Memorial Complex “Stonevichi”

It was a warm summer morning in 1941. The youth of Ivye, like everywhere in Belarus, were partying until the early hours after a party to celebrate the end of the school year. The peaceful Sunday morning was interrupted by an incomprehensible and unfamiliar noise for the locals: Red Army tanks were moving through the village in two opposite directions, and an hour later, at 8 a.m., the residents heard Molotov’s first speech, announcing Germany’s attack on the USSR. At that time, there was a Red Army garrison in the town – a rifle battalion, which the Germans immediately bombed. During the next bombing, German aviation destroyed half of today’s 1st May Street, with the Jews and Poles living there. The population of Ivye began to scatter to the surrounding villages: Strizhenyata, Starchenyata, Lukashino. For only a week, an uneasy and restless silence reigned in the village… By the end of June, Wehrmacht units entered Iwye and for three long years the urban-type settlement of Iwye was under fascist occupation: from June 29, 1941 to July 7, 1944. Immediately after the capture of Iwye, a local police force was organized, which 70 people voluntarily joined, almost all of them Poles. The chief of police was a Pole, Mulica, and his assistant was Boleslav Zhebrik, a young Pole born in 1923, caught in 1945 as a deserter and sentenced to capital punishment. In addition to local policemen, Poles from neighboring villages also signed up, such as Henryk Kowalewski and Franciszek Zhukovsky. The latter lived in Warsaw, where he was arrested and sentenced to 12 years in prison and released after 5 years. According to the source, “the entire police force in Ivye was made up of the finest scum and hardened scum.” The punitive forces and their loyal henchmen did not wait long and the very next day ordered the entire adult male Jewish population to go to work, forcing them to clean cars and gun mounts. The occupiers immediately began to mock the Jews, their first victims were the teachers of the Tarbut school, who, according to the investigation, were pointed out by local Poles. On that day, a local communist, teacher Akiv Bakst, was shot, also betrayed by the Poles…
Already on August 2, 1941, 220 Ivye Jews were shot: the punitive forces took these people out of the column, put them in trucks and drove them out of the town under escort. The rest were told that this group was sent to work in the West, but it all turned out to be a lie. In fact, they were all shot that same day in the area of ​​the village of Stonevichi.
“In August 1941, they herded us all into one place: three thousand people on a small piece of land, a month later they brought another 800 Jews from the towns of Traby and Lipnishki, and in February they drove another 250 Jews from the village of Borisovka and the surrounding area. The terrible overcrowding caused epidemics, from which people died en masse. The unbearable conditions were made worse by constant police brutality, the murder of Jews and terrible hunger… According to the recollections of an eyewitness, some local Belarusians risked their lives to help their Jewish friends, but the Poles demonstrated a fierce hatred of Jews en masse, without hesitation handing over all the escaped Jews from the ghetto to the Germans, receiving for their betrayal as a reward the sum of occupation marks and a couple of kilograms of sugar “for each head”… In February 1942, in the village of Ivye, punitive forces established a ghetto, where they concentrated the Jews of the Ivye and Yuratishkovsky districts, forcibly resettling three thousand people. The ghetto was heavily guarded, securely fenced with barbed wire. It was forbidden to leave the designated territory without a pass, violators of the fascist order were threatened with death. When they tried to leave the fenced area, the fascists demonstratively shot a Jewish girl and her family of six… For the same violation, the punitive forces later shot two more families. Some of the prisoners were used for various jobs outside the ghetto.”
The first mass action to liquidate the Jews took place on May 12, 1942. A detachment of German gendarmerie, a Lithuanian police battalion and Polish policemen from Lida and Novogrudok entered Iwye. The Jews were driven out of the ghetto houses, “herded” into columns, and the policemen escorted them to the central square. Here the selection began: the holders of the so-called worker cards were separated, then several dozen healthy-looking Jews were added to them. The rest were driven to the trenches near the village of Stonevichi. In groups of 20 people, people were driven into pits, after being forced to undress, and shot. More than 2,500 people died during this humiliating and inhuman punitive action. About 1,300 people remained alive in the ghetto, among whom an underground organization was formed, the purpose of which was to obtain weapons and go into the forest to the partisans. Some of the underground members died during a clash with the police a few days later, while others managed to leave the ghetto by various routes and were accepted into Soviet partisan units, establishing contact with the Bielski brothers’ unit. On December 31, 1942, representatives of the occupation authorities came to the Ivie ghetto, which by that time had thinned out considerably after the mass shootings, and announced that all the camp’s inhabitants would be sent to the city of Borisov to work at a peat factory. Those who remained in the ghetto, according to the recollections of an eyewitness, Moisei Kaganovich, a partisan from the Alexander Nevsky detachment, were sent to oil fields in Beloye Boloto, in the vicinity of Borisov, where they arrived on January 20, 1943. and where they died in March 1943.
In January 1943, already on the eve of the liquidation of the ghetto, some of the prisoners began to build a shelter under the floor of one of the houses, 13 of them managed to escape and with the help of Belarusians and Tatars were resettled in nearby villages. During the liquidation of the ghetto, 195 Jews were shot, about 1,200 were transferred to Lida, from where in September 1943 they were taken to the Majdanek concentration camp.