Memorial to the murdered Jews of Mir

Память забитых евреев Мира / Памяць забітых яўрэяў ў Міры

In the small Belarusian town of Mir, three memorials commemorate more than 2,500 Jews who were murdered there between the summer of 1941 and August 13, 1942 by the Germans and their local accomplices.

History

Mir, about 85 kilometers southwest of Minsk on the banks of the Miranka River, was founded in 1395. Jews lived there from the 17th century. In 1921 Jews made up about half of Mir's 4,000 inhabitants.
In the interwar period Mir belonged to Poland, but became Soviet in autumn of 1939 as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. On the eve of the German attack, many Jewish refugees from the German-occupied part of Poland stayed in the city. The German Wehrmacht occupied Mir on June 26, 1941, four days after their invasion of the Soviet Union. A few days later, the Germans had a local auxiliary police force set up with the help of which they went on to expropriate the Jewish inhabitants and forced them to wear identification.
On July 20, 1941 German units shot 19 Jews, mainly intellectuals.
During a mass shooting on November 9, 1941 the Germans and their local helpers murdered most of the Jewish population. The auxiliary policemen drove the Jews from their homes to the market square or shot them directly in the streets. 85 Jews were sorted out as skilled workers and locked away. They shot the other Jews directly on the market square or drove them to other shooting sites, such as the Jewish and Tartar cemetery of the city. About 800 Jews were spared from the »Aktion«. A few days later they had to move to a ghetto, which was relocated to Mir Castle in May 1942. The living conditions there were considerably worse but the walls also protected them from arbitrary attacks by auxiliary policemen. On August 10, 1942 a newly founded resistance group in the ghetto ventured an outbreak in which up to 300 people managed to escape. All the Jews left in the castle were murdered. The Jewish community of Mir was obliterated.

Mir, 2012, Memorial in Oktyabrskaya Street, public domain

Mir, 2012, Memorial in Tankistov Street, public domain

Victims

On July 20, 1941, German units murdered about 19 Jews. On November 9, 1941, members of the local command of Stolbtsy (Belarusian: Stowbtsy) located near Mir, supported by local auxiliary policemen, murdered about 1,500 Jews and thus the majority of the Jewish population of Mir. In May 1942, the previously unguarded ghetto was moved to a few rooms of the city palace and the Jews were confined there in a very narrow space. Despite the miserable circumstances, a resistance group was formed. In the summer of 1942 they learned from Oswald (also: Shmuel) Rufeisen (1922–1998), who disguised himself as a German national with the name Josef Oswald and worked for the Germans as a translator, that the extermination of the ghetto was imminent. Many ghetto inhabitants were unable to flee or mistrusted Rufeisen yet on August 10, 1942 150 to 300 Jews fled into the woods. There they tried to join partisan groups but didn't succeed. About 65 Jews were arrested again by the German gendarmerie and their helpers on the following days. Local civilians also participated in the pursuit. Only about 40 survived the war. Among them was also Rufeisen who was hiding in Mir. A few days later, on August 13, 1942, members of the German gendarmerie and their helpers murdered all approximately 560 Jews left behind in the ghetto in the small forest of Jablonovchina near the town.

With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 and the Red Army’s invasion of eastern Poland the north-east of the country was annexed to Soviet Belarus. In summer 1941 the whole of Belarus was occupied by German troops. Over the next three years between one in four and one in three residents met a violent death. Almost all of the towns were completely destroyed. The Wehrmacht or SS systematically annihilated around 620 villages together with theor inhabitants, including Chatyn. The largest extermination camp on occupied Soviet territory was located in Maly Trostenets outside the Belarusian capital Minsk. It is now presumed that at least 60,000 German and Belarusian Jews were murdered there. Up to 85,000 Jews are estimated to have died in Minsk and 230,000 in the country as a whole. From 1941, Belarus was at the heart of the Soviet partisan struggle against the German occupation with over a thousand active partisan groups. The Red Army began to recapture the country at the end of 1943 and the German occupation was considered over by summer 1944. The country was largely destroyed, the society shattered and the people traumatised. Belarus was reincorporated into the Soviet Union in 1944. A large part of the Polish territory annexed in 1939 remained part of the country. National memorial and memory culture in post-war Belarus were dominated by the liberation of the country on 3 July 1944 and the day of victory on 9 May 1945 as the end of a »heroic« struggle in the Great Patriotic War. Memory of the partisan war was also of key importance. The genocide of the Jews was not mentioned directly in the Soviet republics. An obelisk put up at the »Yama«, a pit where mass murders took place in the Minsk ghetto, was therefore an exception in the former Soviet Union. It was erected as early as 1946 and for decades was the sole memorial with a Yiddish inscription and a direct reference to the murdered Jews. The memorial site at Khatyn is also unusual. Here,153 people were burnt alive in March 1943. The memorial site, established in 1969, is notable for its simplicity, its concentration on the human dimension of the plight of the victims amidst the horrors of war and the absence of monumental features otherwise common in the former Soviet Union. After Belarus claimed independence in 1991 the search began for an independent national identity. The number of victims plays a decisive role, especially those killed during the Second World War. However, there is consciously no distinction drawn between the territorial situation of the country pre- and post-1939. Both the crimes of the Stalinist regime and the Holocaust have come to the fore but the nature of the state has prevented public discussion of these aspects. State remembrance continues to be dominated by the war in the years 1941 to 1944. Its main symbol is the monumental new building of the Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War, opened in 2014. In the meantime, however, the association of Jewish communities in Belarus has established a series of memorials to the victims of mass murder. Since the early 1990s, several German towns have also put up stelae in Minsk to remember the Jews deported and murdered there. The Berlin stele, financed by the federal state of Berlin and the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, was inaugurated in an official ceremony on June 25, 2009. There is also movement with regards to a fitting development of the Maly Trostenets area: In 2015, a memorial complex was inaugurated at the site. A second segment which was co-financed by Germany was opened in 2018 by the presidents of Belarus, Austria and Germany. Germany has also pledged to finance the renovation of the Historical Workshop’s historical building on the former territory of the Minsk ghetto, documenting the fates of its victims.

Remembrance

The Red Army recaptured Mir on June 26, 1944. After the war, Soviet and Polish courts sentenced several members of the local auxiliary police who had supported the Germans in murder operations. Two of the known former mass shooting sites are located near the famous Mir Castle. In 1966 and 1967 an obelisk was erected in each of these places. Since 1966 another memorial is located one kilometer southeast of Mir in the small forest of Yablonovchina, where the victims of the last mass shooting in summer 1942 are buried.
Oswald Rufeisen, with whose help about 200 Jews had escaped from the ghetto, survived the war, hidden by a nun. He converted to Catholicism and moved to Poland after the war to become a priest. In the 1960s he emigrated to Israel. Until his death in 1998 he lived as a monk with the Carmelites and was a priest of a Catholic parish in Haifa. In 1992 the survivors of the ghetto of Mir gathered to personally thank Rufeisen. He was also honoured in books and films, the Israeli memorial Yad Vashem produced a documentary film about his life. The Russian writer Lyudmila Ulizkaya based her main character of her novel »Daniel Stein, Interpreter« on the person of Rufeisen. In 2002, the nun Yelisaveta Bartikova, who had hidden Rufeisen, received the Israeli award »Righteous Among the Nations«.
Today Mir has about 2,300 inhabitants but there is no longer a Jewish community. A private museum run by Viktor Sakel tells also about the Jewish past of the town. There are four cemeteries in Mir, one Jewish, one Christian Orthodox, one Catholic and one Tartar. Although many tombstones of the Jewish cemetery were stolen during and after the Second World War, more than one hundred are still preserved there.

Mir, 2012, Inner courtyard of Mir Castle, Alex Zelenko

Mir, undated, Dovid Danzig at his mother's grave in the old cemetery in Mir, http://pages.uoregon.edu/rkimble/Mirweb/MirSiteMap.html

Open

The memorials are accessible at all times.

Contact

http://pages.uoregon.edu/rkimble/Mirweb/MirSiteMap.html

rkimble@uoregon.edu

Uliza Tankistow
231444 Mir

Mir, before 1932, Old photo of the synagogue in Mir, http://pages.uoregon.edu/rkimble/Mirweb/MirSiteMap.html

Mir, about 1946, Mir after Second World War, http://pages.uoregon.edu/rkimble/Mirweb/MirSiteMap.html

Mir, before 1932, Old town view, http://pages.uoregon.edu/rkimble/Mirweb/MirSiteMap.html

No place given, undated, Oswald Rufeisen from Mir, Archive of the Museum at Mir Castle

Mir, 1922, Fanny Gorodeijski and her mother at Fanny's grandfather's grave, http://pages.uoregon.edu/rkimble/Mirweb/MirSiteMap.html

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