All vacant plots in the ghetto were cultivated. Many young volunteers worked there. Mersik became secretary and operational spokesman of the enterprise. He also engaged in ideological work and was the leader of the Snif (youth-movement branch) in Białystok.

Whether he was already at that time occupied with collecting historical materials is unknown. A certain remark in Birman's notes suggests that he began gathering historical materials only during the period of the destruction of the Białystok province. An indirect confirmation of this assumption is also found in Tamaroff's notes.

Mentioning the premature and unexpected death of Mersik, he writes [in Hebrew]:

“ …he was supposed to meet and maintain contact with the refugees from the surrounding towns – he was collecting historical material on the annihilation of the communities in the district – from one of these meetings he contracted typhus, and a week later he left us.”

Thus we may state, with a high degree of probability, that the Mersik–Tamaroff archive was established in November–December 1942, after Tamaroff's return from Warsaw. The destruction of Warsaw, the destruction of the Białystok province, the looming catastrophe for the Białystok ghetto, Tamaroff's own severe personal experiences, the sense of uncertainty as to whether anyone would emerge safely from the catastrophe

[Page 180]

and live to see liberation and tell the world about the horrific German fascist crimes – all this moved Tamaroff to create a collection of documents that would speak, accuse, and bear witness for future generations.

Tamaroff considered this work so important that he asked Barash for a separate room for Mersik, in order to enable him to work in peace. Barash agreed to fulfill this request.

In the midst of the work of gathering materials on the destruction of the Jewish settlements in the Białystok district, Mersik contracted typhus. The Białystok ghetto had no typhus epidemics. The energetic measures of the Health Department of the Judenrat (headed by Dr. Moyshe Katsenelson) and of the Sanitation Department (headed by Dr. Holenderski) ensured that Białystok avoided the epidemics that devastated other ghettos (Łódź, Warsaw, etc.). There was a widespread belief in the ghetto – people spoke openly of threats made by the Germans – that should a typhus epidemic break out, it would lead to the liquidation of the ghetto.

Cases of typhus did occur in the ghetto, but only isolated ones, and they always involved Jews from other towns who had brought it with them, fleeing from their destroyed towns and seeking a place of refuge in Białystok. Severe typhus epidemics were raging at that time in the terrible collection camps of Volkovisk [Wołkowysk], Kelbashin [Kołbaszyn], Zambrów, etc. Refugees from those camps brought it to Białystok.

Mersik contracted the disease from one of these refugees. For several days the doctors were unable to establish the correct diagnosis, and afterwards it was already too late. Tamaroff describes his illness as a catastrophe and worries, among other things, about what would become of the work of collecting the historical materials. Mersik, sensing that he would not return from the hospital, handed over to Tamaroff all matters in precise detail; he omitted nothing. And after two weeks of illness he died. Tamaroff records the exact date: “28 January 1943, at midnight Mersik died.”

Three days later, on 31 January, his funeral took place, which was attended by enormous crowds. Mersik's Lithuanian passport and his Schein [work permit], issued by the Białystoker Judenrat, were placed in the ghetto archive that he had founded. On this passport Tamaroff had – apparently – written a short eulogy, conveying Mersik's last words, which he had whispered in agony.

Tamaroff concludes: “Indeed – few like him have been, and few will be – so it is.”

From the ghetto Schein, written in German, we learn that Mersik lived at Post-Straße 3 and was employed as a gardener in the provisioning department.

His comrade Tsipora Birman took leave of him in a deeply moving way.

After the 3^rd of February, almost on the eve of the terrible summer slaughter, Tamaroff – who at that time stood at the height of despair and on the verge of psychological collapse – devoted his thoughts to the deceased. Comrade Tamaroff, who mourned his Warsaw comrades, who was shaken by Mersik's death, and who carried within him all the dreadful experiences he had lived through and still faced, did not, however, lose awareness of the great responsibility that rested upon his shoulders. He resolved to complete all preparations for the resistance. Yet then he considered himself justified in departing (from his life). Tragically sound his words [in Hebrew]:

“…and I will go; I do not want to wait. I cannot. Cyanide – quick and simple. Tomorrow morning I will consult about this with Mersik. With the living Mersik I did not share this; I could not share these pains. The dead Mersik is with me. Also for life itself. Yes. – the eternal question, the eternal death.”

To be or not to be.

It must be emphasized that Tenenbaum–Tamaroff's personal contribution to the collection of the historical materials was considerable already during the period when Mersik was still alive, and especially after his death. He negotiated with various prominent figures in the ghetto to persuade them to prepare and supply materials. He met with refugees from the Białystok district and urged them to write about the destruction of their communities. His notes (diary) bear witness to the personal interest he showed in this matter. Thus he turned to his party comrade כמ. [KM], asking him to write down his memories of the war and, above all, to describe the history of the movement. K.M. raised the question of whether the place where the archive would be hidden was secure. To this he received from Tamaroff the reply [in Hebrew]:

“We shall not remain alive again. These writings that we are gathering – we shall secure them and hide them outside the ghetto.”

He also intervened with Barash, asking him to order that the secret archive (documents) and the reports of the Judenrat be retyped on a typewriter and handed over. With refugees from Grodno he held a conversation about describing the course of the liquidation of that community. He discussed with his informants the method of selecting the material and the overall methodology.

From Tamaroff's notes it emerges that after Mersik's death the matters of the archive were taken over by a person whom Tamaroff designates with the initials פ [P] and, on another occasion, פּעק [PEK] – with whom he discussed the issues connected with the collecting of historical materials.

As can be seen, Tamaroff developed – especially in January 1943, in the face of the impending danger of annihilation – feverish activity in order to collect and record for “future generations documents and materials about the Hitlerist crimes and about the destruction of the Jews.” But even after the February murder-Aktion, his diary provides evidence that his interest in this regard had not diminished.

[Page 181]

Only the circle of his archive collaborators had diminished, for they had fallen on the spot or had been deported to Treblinka.

Highly characteristic is an incident involving the poet A.

Tamaroff asked him to hand over to the archive some of his poems and notes. At first the poet did not want to fulfill this request. He argued:

“I do not want that Stephen Wise or any other Jew to shed crocodile tears over me; I do not want to give him material for lectures and declamations.”^[3]

After long arguments and counterarguments, he did agree to give a portion of his works.

These laconic words of the unknown Białystoker poet reflect the feeling that gripped the entire ghetto before and after the terrible February slaughter: the protest and the anger against all those who have time, who wage a sham war and do not create a second front, whose delaying strategy the Jews of Białystok will pay for with their lives – just as millions of Jews throughout Europe have already paid the price – who do nothing to save the remnants of the surviving Jews, for whom the destruction and annihilation of millions will one day (at most) be a cause and pretext for a sigh, a lecture, a public declamation.

Tenenbaum–Tamaroff describes these feelings when he notes – in the margin next to the poet A.'s accusation – the following:

“In truth, this is the feeling of us all: not only do they not believe in us, they do not believe even in the vengeance of those who will come after us.”

We must further note that in Mersik's archive we find no trace of poems that the poet A. may have handed over to Tamaroff. Nor do we find any note indicating when, where, or by whom Mersik's archive was buried.

We do not know how many people were aware of the secret of the buried Mersik archive. Among those who survived, Bronya Vinitska^[a] [Bronia Winicka] and Dr. Leyb Blumental certainly knew of it. Both searched for the archive after the Hitlerite occupier had been driven out of Białystok. They searched independently of one another. Bronia Winicka searched already in the first days after the liberation, in August 1944, but her efforts were fruitless^[b].

Blumental was more successful. A year later, in August 1945, he dug up the archive. He had a plan of the place where the archive had been buried and found it without great difficulty^[c].

In all probability, the archive was buried in the middle or at the end of April, or at the latest at the beginning of May 1943^[d]. This assumption is confirmed by the fact that the latest dates in the documents of the M.T. archive come from the first days of April 1943.

Together with the plan, Leyb Blumental had received from his brother an oral information that the archive was located in two boxes. And indeed, the excavated archive was found in two well-sealed tin boxes.

Why was the archive dug up so late?

[Page 182]

This is explained by the fact that Dr. Blumental, immediately after the liberation of the Białystok region (end of July 1944), was mobilized into the Polish Army, served at the front, and in doing so made the imprudent decision to keep the plan with him for that entire period. After the war had ended, he returned to Białystok and dug up the archive.

The place where the archive had been buried was located outside the ghetto, at 29 Piasta Street, in a stable belonging to a Pole, an acquaintance of Yisroel Blumental named Filipovski, who had been entrusted with the secret and had helped to bury the archive.

Bronia Winicka apparently knew on which street and in which courtyard the archive had been buried. According to Dr. Blumental's information, someone had already dug around the well on Piasta Street before him (and in all likelihood this was B. Winicka), but it had not occurred to her to dig in the stable.

Finally, two remarks^[4]:

1. In the years around 1950 I saw a portion of the excavated documents from Tenenbaum's archive in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. I emphasize: only a portion – for, according to Dr. Blumental's explanations, not everything that had been found in the unearthed treasure was present in the archive of the Jewish Historical Institute. Photographs from the occupation period with Jewish subject matter were missing, as were clippings from German wartime newspapers, literary works (Yiddish poetry), and a historical study from 1905; and it is possible that this list is still not complete. What remained was nothing more than a fragment: in the archive of the Jewish [Historical] Institute a significant part of the original documents was lacking. There were only copies left, which had been made after the war by the Historical Commission in Białystok. Since these copies were often full of errors (sometimes words were missing, sometimes words were transposed), it was often difficult to determine what had been faithfully copied (errors included) and what had to be attributed to a poor copy.

Dr. Blumental could not answer my question as to where these originals had gone.

Author's notes:

1. Immediately after the liberation of Białystok, in August 1944, Bronya Vinitska [Bronka Winicka] approached the author of this work, who at that time had assumed the position of chairman of the Jewish Voivodship Committee in Białystok, and asked for assistance in searching for the ghetto archive. She searched in the well-known “oyfshtendler bunker” [bunker of the uprising fighters] on Chmielna Street 6, but in vain. She also searched in an unknown location outside the ghetto, but here too the efforts proved fruitless.
   Bronya Vinitska, a young Jewish woman from Grodno, had served during the ghetto period as a liaison for the Białystok resistance organization, at the head of which stood Mordechai Tenenbaum-Tamaroff. Return
2. Dr. Leyb Blumental conveyed an important detail to the author of this work: in addition to the marked plan of the place where the archive had been buried, he had also received – through the mediation of his wife – from his brother Yisroel in the Białystoker ghetto, a well-sealed bottle containing documents. He no longer remembers whether he received the bottle at the same time as the plan or only later. Yisroel had stated that the bottle contained extremely important documents. They buried the bottle beneath their house in Shnyadove [Śniadowo]
   Unfortunately, a tragedy occurred. When the front approached Shnyadove in 1944, an artillery shell destroyed the house and with it annihilated the precious deposit. The contents of the destroyed documents have, it seems, remained a secret forever. Return
3. Leyb Blumental was by profession a Doctor of Medicine. Born in Sokolka, he completed secondary school in Białystok. At the outbreak of the war in June 1941 he was the director of the hospital in Śniadowo. During the occupation he lived in Tsharnevitsh [Czarnowicz?], near Białystok, until the destruction of the Białystok Jewish province (2 November 1942). At that time he fled to Śniadowo, where his wife – a Polish woman – helped him save himself from death. His wife maintained constant contact with his brother, Yisroel Blumental, by profession a legal apprentice, who was in the Białystok ghetto. Incidentally, Dr. Blumental told me that his brother Yisroel had been active in the Białystok resistance organization and was one of the closest collaborators of Mordechai Tenenbaum.
   From this brother, Leyb Blumental received – through the mediation of his wife – at the end of April or the beginning of May 1943, a plan drawn on a small piece of paper, with the indication that this was the plan of the place where the archive of the Białystok ghetto had been buried. Return
4. The remark in Sefer Dror (p. 425), made in connection with the protocol of the assembly of Kibbutz Dror, stating that the archive was buried on the eve of the Białystoker ghetto uprising, is therefore not correct. Return

Translator's notes:

1. Contents in [ ] are from the translator. Contents in ( ) are from the author. Return
2. I would like to note that a chapter with similar content - apparently by the same author - appears on page 80 of the English section of this Yizkor Book, under the title “The Archives of Tenenbaum-Tamarof and Mersik.” However, this is a separate translation and a significant abridgement of the original text, prepared by Rabbi Lowell S. Kronick - or Rabbi Shmuel A. Kronick, as indicated on page VI. This version also contains several deviations from the original. Return
3. Stephen Samuel Wise (1874–1949) was a leading American Reform rabbi, Zionist leader, and founding president of the World Jewish Congress. During the Second World War he was one of the most prominent public representatives of American Jewry and a frequent speaker on the persecution of European Jews. Return
4. There is only one comment in the text marked with 1). Return

I returned to my ruined Białystok home in the first days of August 1944. Once I was back, I recovered for several days from an illness – probably typhus – in a Soviet military infirmary. I quickly set to work and, among other things, became a member of the Voivodship National Council^[3]. The first weeks of intensive social work passed, both in the Polish and the Jewish sectors.

One day – it was probably in September or October 1944 – rumors spread through the city that in the large Białystoker prison, which was still standing empty at that time, inscriptions had been discovered on the walls of several cells, both in Polish and in Yiddish, left behind by the last prisoners who had been held there during the Nazi period. Since these inscriptions might possess a certain historical importance, the National Council delegated a group of its members, among them myself, to investigate the matter.

The large, deserted building made an uncanny impression. We found the inscriptions – still fresh, easily legible. The Yiddish inscriptions were in the death cells on the ground floor. These were the three cells numbered 80, 81, and 88. I was the only Jew among the visitors. It fell to me to record the Yiddish texts.

In death cell number 81 there were three wall inscriptions in Yiddish.

The only woman who signed her name was a girl:

P e r l s h t e y n  L e y e (Leah). She signed her name three times, each time spelling it phonetically [to indicate the correct Yiddish pronunciation of her name].

The second inscription was both in Yiddish and in Polish:

“Yekhiel Gurvitsh falls a victim, 23.1.1944, because he is a Jew.”

I cannot clarify the contradictions in the date – whether I copied it from the wall exactly as it appeared, or whether the error occurred in my own transcription.

The third inscription was from an entire family: End/e/r.

In death cell number 80 I read five inscriptions, two of them in Polish:

Singer Sholem (Shalom);
the Katshkovski brothers, ז.ל.^[4];
Lev Avraham and
Sokoli, Purim 5704 [1944].

[The two Polish inscriptions in Latin letters are:]

Tellman Dawid, from Zgierz – imprisoned from June 1 to July 14, 1944;
Goldfarb Zalman, from Slonim – July 6, 1944
(Sz.D.= Szymon Datner)

The strongest impression, however, was made by death cell number 88. We stood silently before the walls and looked at its Yiddish inscriptions. All of them bore the same date:

July 15, 1944.

[Page 183]

Certain inscriptions contained mistakes; we do not consider it necessary to correct them. Almost all of them had a Star of David next to the name:

“Yitskhok Kulkin, killed in the Białystoker prison on the 15^th of the 7^th month 1944, because he was a Jew – take vengeance^[5].”

“Born in Bielsk-Podlaski, 1921. My entire family was killed. I was the last Jew in the prison. Gofman Enokh.
Go to your death with your head held high. I send greetings to my khaveyrim [friends], the Okun and Pozanski brothers. Take vengeance for me. They tortured me; I did not betray.
Take vengeance.”

“We are going to our death very calmly; we have nothing with which to defend ourselves. Take vengeance for us.
The Białystoker Avroml Batskovski. Take vengeance for us.
From Grodno: Kirshnboym, Kulkin, the Liftses brothers, Frusak Meir.
Take vengeance for us.”

“Let it be even more terrible than what they did to us Jews.
The last day of our lives, 15 July 44.”

“Take vengeance for us!” This was written by Khayim Berl Kirshnboym, from Grodno.

“Here, in their final night, live Jews who remained from Białystok and Grodno. We are living our final minutes; we are waiting for death. Today is the 15^th day of the 7^th month –15.7.44.”

Up to this point, these are the inscriptions of the last Jews of Białystok, found there a few days later, still under Nazi rule.

On July 27, 1944, the first units of the Red Army entered Białystok, together with partisan detachments – among them not a few Jews. Five minutes before their end (in Białystok), the murderers still managed to shoot the last Jews who were under their guard.

But the testaments of the victims remained.

Silent and motionless we stood before the sacred letters, engraved forever on the walls of the prison.

Quietly, reflectively, I look today – after many years – into the black letters in my black notebook, where I copied them down at the time.

”Take vengeance for us!” – it sounds in my ears today just as it did then.

How does one take vengeance for the fifteen thousand Białystoker Shloymelekh, Moyshelekh, Leyelekh, Shulamitlekh, for the ninety to eighty thousand Jewish little children of the Białystok district, whom the Nazi murderers slaughtered?

Have we fulfilled their holy testament? Doubts and uncertainty.

And perhaps the only vengeance is that we are here, that we have not disappeared, that we believe and hold fast that “the Eternal One of Israel does not lie”^[6].

I greet the living Białystokers! Do not forget the holy ones, those who are gone!

Translator's notes:

1. Contents in [ ] are from the translator. Contents in ( ) are from the author. Return
2. I would like to note that a chapter with similar content - apparently by the same author - appears on page 81 of the English section of this Yizkor Book, under the title “Tragic Messages from the last Jews.” However, this is a separate translation and a significant abridgement of the original text, prepared by Rabbi Lowell S. Kronick - or Rabbi Shmuel A. Kronick, as indicated on page VI. This version also contains several deviations from the original. Return
3. This is the literal translation of the Yiddish term “Voyevodisher Natsyonal-Rat.” Other translations I have found include Jewish Regional Committee or Jewish Reconstruction Committee. Return
4. I assume that this is the abbreviation ז”ל, “of blessed memory.” Return
5. The term nekome (Hebrew: נקמה) is commonly translated as “revenge,” but in Jewish historical and religious language it carries a broader and more restorative meaning. It refers not only to retaliation but to the rebalancing of a world thrown out of moral alignment – the restoration of justice, the affirmation of truth, and the insistence that evil not stand unchallenged. In this sense, nekome expresses a call to re-establish ethical order for the sake of all, rather than a desire for personal vengeance. Return
6. נצח ישראל לא ישקר = a quotation from 1 Samuel 15:29, traditionally rendered as: “The Eternal One of Israel does not lie.” The phrase is understood to affirm the enduring continuity of the Jewish people. Return

The most precious and valuable thing in life is life itself. Anyone who raises a hand against this immeasurable worth has always been branded with contempt as a murderer, a killer. Shfikhes-domim – “Shedding of blood” – has, for thousands of years, been regarded among Jews as the gravest sin, the very essence of moral downfall.

And what is the ruling regarding suicide? We Jews have condemned it in the sharpest terms, almost as severely as murder. A suicide in a family was considered not only a tragic event but also a blemish upon the entire household for many, many years. Indeed, cases of suicide occurred extremely rarely among the Jewish masses, who were raised in the Jewish way, in the spirit of Jewish tradition. Such was also the view in Jewish Białystok.

The most terrible time in all of Jewish history had arrived – and within it, the most terrible time in the Jewish history of Białystok. One catastrophe followed another: thousands of Jews burned in the Great Synagogue and shot in the streets; the “Thursday,” “Shabbat,” and “Sunday” massacres; the ghetto; the yellow badges; terrible humiliations; poverty; forced labor; fear and uncertainty; thousands of human victims; tens of thousands suddenly orphaned and despairing.

All this created a fertile ground for profound psychological collapse on a mass scale – and thus a ground in which desperate acts, including suicides, could take root.

Did such cases occur? I believe that, all in all, the answer is yes – although they never assumed a mass character. And in the chaos of those first terrible calamities (June–July 1941), no chronicler recorded them. Later on, they were not mentioned either. Had such cases occurred in large numbers, they would certainly have been noticed and documented in the records of the underground Białystoker ghetto archive. And I, the writer of these lines, would surely remember something of them.

[Page 184]

More than a year of ghetto life had passed. Daily German oppression and the constant struggle for a piece of bread had gradually caused people to begin forgetting the terror of the days of June and July 1941. It even began to seem that those who had spoken of sporadic massacres carried out by undisciplined front-line soldiers had perhaps been right, that Germany was still a cultured nation, and so on, and so on.

Until… the dark days of October 1942 arrived, when people in the ghetto began to speak openly of some terrible, all-embracing slaughter of all Jews. Some believed it; others did not.

A darkness settled over the city; the mood was dreadful. And yet I do not recall that, in that time of despair, anyone took their own life. I remember how helpless and worthless I myself felt, unable to find any counsel for how to ward off the specter of annihilation – of the entire community, of my family, and of myself. I wandered through the half-empty ghetto streets, trying to catch a glimpse of the passersby: the silent people, their faces clouded and turned inward. Tens of thousands of people who, as it was said, were all condemned to destruction, to a swift and unnatural death, for no other reason than that they were Jews. To observe the unbelievable – to the end, to the very end…

Białystok was sealed off at that time. There were cases of people falling into each other's arms, crying out, “We will live!”

And at that very same moment, 130,000 provincial Jews were walking their final road to the death camps…

The destruction of the provincial communities (2 November 1942) shook the entire ghetto. Białystok – and for a few weeks also several other communities, such as Sokołka, Pruzhany, Yashinovke [Jasionówka], and partly Grodno – remained alive. For how long? Like a terrible weight, the monstrous vision of death camps for Jews – for all Jews, without distinction of age or sex – settled upon every heart and mind.

The name Tremblinke – this was how, instead of Treblinka, people in the Białystoker ghetto pronounced the name of the death factory – was on everyone's lips. The uncertain rumors that had been circulating for weeks about “Tremblinke” had become something real, something undeniable. Jewish laborers unloading entire wagons of used clothing at the railway station found in the pockets documents bearing the names of well-known Jews from the provincial towns who had only recently been taken from their homes. A Polish underground leaflet, smuggled from Warsaw into the ghetto, told the truth about Treblinka.

And here we come to the heart of the matter. What people had not wanted to believe revealed itself as the truth. The entire Jewish people under German rule was condemned to death. And this truth, this certainty, drove desperate people to decide: better to die by one's own hand than in a German death camp.

There were several Jewish suicides in the ghetto. They did not want to perish at the hands of the Hitlerites; they wanted to remain the masters of their own lives. Some even left behind a testament, saying that they no longer had the strength to go on fighting – that life had become too much to bear.

These cases occurred on the eve of the great slaughter – that is, the “first Aktion” of 12–15 February 1943. It is possible that there were a few more such cases at that time. But this phenomenon took on a much larger scope during the dreadful Aktion itself. The road to death led either through taking poison (mostly cyanide) or through hanging oneself.

Thus the following took their own lives:

Kagan, the fruit seller, who had a shop on Lipowa Street;
Khayim Grinshteyn, a bricklayer, who lived on Supraselske [Supraśl] Street;
Shloyme Yankelev, the barber;
Dr. Franke Horovits [Horowitz] , the woman teacher at the Hebrew Gymnasium.

A collective suicide was carried out by three children – orphans – in the orphanage on Tshenstokhovski [Częstochowska] Street.
This bloody list is certainly not complete.

More than ten thousand human victims were given over to the Nazi Moloch by Jewish Białystok during the “first Aktion.” The grief and pain of the roughly thirty-five thousand Jews who remained alive were indescribable. But life moved forward; the dead were buried at Zhabye; new daily worries gradually dulled the pain over those who had been taken away.

Not a single case has remained in my memory of someone taking their own life because their dearest and closest had been deported – although it is possible that such a case may indeed have occurred.

I remember my encounter with the former woman secretary of the Hebrew Gymnasium, Pupko, from the Rudovski family, shortly after the Aktion. She was shaken to the core; the murderers had taken away her mother. Souls twisted in torment. But people wanted to live – and they lived.

It may well be that what worked here was the awareness that what had happened yesterday to those whose lives the murderer had snatched away would happen to all of us tomorrow.

Barash's saying – that “we were all the dead on furlough” – was widely known and, since “Tremblinke” had become a grim reality, also widely accepted.

And then came the Day of Judgment, August 1943 – the end of the existence of the Białystoker ghetto. After the crushing of the uprising, after the struggle, there arose once more a series of suicides among those who had decided to fall by their own hand here in Białystok – if only to avoid the road to the German death factories.

The two leaders of the ghetto uprising took their own lives – the Zionist and khalutz [pioneer] Mordechai Tenenbaum (“Tamaroff”) and the communist Daniel Moshkovitsh [Moszkowicz].

In life, almost everything had separated them; what united them was the Jewish fate, the struggle against the enemy of Jewry – and the death.

[Page 185]

They could still have saved themselves at the last moment in the chalutzim bunker on Khmelne [Chmielna] Street (the headquarters of the uprising command, from which they directed the revolt, was located on the neighboring street, Tsheple [Ciepła], together with the seventy fighters. But they chose death instead. Incidentally, as is well-known, the seventy heroes perished at the same time in any case.

At that time, the well-known and devoted educator and author of schoolbooks, Rafael Gutman of Warsaw, took poison. He died in his wife's arms, in the surgical ward of the Jewish hospital on Fabryczna Street.

In the midst of the orgy of dragging the sick out to be shot, the kind-hearted nurse Polye Duglatsh [Długacz] (originally from Łódź) took her own life. In that world-shattering moment – in those days between 16 and 24 August 1943 – these were certainly not the only cases of suicide in Białystok.

Terrible was the collective suicide carried out by a group of Jewish women from Białystok in a railway wagon of a moving train not far from Treblinka. It was one of the first transports that left Białystok after the 16th (?) of August. The wagon was packed entirely with women.

When the train reached Malkin [Małkinia] – not far from Treblinka – a wave of panic swept through the women. With tears and cries they began pleading with the few women doctors in the wagon to spare them, for God's sake, from the torment awaiting them in the gas chambers of Treblinka, and to bring their lives to an end before that could happen.

Dr. Tsharnoleska [Czarnoleska], originally from Łódź, responded to their desperate pleas and began opening their veins with a small zhilet-meserl [vest-pocket knife]. Soon other women followed her example and cut their own veins, and those of their suffering companions.

Immediately afterward, everything around them was awash in blood. But the train did not go to Treblinka – it continued instead toward Majdanek, near Lublin. In Lublin the train came to a halt, and the wagon – from which traces of blood had become visible – was opened. Before the eyes of the SS murderers and the Jewish forced laborers, a horrifying scene was revealed.

Bodies lay heaped together, and among them were still a few who showed faint signs of life. The impression was overwhelming; something seemed to stir even in the bestial hearts of the SS murderers. They ordered the wagon to be unloaded at once and did not interfere when Jewish forced laborers at the station gave assistance to the few women who were still alive.

Among those who survived the slaughter and the war was the Białystok woman Berta Sokolska. She recounted the event in the Blizhin [Bliżyn] camp to Dr. Tuvia Tsitron [Citron], and he passed it on to me in April 1946, when he was staying in Białystok.

I, the writer of these lines, recorded it on the 13^th of April 1946 and now pass it on to our Białystoker amkho yisroel – our own Jewish brethren.

A group of religious Jews at the hands of the Nazis, on the way to their annihilation

[Page 186]

  Białystok, Poland     Yizkor Book Project     JewishGen Home Page

Copyright © 1999-2026 by JewishGen, Inc.
Updated 20 Feb 2026 by LA