Dr. Speckhard is the
director of the Holocaust Survivors Oral History Project – Belarus. Begun
in 1999 it is an ongoing project collecting oral histories from survivors of
the Minsk ghetto and Holocaust in Belarus. Sixty-five oral histories have been
collected to date which includes all the surviving members of the Minsk ghetto
still alive in Belarus. Dr. Speckhard has written academic articles on the
Minsk ghetto examining the historical and psychological issues, including
long-term effects of psychological trauma in Holocaust survivors living in the
former Soviet Union. She also wrote the Minsk ghetto entry for the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of Ghettos.
The Minsk ghetto was the largest and longest-lasting ghetto on Soviet
territory. At one time it housed over 100,000 Jews. This figure included the
original 75,000 Jews trapped in Minsk at the war’s outbreak in June of 1941.
Added to their numbers (which continually shrank with exterminations) were the
so called “Hamburg” Jews deported from many areas of Western Europe as well as
skilled local Jews and their families who were saved for a time from
extermination in other towns throughout Belarus and transported to Minsk ghetto
to work as slaves. Unlike other ghettos that existed before the war in Europe,
the Minsk ghetto was artificially created – prior to the Nazi occupation
there had been no segregated territory for Jews in Minsk. Another unique
feature of this ghetto is that its inhabitants were forced to serve as slaves
for the Nazis supporting the front (Ehnrenbur & Grossman, 1980; and Smolar,
1989).
Some survivors of the Minsk ghetto have compared it to worse than a
concentration camp because whereas in a concentration camp death occurred upon
arrival or when a person failed to be productive, death squads in the ghetto
were active day and night, and struck randomly all citizens of the ghetto.
Forced labor also took place, yet unlike a concentration camp most of the
inhabitants of the ghetto did not receive any daily food allowances –
therefore starvation and disease was rampant. Likewise unlike the Warsaw ghetto
no semblance of normal life or cultural activities carried on in the ghetto as
it was an artificially created place where slave laborers where housed in
vastly overcrowded living quarters until they were killed.
The majority of Jews gathered in the Minsk ghetto perished in a series of
“actions” culminating in the final liquidation of the ghetto in October 1943.
They also died as a result of unbearable living conditions. Only 10,000 ghetto
inhabitants are estimated to have survived; having done so by escaping to the partisans
or by being spirited out of the ghetto into hiding. Over 140,000 persons, many
of them Minsk and European Jews are estimated to have perished in Trostinets, a
nearby killing center (and later crematorium) just outside Minsk.
The Jews of Belarus have been silenced for many decades. Many admit to never
having recorded (in any form) their personal histories during the Holocaust.
After the war, many feared reprisals from Stalin’s government and kept silent
about their experiences. Those who had managed to escape and fought with the
partisans would sometimes make reference to their Holocaust experiences in
official biographies (these were required for employment) but many others
deleted this portion of their lives as though it never existed and some even
hid their Jewish identities because they feared Stalin’s repressive policies.
Most Belarusian survivors recall that at first after the war, they were too
afraid and traumatized to tell their stories. Over time they were busy
rebuilding their lives under extreme hardships and grew accustomed to living in
silence. They adjusted to rarely speaking of their ordeals. Finally, with
Perestroika, a new wind of openness pervaded the culture. The historical
archives were opened and a few Belarusian Jews began to collect the official
lists of those who perished in the ghetto and to publish archival data in book
format, including some brief first- person accounts. Frieda Raisman, the author
of one of these biographies written in the nineties, recalls leaving her handwritten
account of her experience in the Minsk ghetto on the kitchen table so her
husband would see it in the morning. It was the first time he had learned the
details of her internment in the Minsk ghetto. In over fifty years together,
she had never told him about her experiences. Many survivors told us that they
also had never shared their history with their family members. Collections of
short survivor autobiographies in Russian appear periodically but these are
nearly all self-published by the survivors themselves, or by Jewish groups and
lack academic analysis.
There are only 300-plus Holocaust survivors living in Belarus today. Dr.
Speckhard has interviewed 65 who represent most, if not all, of the Minsk
ghetto survivors who are still physically and mentally able to handle an
interview. Now that the oral histories are collected, Dr. Speckhard has
assembled a team comprising three Belarusian historians from the National
Academy of Sciences and the National Archives, and two historians working in the
Great Patriotic War Museum in Minsk, and a research assistant to help her
conduct research in the Belarusian archives for the historical materials to
support writing the oral histories into a comprehensive and definitive
eye-witness account of the Minsk ghetto and the Holocaust in Belarus.
Dr. Speckhard is currently fundraising for and writing a historical book about
the Minsk ghetto entitled The Minsk Ghetto & Beyond: Eyewitness Accounts of
the Holocaust in Belarus and fundraising for the development of a website
related to the Holocaust history of Minsk.
The book is to be an academic work appropriate for university courses and will
describe the Minsk ghetto and this period of Belarusian history through
eyewitness accounts that will be corroborated by the factual historical
details. This work will be much more than a technical history of the Holocaust
in Belarus; it will be enriched and enlivened by the voices of the survivors
themselves. The website will be more accessible to a wider audience than the book,
will include photographs, and be written in both English and Russian. The
project is time sensitive in that the remaining survivors are few in number and
dying off rapidly; the average age of the survivors is over eighty.
There are very few accounts written about the Belarus Jews far fewer than for
any of the other European countries, such as Poland and Ukraine. Most that were
written have been non-academic and focused on the partisan fighters. The main
reason for the paucity of historical work has been the difficulty of working in
the former Soviet union and now in the Republic of Belarus.
Because of Dr. Speckhard’s commitment to this project, both time-wise and
financially – self funding the majority of the research - she has been
able to complete the first portion of the project without major donor funds.
Now the book must be written. It is important for young people in Minsk,
Belarus and throughout the world to know about these events, not just because
of the inherent value of understanding history, but also so they can also
understand why it is so important to millions of Jews to have a country of
their own, a place where they can always find sanctity and safety. With
funding, this project will be able to achieve two important objectives: a comprehensive
academic history of the Minsk Ghetto and an educational website in both Russian
and English about the Holocaust in Belarus. After all these years of neglect,
the Jews in Belarus deserve to see this accomplished in their lifetimes.
If you would like to make a financial contribution to seeing this project to
fruition please contact Dr. Speckhard at Aspeckhard@brutele.be Arrangements can
be made to receive the funds through a Jewish nonprofit organization if
desired. As the research has been nearly all self funded to date and the data
collection, travel and professional time devoted to the project (by Dr.
Speckhard and other experts ) are each expensive, all financial contributions
are most welcome. Special thanks to Lufthansa, Frank and Galina Swartz, and to
the Remembrance & Reconciliation Fund for their contributions to this
important work.
http://www.annespeckhard.com/Holocaust.html