Between 1941 and 1945, about six million Jews fell victim to the Holocaust. About 800,000 Jews – men, women and children – were exterminated in the territory of occupied Belarus. These figures are not just statistics, they represent millions of human lives cut short in a whirlwind of horrific cruelty.
As part of the operation "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", Nazi Germany committed mass murder on an unprecedented scale. One of the methods of murder was mass shootings, which were carried out on the outskirts of villages, towns and cities throughout Eastern Europe, including Belarus.
After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, German units began carrying out mass executions of local Jews. At first, their victims were Jewish men of military age, but by August 1941, they had begun to exterminate entire Jewish communities en masse. These killings were often carried out in broad daylight, in full view of local residents.
Mass shootings were carried out in over 1,500 cities, towns and villages across Eastern Europe. German squads tasked with killing the local Jewish population moved throughout the region, committing horrific massacres. Typically, these squads would enter a town and round up the entire Jewish civilian population. They would then march them to the outskirts of the town, force them to dig a mass grave or bring the Jews to previously prepared mass graves. German troops and/or local auxiliaries would then shoot all the men, women and children and dump their bodies in these pits.
The Germans also carried out mass executions in special killing centers located in occupied Eastern Europe. One such center was Maly Trostenets near Minsk, where the Germans and their local supporters murdered tens of thousands of Jews from Minsk ghetto. In Maly Trostenets, thousands were also killed in “gaswagen”.
The sixth hall of the Memorial Complex “Khatyn” displays unique and terrifying artifacts handed over by Minsk Region Prosecutor's Office following the investigation into the genocide in 2023. These items have become silent witnesses to the horrors that befell the Jewish population of Belarus during the Great Patriotic War. The exhibits include cartridge cases, bullets, personals, and household items. Each of these items holds a tragic story about the life and death of people who died in the bloody massacre that took place near Logoisk, in area “Ivanovshchina”. This place, sometimes called the Jewish Cemetery by local residents, holds memories of the terrible tragedy that occurred here at the end of August 1941.
Before the war, people of different nationalities lived in peace and harmony in Belarus. They created families, raised children, worked and rested together. However, with the beginning of the war, peaceful life was destroyed, and the horrors of the Holocaust and the burning of villages along with their inhabitants came to Belarusian land.
The Jewish population of Logoisk had long lived densely in the city center, in the area where the district executive committee building is now located. Just two months after the Nazis occupied the district center, a decision was made to exterminate the Jews living in Logoisk and Gaina. In August 1941, hundreds of civilians, mostly of Jewish ethnicity, were rounded up and taken to area “Ivanovshchina”, where they were brutally shot.
Here they met a terrible death in one mass grave on a hill, which local residents call the Jewish cemetery...
From the memoirs of Leokadia Sosnovskaya, a resident of Logoisk, born in 1927: “…all the Jews were driven to a hill near Gaina road and shot... My mother was just coming home from work when they were driven to the pit on the hill. She came home and told us. We knew a very nice Jewish woman there. She had two children. One child was holding on to her dress, and she was carrying the other in her arms. And the policeman who was walking next to them kept urging them on, so that they would go faster. And how could she walk fast with two small children. So he beat them with a whip, and the child in her arms was almost choked with screams... We lived on Zaozerskaya street, and the Jews lived in the center, mainly on Chkalovskaya street, on Borisovskaya street. Jewish children went to school with us. The synagogue was on the square, where the district executive committee is now...
What is characteristic is that it rained heavily after all this. And there were so many of them shot there, not only from Logoisk, but also from Gaina. They were poorly dug in, and when it rained, the water in our Lapenets, it flows from there, was red from blood. Lapenets is a stream that flows into Gaina, flowed near our Zaozerskaya street. There was a heavy rain, everything was washed away from the hill and into this Lapenets. I remember very well that the water in Lapenets was red from blood. Thousands of people were killed there…"
All witnesses mention that after the shooting there was a very heavy rain - as if nature was mourning these unfortunate people, innocently killed in the sand quarry.
Now trees grow on the site of the execution, but in August 1941 there was a sand quarry, and there were fields around it, and it seemed impossible for the people surrounded in the open area to break through the cordon and escape. But it turned out that a heroic incident occurred at the site of the execution. Not all the people doomed to death accepted their fate and made a mass escape. And as a result, some people were able to escape from the execution. Brothers Yakov and Naum Kosovsky were among those saved. The surviving 17-year-old witness Yakov Kosovsky told how it happened: “There were approximately one thousand four hundred Jews living in the shtetl before the war. We lived 40 km from Minsk and when the bombing began, dozens of Minsk Jews, saving themselves, came to our town. There were three of us brothers, I was the youngest at seventeen, the middle one was at the front from the first day, Naum, the eldest, was with me. On August 30, the fascists gathered the residents of the town in the park, registered everyone and called the local policemen... In the park, where the fire station is now, there was a big house, a count's house, a big one. They gathered everyone there and waited for the Germans to arrive... When they drove everyone out, maybe someone hid somewhere, but it's hard to say because no one knew that such a thing could happen. Actually, this was the first pogrom in Logoisk. It was a Saturday. The weather was beautiful, sunny… When the fascists lined us up, they announced that they were resettling us to the neighboring Gaina Jewish settlement. We walked a kilometer from Logoisk and were turned towards the quarry. It became clear to us what kind of “resettlement” the fascists had started. We were ordered to sit down, undress, and take off our shoes. The Germans and the police surrounded us in a ring, and at that moment a column from Gaina began to approach. They were also being “resettled.” The dwellers of the towns were led into the quarry in groups, and two fascists were shooting them with machine guns… An elderly man was sitting next to us. He said: “Children, why are you sitting? Run! Run!” We had no weapons, but a hairdresser was sitting next to us. He took a razor with him and slashed the neck of a German standing next to him. We ran, dragging the others along with us. The fascists were shooting at us, and our neighbors were falling wounded and killed nearby: old people, women, children. Only 12 people managed to reach the nearest forest, all the rest (about 1,500 people) died in this damned quarry. Witnesses said that the earth moved in it for several days, from under which the groans of the unfortunate were heard... Then we reached Borisov, they helped us get clothes and food. At the end of my ordeals, I ended up in a partisan detachment..."
Information. According to the surviving results of the 1939 census, 3,400 people lived in Logoisk urban settlement, of which: Belarusians - 2,336, Jews - 864, other ethnicities - 200. Taking into account the rural population of Jewish ethnicity (343 people), a total of 1,207 Jews lived in Logoisk district at the time of the census.
On August 30, 2022, the remains of civilians shot by the Nazis and their accomplices in 1941 were reburied in area “Ivanovshchina”, the Logoisk district. The memorial service for the dead was held by representatives of three religious denominations of Belarus. During the mourning ceremony, a memorial sign was unveiled here in honor of the innocent victims of the war.
"What we saw during the excavations is horrifying in its inhuman cruelty. This place is filled with pain that cannot be silenced. Hundreds of families whose hopes, dreams, and future were destroyed in an instant by the cold-blooded hand of the Nazis will remain here forever," said Andrei Shved, Prosecutor General of the Republic of Belarus, addressing the participants of the event.
The used shells and bullets that can be seen in the museum of the memorial complex “Khatyn”, resemble shootings and executions, and the personals stored there resemble the fates of specific people whose names and stories should not be forgotten.
We remember. We mourn.
