A tiny Belarusian town of less than 1,000 people made international headlines after the discovery of a mass grave of holding nearly two dozen Jewish victims.
Uncovered in the once Nazi-controlled town of Stresyn, within the Gomel region in the country’s south-east, were the remains of 23 people, including 11 children between the ages of one and seven.
According to Belarusian media reports, a local man bought a house close to the site 15 years ago and discovered the bodies while carrying out work on the grounds.
He decided, as reported by Belarus news agency Balta, not to disclose his find to anyone, even though many local residents purportedly knew the remains of Jews once confined to the local ghetto were buried in the area.
Eventually, local media reported on the discovery and it was quickly picked up by international outlets.
Belarus authorities hypothesise that the 23 victims died as a result of appalling conditions in the ghetto or illness, as no evidence of execution was found during an examination of the grave.
The Gomel region was once home to a sizeable Jewish population. Some 40,000 Jews lived and worked there in the late 1930s, accounting for nearly 30 per cent of the region’s total population.
Most of the region’s Jews were able to evacuate the district before the arrival of German troops on August 19, 1941, but those who remained were forcibly incarcerated in three ghettos, and their property was looted. Holocaust victims from Gomel are estimated to be between 3,000-4,000.
The find, the country’s second Jewish mass grave unearthed in five years, comes at a time when the Belarusian authorities are beginning belatedly to acknowledge the full extent of war crimes committed against their Jewish citizens.
Most memorials and plaques honouring Belarusian victims of the Second World War are controversially dedicated to “Soviet citizens” who were killed “resisting the Nazis”, often ignoring or obfuscating the fact that Jews were targeted specifically for being Jewish.
Belarusian workmen excavate a mass grave of Jewish victims, uncovered at a construction site in the city of Brest, February 27, 2019 (Credit: SERGEI GAPON/AFP via Getty Images)AFP via Getty Images
It is estimated that 800,000 Belarusian Jews, or 90 per cent of the total Jewish population, were murdered during the war following Nazi Germany’s invasion of the country, then a republic of the Soviet Union known as the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.
By the end of 1941, there were about 5,000 troops in the country dedicated to finding, rounding up and murdering Jews, but much of the killing was carried out by local task groups spurred on by the Nazis to carry out pogroms against their fellow citizens at killing sites throughout the country.
In 2019, another mass grave containing more than 1,200 bodies, many with bullet holes in their skulls, was discovered in Belarus, in the southwest city of Brest, close to the border with Poland.
Those remains were buried, within blue caskets embossed with the Star of David, according to Jewish custom during a ceremony featuring various dignitaries and members of the Jewish community, but no such arrangement has yet been announced for the most recent discovery.
There are today around 14,000 self-identifying Jews in Belarus, according to the national census.
