_-3.jpg)
1 Execution site(s)
Daria L., born in 1929: "After the shooting of the Jews, during the night, a Jewish woman called Leika came to knock on the window of our house. She was young. She said that she had escaped from the pit, which hadn’t been covered very well. She had an injury on her left arm. She asked if we could make a bandage for her. My father did, but thought that it was too dangerous for her to stay with us, and that our family could be shot if she did. Leika asked us just to take her to the railroad so she could follow the tracks to her house. As my father didn’t want to do it, I took her by myself.» (Witness N°822, interviewed in Parichi, on June 23, 2014).
"In November 1943, all the Jewish bodies were burned by the Germans. The fire lasted three days. All the bones and ashes were scattered under the supervision of the Germans in the fields of our kolkhoz. The bones were transported in carts by requisitioned locals." [Testimony of Erofevich G. born in 1908, for The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission, RG- 22.002M. 7021-82]
Parichi is a small town located 115 km northwest of Gomel. In 1939, half of the population was Jewish. There were 1881 Jews living in the town. There was a synagogue and a Jewish cemetery. Before the war, Parichi was a district center. Parichi was occupied by German forces on July 21, 1941.
Until September 1941, the Jews lived in their own houses freely and were subjected to hard labor, like cleaning the streets or digging sand from the Berezina River. At the end of September 1941, all the Jews were resettled in a ghetto on Bobruiskaya Street, fenced in with barbed wire and guarded by local policemen. According to different estimates, there were between 1000 and 1500 Jewish inmates in the ghetto.
The Aktions started in the autumn of 1941. On October 18, 1941, the ghetto was liquidated by a mobile SD unit which arrived from Bobruisk, assisted by the local police. Initially, all the Jews were locked up at the Ortskommandantur, located in the building of the former hotel. Once gathered, they were transported to the execution site in covered trucks, 2 km away from Parichi, in a field between the villages of Vysokiy Polk and Belitsa. According to eyewitness n°822 interviewed by Yahad, the Jews were shot in 4 different mass graves that they had dug themselves. There were approximately 1000 victims. At the end of the war, in March 1944, the Germans decided to hide all traces of their crimes during Operation 1005, during which the bodies were exhumed and burned.
Do you have additional information regarding a village that you would like to share with Yahad ?
Please contact us at contact@yahadinunum.org
or by calling Yahad – In Unum at +33 (0) 1 53 20 13 17