Kirkuty and the Warburg Colony

Berestye, Brest-Litovsk, Brześć nad Bugiem or Brest has always been a multinational city. From ancient times Belarusians, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Jews lived there. The city was built and grew by means of their work. New generations came, and the former, ending their life, settled in three cemeteries: Russian Trishinsky which was Orthodox, Catholic Polish and Jewish. People separated by faith were united by many other things: they were residents of one city, friends, neighbours, acquaintances, often shared joy and sorrow, and they all considered Brest their homeland.

For a long time, the majority of Brest’s population was Jewish. This was not by choice, but rather as a result of the policy of tsarist governments. This was the case until October 1942, when more than 30,000 ghetto prisoners were killed by the occupying forces. I want to tell you everything I know about the Jewish colony, cemetery and about the events connected to them. I am a witness of some. I learned about others from my friends in Kievka, who did not leave Brest during the occupation. Most of them are not with us anymore, many of their descendants moved to other parts of Brest, to other cities and much has changed in Kievka itself.

The expert in the Talmud and the Torah from the Great Synagogue on Sovetskaya Street. 1940.
Pivovarnaya Street (Browarowa) and the Jewish cemetery “Kirkuty” (now the Lokomotiv stadium). The funeral in May 1941.
Brest. The 23nd of June, 1941. The first arrests amongst Jews — Jewish young people aged 14–20. They were captured in the houses of Graevka, in particular, in the house of Skorbnikov on Mostovaya Street (Zbożowej Street at the time of Poland). The arrests were accompanied by beatings, people were hunted by dogs. The detainees were transported away by two trucks and they were forever gone. In one of the houses the wife of a Polish man, a German by birth, explained to German soldiers that there were no Jews around trying to save her neighbours. It helped for a short while. When the total extermination of Jews began everybody had died: the families of Skorbniks, the young and the elderly, the Grinbergs, the Londons and thousands of other Jews.
After the liquidation of the ghetto, the Germans and the police were ransacking the houses in search of sheltered Jews. They shot every Jewish person they found. Two people were killed at the intersection of Gogolya and Shirokaya Streets (now Kosmonavtov Boulevard). The order to shoot was given by the German, but the policeman who participated in the arrest failed to fulfill it. Then the German took away a rifle, beat the policeman with a rifle butt, and then shot the men from it. The drawing was created according to the memoirs of Misha Korza, who eye-witnessed this scene.
Yankel, a son of Sarah, was a happy cheerful, hunchback. In 1940–1941 he worked as a watchman at Brest Secondary Technical School of Railway Transport. He was a kind and sympathetic person, proud of his position. He diligently carried out his duties. He lived together with his mother in the Warburg Colony, where poor Jews used to live, on Minskaya Street (9-go Lutego Street at the time of Poland, now it is an extension of Pushkinskaya Street*). They had a small apartment on the second floor of the first house to the right at the beginning of the Colony (opposite to the Catholic cemetery). Yankel died together with his mother during the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in 1942. He was under his 30s. The house has survived. During the war the commandant’s office of the prisoners’ camps (Soviet and German) was stationed there. In recent decades, it was an ordinary residential building, residents of this building were resettled in XXI century.
The summer of 1942. Public execution at the intersection of Sovetskaya and Gogolya Streets. The victims were accused of looting while sorting the clothes of the ghetto prisoners shot at Bronnay Mount.
The arch of this house on Sovetskaya Street is the gate to the pit for the executed. Jewish prisoners were guided from Ostrovskogo Street. They gathered in the house where the militia headquarters were stationed after the war.
Kujbysheva Street at crossing with Moskovskaya Street. The picture shows the burial place of executed ghetto prisoners in the courtyard of a private house in the autumn of 1944. Later, the remains were reburied at Trishin cemetery. A multi-storied building was built on this site later.
The oldest Brest synagogue, built in 1862. It lost parishioners but it survived among the ruins. The picture shows how it looked in 1944–1945.
A memorial prayer of my classmate Dora Rubinstein’s grandfather. The Jewish cemetery in 1946 was already difficult to recognize. Matzevahs, taken from the graves, were used by the military authorities in 1945 for the improvement of the German PW camp.
Translated from Russian by Leo Levine and Sofia Levine