Byten Ghetto

Byten Ghetto
Location	Ivatsevichy District
Date	summer 1941 – December 25, 1942

Byten Ghetto (summer 1941 – December 25, 1942) was a Jewish ghetto and a place of forced resettlement of Jews from the town of Byten in the Ivatsevichy district of the Brest region and nearby settlements during the persecution and extermination of Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II.

Occupation of Byten and the Creation of the Ghetto

Before the war, 739 Jews lived in the town of Byten, along with about 200 Jewish refugees from Poland. The German occupation lasted more than three years, from June 26, 1941, to July 9 (or 10), 1944. Following the occupation, the Germans, implementing the Nazi program of exterminating Jews, organized a ghetto in the town and established a Judenrat of six people, headed by dentist Arbuz.

Destruction of the ghetto

The Germans took the possibility of Jewish resistance very seriously and primarily killed Jewish men aged 15 to 50 in the ghetto or even before its creation, despite the economic impracticality, as these were the most able-bodied prisoners. For this reason, "actions" (used by the Nazis to refer to the mass murders they organized) against Jews in Byten occurred repeatedly until the complete destruction of the ghetto. On December 25, 1942, the Nazis and collaborators destroyed the Byten ghetto. Jews were brought by trucks to the outskirts of the town to an old trench 100 meters long, forced to undress and lie face down at the bottom, and then shot from above with machine guns and submachine guns. The next victims were forced to lie on top of the dead. The pit was covered with a layer of earth 0.5 meters thick and surrounded with barbed wire. A total of 2,000 to 3,000 Jews from the town itself and nearby villages were killed in Byten.

Memory

The Commission for Assistance to the Extraordinary State Commission of the USSR for the Byten district exhumed the site of the shooting on November 18, 1944. On December 30, 1944, the same commission examined two mass burial sites near the village of Rudnya (2 km from Byten). In one site, they counted 900 bodies (350 men, 420 women, and 130 children), and in the other, 80 bodies (45 men, 20 women, and 15 children). The expert commission's conclusions did not record the nationality of the deceased, but according to witness testimonies, it was established that Jews from Byten were killed at this site on July 25, 1942. They were brought to the killing site by trucks, forced to undress, lie face down in the pit, and shot. The next group of doomed people was forced to lie on the dead. The commission's conclusion recorded that the bodies of the dead were completely unclothed, lying face down, mixed with children, women, and men, with bullet marks in different parts of the bodies.

From the posthumous letter of Zlata Vishnyatskaya, a Jew from Byten, found after the war (written before the execution of Zlata and her 12-year-old daughter Yunita - to her husband and father): "On July 25, we had a terrible massacre. Mass murder. 350 people remain. 850 died at the hands of the killers with a black death. Like puppies, they were thrown into latrines, children were thrown alive into pits. I think that someone will accidentally survive, he will tell about our torments and our bloody end. We wait for death every day and mourn our loved ones. Yours, Moshkele, are no longer here. But I envy them. I am finishing, it is impossible to write and I cannot convey our torments... The only thing you can do for us is to avenge our killers. We cry out to you: avenge! Farewell to all of you before our death. (postscript) Dear father! I say goodbye to you before death. We really want to live, but it's gone - they don't let us! I am so afraid of this death because small children are thrown alive into graves. Farewell forever."

The commission identified and documented the names of some of the organizers and perpetrators of the mass murders of Jews in Byten: gendarmerie chief Schultz, officers Ganofftol, Hilkin, Browzer, Griche, deputy gendarmerie chief Weber, SD chief Tubis, gendarmes Enkel, Shmek, Izberg, sawmill chief Wunderlich and his assistant Lass, head of the furshutskommando Michelos Otto, Oberleutnant Koch, and Stabsfeldwebel Alfred Rozubavts. Incomplete lists of Jews killed in Byten and nearby villages have been published. In 1968, a monument was erected at the site of the shooting in memory of the victims of the Jewish genocide.