The Germans entered David-Horodok on July 5, 1941. The first significant action they took was the destruction of 3,000 Jewish men and boys. On August 10, 1941, the 17th of Av, 5701 on the Hebrew calendar, the Horodtchukas, David-Horodok Christians of Tartar descent, collected all Jewish males over the age of eight in the marketplace across from the Catholic Church. Then, with the SS, they marched the men out of town to mass graves prepared east of David-Horodok on the road to Chinovsk and Olshan. There, the men and boys, surrounded by SS Einsatzgruppen troops, were machine-gunned and buried.
Later that afternoon, as the rain fell, all the Jewish women and children were forced out of town to wander for two to three weeks under the control of Horodtchuka guards. Meanwhile, their homes and possessions were plundered. Many of the older women died, while a few of the women escaped to other shtetls where they had relatives. Most, however, were returned to David-Horodok where they were put into a ghetto surrounded by barbed wire. There, forced to work for the Germans, many died of maltreatment and starvation.
On September 10, 1942, the day before Rosh Hashanah and the 28th of Elul, 5702 on the Hebrew calendar, the remaining 1,100 women and children were marched out to the same place the men had been shot and were murdered by the guns of German SS Police Battalion 309. This ended the close to 500-year existence of the Jewish community in David-Horodok.
Immediately after the end of the war in 1945, a number of David-Horodok residents, who had survived the Holocaust because they had been in the Soviet Union during the war, arrived in the town of David-Horodok and its land soaked in the blood of the Jews. They did not find a single Jewish soul, but they found a large mass grave of David-Horodok Jews.
The town’s son, Yitzchak Nachmanovitz, a soldier in the Russian Army, went to the mass grave for the first time in 1945, four years after the murder, and found human bones lying on the ground. He buried them and marked the spot with a large stone. Over the years, a thick forest was planted around the grave area, a forest that threatened to take over the grave site as well.
In 1991, with the fall of the Iron Curtain, a delegation from the organization in Israel visited for the first time and erected a monument near the grave. In 1996, the monument, which had been vandalized, was renovated. The monument was fenced in and the area surrounding it was tiled. However, the old monument began to crack and crumble and it was clear that its years were numbered. Sometime after 2000, the monument was renovated again and painted blue.
In 2005, the Organization of the Descendants of David-Horodok and the Surrounding Areas’ committee decided to renovate the grave site in a way that truly respected the fallen. There were three immediate goals: to investigate and mark the boundaries of the tomb precisely, to choose an architect to design the entire site, and to collect donations to finance the mission. The three objectives were not easy to achieve, but were finally achieved.
The borders of the grave were drawn precisely according to reliable evidence, the architect Leonid Levin was chosen, who was also the chairman of the Jewish community in Belarus and a talented architect who had won the Lenin Prize for Architecture, and the required amount was collected, with the generous contributions of the community members in Israel and abroad. In 2009, the work began and was finished about a year later in May 2010.
In July 2010, the newly designed monument and mass grave site were unveiled and dedicated. About 100 men and women from Israel, the United States, and Canada participated in the dedication of the site. In honor of the event, the film “Memory Chain” was produced. It documents the delegation’s visit in 2010 to the town of David-Horodok, as well as to the city of Stolin and the region in general, and also commemorates the moving event of the inauguration of the mass grave site. The 52-minute film, in Hebrew with English subtitles, can be viewed at: http://vimeo.com/42809338.
With the newly designed monument and mass grave site, the murdered Jews of the town of David-Horodok were given a fitting memorial and an honorable grave for eternal memory. May the memory of the martyrs of David-Horodok be a blessing.
