The story of Abram Rubenchik is a remarkable and tragic account of a Jewish boy who was destined to pass through the circles of hell of the Nazi ghetto, to lose almost his entire large family, and to survive in order to tell the truth. Abram, his older sister Ekha, and his cousin Ginda became symbols of an unbreakable will to live and to resist.
Abram (in the family he was affectionately called Avremele) was born in 1927 into the large family of Israel and Nakhama Rubenchik. He was the second of seven children: Ekha, Abram, Elya, Gesl, Khaya, Yarukham, and the youngest little sister, Tayba. The family lived in their own house on Zelyony Lane, in the northwestern part of Minsk. Almost all their neighbors were Jews. His father worked as a plasterer and painter; in winter he would sometimes hire himself out to cut ice from the Svislach River. They lived modestly but in harmony. The Rubenchiks were likely long-time residents of Minsk: even Abram’s grandfather, Gesl Rubenchik, before the Revolution, transported sand that was extracted from a quarry on Ratomskaya Street. Once, having grown very tired, he lay down to rest on damp sand, caught a chill, and died of pneumonia at the age of fifty-four…
Abram’s father, Israel Rubenchik, had five sisters and five brothers. Almost all of them lived nearby. Abram remembers them by name: Aunt Tayba (killed with almost her entire family on “Bloody Monday”—we will return to this), Uncle Khaim the stove-maker (killed with his wife and children), Aunt Yudes the cook (killed with her daughter), Aunt Eshka with her husband Leybe Shifrin and their three children (all were killed), Aunt Genya Soloveychik (killed with her husband and son Gesl; her daughter Maya miraculously survived and later moved to the United States), Aunt Sima (joined the partisans), Uncle Leva (went to the front; his family was killed), Uncle Lazar (a teacher at a dental school, went to the front, returned, later moved to Israel), Uncle Aron (killed with his family), and Uncle Genakh. The tragic fate of Genakh Rubenchik is an example of the brutal antisemitism Jews faced even in the partisan forests. During a march, his feet were rubbed raw and bleeding, and when Genakh fell behind the column, the commander caught up with him and personally shot him with a submachine gun, stating that he was getting rid of “extra Jews.”
In his memoirs, Abram warmly describes his childhood: how they—laughing, merrily splashing little children—were bathed in a tin basin; how, if someone fell ill, their mother would buy sweet halva and a rich bun—this was a real celebration. He recalls how his father would put on a tallit in the mornings and pray, swaying, and after the prayer would unwind the black strap of the tefillin from his arm.
Abram studied his first three grades at Jewish School No. 30 on Internatsionalnaya Street. His teacher’s name was Faina Kaplan—among themselves, the children good-naturedly joked about her, recalling her far more famous namesake who had attempted to assassinate Lenin. Later, the school was closed, and Abram transferred to the fourth grade of Russian School No. 12. He attended drawing, chess, and checkers clubs at the Palace of Pioneers. With neighborhood boys, he played cards, lapta, “mayalki,” and “nozhiki.” From about the age of ten, the boy earned money through physical labor: sawing and chopping wood, gathering hay, unloading watermelons at the market, carrying crates. “I was happy that I could help my family,” he recalls.
In winter, Abram loved skiing. The steep slopes ending at the Pit were perfect for such outings. This place our hero would never forget. Back then, in his cloudless prewar childhood, he could not have imagined that during the horrific pogrom on March 2, 1942, the Nazis would shoot about five thousand prisoners of the Minsk ghetto at the Pit. Many victims—including around two hundred orphans from an orphanage, along with medical staff and caregivers—were thrown into the pit while still alive and then covered with earth. In 1947, a commemorative black obelisk would be erected here, and half a century later it would be complemented by the sculptural composition “The Last Journey” by architect Leonid Levin.
On the morning of June 22, 1941, Abram was at the opening of Komsomol Lake. Like many schoolchildren, he and other boys had worked there during a community work day, pushing wheelbarrows of soil and tamping the ground. The children worked willingly, joked, laughed, and sang songs. And suddenly, one of the adults said: “War!” Abram recalls: “At first we didn’t even understand what it was. But when we returned home, from the worried faces of the adults we sensed: something unexpected and irreversible had happened.” Alarming rumors began to spread through the city: the Germans had dropped a paratrooper landing on the outskirts! Panic began.
On June 24, Minsk was subjected to a massive bombardment. The headquarters of the Western Front, the government of the republic, and the leadership left the city, moving to Mogilev. Incendiary bombs fell on residential districts, fires broke out everywhere—wooden houses, which had made up the overwhelming majority of Minsk’s housing before the war, burned like candles.
Anxiety was growing in the Rubenchik family. Relatives gathered—the father’s brothers and sisters. A dispute broke out: what should they do? Many had no doubts—they had to flee the city, escape the fire and bombings as quickly as possible: find a horse and cart, pack the essentials, and head east, following the retreating army. Others hoped that everything would pass. “We are working people—what do we have to fear?” someone argued. “There are no Communists among us…” Everyone was waiting for the father’s older brother, Aron, to arrive. Because of her fair hair, his wife Masha was nicknamed “Mashe di Gele” (from Yiddish—Masha the Fair). Educated and pleasant, she was considered intelligent and authoritative within the large Rubenchik mishpokhe. They began asking her opinion. Abram remembered a phrase Aunt Masha said in Yiddish: “To abandon bread and go looking for scraps? No, I will not agree to that!” Similar discussions were taking place among the neighbors—everyone was worried and arguing. At that time, in the USSR, people still did not know that the Germans were persecuting Jews. And the family stayed in Minsk…
Meanwhile, tension in the city was rising. Shops were closed, and the market stood empty. In the former mosque on Dimitrov Street there was a food warehouse—on June 25, people began to carry food away from there. Abram did not hesitate either: he rolled out a small barrel of margarine and dragged home a box of candies—his favorite “pillow” caramels. “Later, when there was no food, these supplies were very useful for our family,” he recalls.
Near the former mosque, the boy saw Germans for the first time. They rode onto Dimitrov Street on a motorcycle with a sidecar. Abram clearly remembered their gray-green tunics, Parabellum pistols on their belts, and Schmeisser submachine guns on their chests. An officer jumped off, pulled out his pistol, and fired into the air, dispersing the crowd. Entering the mosque building, he shouted: “Was ist da los?” (“What is going on?”). Frightened people pressed themselves against the walls; no one answered. Some time later, the Germans left, and the frenzy of looting continued until late at night. Stearin candles were especially valued—there was no electricity, and fights would sometimes break out over them.
Abram returned home proudly with his “trophies,” feeling like a provider. His mother, however, shook her head sorrowfully: “What people have come to—everyone is looting…” Soviet money immediately turned into useless scraps of paper. At first, it lay scattered on the sidewalks; boys burned it in bonfires. Later, an exchange rate was established: ten rubles for one occupation mark.
Soon, SS men appeared in Minsk. They roamed the streets, sometimes accompanied by interpreters, finding out where Jews lived, entering apartments, searching for valuables: “Gold! Gold!” This was an order of the occupation authorities—to confiscate Jewish property, first and foremost gold and silver: rings, earrings, tableware, candlesticks, watches. But what was far worse, the SS carried out a “selection”: they seized young Jewish men and took them to prison (many of them would later end up in the concentration camp in Drozdy), releasing only those with needed professions—stove-makers, masons, painters, plasterers.
At that time, Abram still did not understand why the Germans were so aggressively disposed toward Jews. Later he realized, learned through terrible experience: it was a deliberate policy that blamed his people for all misfortunes. The researcher of Nazism, historian and playwright Hannes Heer, later wrote: “The hunting of Jews and their extermination were not carried out accidentally or spontaneously. There existed a clearly developed, approved system… The desire to kill, sadism, cruelty… could not arise by order. These qualities were inherent in a significant part of the servicemen. But the orders of commanders provided the pretext for these instincts to come out.”
Abram Rubenchik recalls the concentration camp in Drozdy—one of the first in occupied Belarus. On the northwestern outskirts of Minsk, right by the Svislach River, the Germans created a temporary camp that later became the notorious “Stalag-352.” In the July days of 1941, a large group of prisoners of war—ten to fifteen thousand—was driven onto a vast area. All were made to sit directly on the bare ground; the territory was fenced with ropes, and machine guns were set up at the corners. All Jews arrested in the first days of the occupation, aged from eighteen to forty-five, were brought there as well.
In The Black Book by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, there is an account by a man who had been in Drozdy: “On the first day, thousands of people were left to spend the night in an open field. It was cold, but everyone lay close together and thus kept each other warm. On the second day, everyone was thirsty, and each person approached the guards and asked for water. In response, the Germans shot at people… On the third day… an interpreter appeared with an officer and announced that until four in the afternoon, relatives would be allowed into the camp with food parcels… But then we heard the cries of weeping women. People asked: why are you crying? And immediately we heard the answer: our husbands and children are no longer there—they have been killed…”
Abram, in his memoirs, confirms this: every day, hundreds of Minsk residents rushed to Drozdy in the hope of finding their relatives—but not many were fortunate… After the war, historians established that during the occupation, at least eighty thousand people perished in the camp.
Even before the official establishment of the ghetto, looting and killings began in Jewish neighborhoods. Abram’s father broke down the interior partitions and made internal wooden shutters for the windows. He suggested that his sister Tayba, who lived across the street in house No. 20, do the same. But she refused: “God has protected me until this day; He will protect me further.”
One night, the sound of shattering glass rang out. Then came blows against the windows and the door. Everyone froze in fear. From the street came German curses: “Verfluchte Juden!.. Schweinerei!..” (“Cursed Jews!.. Swine!..”) The internal shutters saved the family. Everyone rushed into the malina—a shelter dug into the ground.
Hiding, they heard indistinct sounds and gunfire. After some time, everything fell silent. In the morning, there was a knock at the door. A crying child’s voice in Yiddish pleaded: “Lozt mikh arayn! Lozt mikh arayn! Bay undz hot men alemen geharget!” (“Let me in! Let me in! They have killed everyone at our place!”) It was their cousin Ginda. Everyone ran to the house across the street. What they saw there Abram would never be able to forget: thirteen bloodied bodies—on the floor, on the beds, on the sofa, in the kitchen. Aunt Tayba lay on the floor; beside her, in the bed, was her daughter Khaya’s little son, the first grandson in the family. Khaya herself, the eldest daughter, lay with her chest torn open, and around the wound were what seemed like marks of claws driven into the flesh. “It seemed that only a wild beast could leave such a wound…”
Sobbing, Ginda recounted the details of that night. The SS men broke in after midnight. There were four of them, wearing red armbands with swastikas, armed with Parabellums. The senior one shouted: “Is there any gold? Hand it over!” The father said there was no gold. Then the officer said something to the others; they took positions by the exits, while he himself grabbed Khaya and dragged her into a separate room. She screamed and resisted. The brute raped her, then shot her and rushed out in a rage. Another German seized little Dinka. She broke free and began throwing dishes. The German flew into a fury and started shooting. The senior officer killed the mother, who had tried to shield Mina and Sofa with her body. He wounded little Gesl in the stomach as he lay on the stove. Then he fired several shots at the father. He fell and pinned Ginda beneath him—this saved her life. The girl was covered in blood and pretended to be dead.
How long it lasted, Ginda did not know. She only remembered that the officer said something in German, and they all left. She did not understand that her relatives were dead—it seemed to her that they were sleeping. She went from one to another, trying to wake them, shaking them. Only the wounded Gesl on the stove regained consciousness. She helped him down and dragged him to the bed…
Ginda listed those who had been in the house: her mother Tayba, her father Eli, her little sisters Mina, Sofa, Dinka, Ester, her little brother Gesl, Khaya’s one-and-a-half-year-old son, Gershn Slepak with his son, her father’s brother Meysl with his wife and children… In total, twenty-two people; thirteen of them were killed. Abram called that terrible day “Bloody Monday.” But it was only a precursor of the nightmare that awaited the Jews of Minsk ahead.
On July 19, 1941, the military commandant’s office of Minsk issued an order establishing a Jewish ghetto. Its text, in German, Russian, and Belarusian, was posted in prominent places. The order required Jews to move within five days to designated streets. Violation of the order meant execution; hiding Jews meant execution of the entire family.
A real crush began. Jews from all over the city moved to the streets assigned to them. Trams were not running, so adults with children made their way as best they could—hauling their belongings on carts and wheelbarrows. Some hired porters, but taking advantage of the confusion, they sometimes disappeared with the belongings. “It is impossible to describe the din, the noise, and the crying that accompanied the resettlement,” Abram recalls.
The ghetto area consisted mostly of wooden houses. All the streets were enclosed with barbed-wire fencing: two-meter posts, with barbed wire stretched between them every twenty centimeters. “Of course, for us nimble boys it was nothing to get over this barrier. We went into the city anywhere and at any time. We still did not understand that this involved great risk, that one had to be very cautious. God forbid if you were caught at such a moment by gendarmes or the commandant himself—they would shoot you without a word,” Abram writes.
Among the Jewish youth, anger was growing. Rumors spread that the first groups of boys had already gone into the forests to join the partisans. Among them were Mikhail (Mikhel) Gebelev, Naum Feldman, and Zyama Okun. In the spring of 1942, twenty people led by Israel Lapidus successfully reached the forest near Slutsk. This was the first partisan detachment whose core consisted of fighters from the Minsk ghetto.
In the autumn of 1941, the Germans carried out public executions in four different places in Minsk at the same time—they hanged twelve patriots who had been rescuing wounded prisoners of war and helping them escape to the forests. Those sentenced to hanging were led from the city prison to the sound of drums. A young girl had a placard hanging on her chest stating that she was a partisan and had fired at German soldiers. This was a fabrication of Nazi propaganda. In reality, she had not shot at anyone. It was Masha Bruskina, a courageous underground resistance member who helped save Jews.
On November 7, 1941, the anniversary of the October Revolution, the Germans began a “cleansing” of the ghetto. Their goal was to destroy as many Jewish families as possible in order to free part of the territory for Jews deported from Germany. At that time, Abram and his family were living in the 2nd Opansky Lane—his father, as a fakh-arbayter (a skilled worker), had received an apartment there. The house was a single-story, multi-apartment building with a large Russian stove. Abram and his older sister Ekha immediately arranged a malina, so that there would be a place to hide—using the inner cavity of the stove and the crawlspace beneath it (called a “poplec”), from which they scooped out sand, expanding the shelter.
Early in the morning of November 7, the pogrom began. The Germans and the police surrounded part of the ghetto, announcing that people were being sent to work. Those who hesitated were driven out with rifle butts. The columns were marched to Tuchinka, to a quarry where pits had already been prepared. People were shot with machine guns. Children were pushed into the pits alive. Police from the Judenrat (the body of Jewish “self-government” organized by the Nazis) were forced to lay out the bodies. Some of the policemen could not endure such “work” and tried to refuse—the Nazis shot them without hesitation as well.
At that time, Abram and his father were at work. For two days they were not allowed into the ghetto. When they returned, the father rushed to the malina. Pale as a sheet, he called out to his wife: “Nakhama! Nakhama!” And she answered—all of them were alive. “We embraced each other and cried with joy,” Abram recalls.
On November 20, a second pogrom followed. Abram remembered the story of Girsle der Stark­er: an elderly man of heroic build broke out of the column of those being led to execution, threw himself at a German, knocked him to the ground, and bit off his nose—after which he was shot… The Rubenchik family survived this time as well: Uncle Aron led the household out using a specially obtained pass. On the way, a Vlasovite noticed Aunt Masha’s gold teeth and wanted to knock them out with a bayonet—by some miracle, they managed to persuade him to let everyone go, promising to hand over the gold afterward.
In October–November 1941, trains with Jews from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia began arriving in Minsk. The “resettlers” were assured that they were being taken east to help rebuild cities—they were even promised a passenger train. Instead, they were crammed into freight cars. Upon arrival, they were settled in a separate district—the “Sonderghetto.” Contact with prisoners from other parts of the ghetto was strictly forbidden; the belongings they had brought were quickly exchanged for food, and as a result, the German Jews suffered from hunger even more than the locals. At the same time, they maintained perfect order in their area and demonstratively observed the Sabbath. At first, German Jews naively believed that after Germany’s victory they would be returned to their homeland. However, the Nazis destroyed them with the same methodical efficiency as the local population: according to German historian Monika Künzler-Kingreen, out of fifteen and a half thousand deportees, only five hundred survived until liberation.
The first winter in the ghetto was terrifying. In unheated, often half-ruined houses, weakened and sick people died from cold and hunger. At that time, Abram’s family numbered fifteen people. The children slept on bunks, while the adults listened through the night. Hunger was relentless. What helped was “barter”: Abram and his friends exchanged goods for food with peasants, sometimes even managing to resell it. But this “business” carried mortal danger: each time, the boys had to leave the ghetto. Once, after trading his father’s shoes for flour, Abram was caught in a roundup and, fleeing pursuit, lost all his “trophies.” At home, the younger children met him with pleading eyes—and he did not even have a crust of bread. “My dear little ones, forgive me for not being able to feed you…”
Food was also obtained at the freight station: they stole it from railcars. Once, Abram was caught by soldiers guarding the station. And not only caught—they also took away a jar with a double bottom in which the most valuable thing was hidden—a small amount of German marks. The boy was beaten, but he still managed to persuade them to return the jar. Abram thought the soldiers were Italians—they were usually not as cruel as the Germans. Overjoyed, our hero grew bold: having run about fifty steps away, he shouted in German, “But I have marks!” and made a rude gesture.
Another time, fleeing pursuit, Abram and Ekha hid in a brick well and nearly suffocated—steam was pouring from a nearby pipe, and it soon became hard to breathe in the shelter. That day, more than a dozen boys known to Abram were caught and shot. Brave Yankele Kuper survived: he had so many lice that they were afraid to touch him, and Yankele managed to escape.
Occasionally, real miracles happened. Once, Abram’s younger brother Gesl was rummaging through the ruins of a house and found several gold coins—five-ruble pieces from the tsarist mint. “Where did you get this?!” the father cried out joyfully when he saw the gleaming discs with the profile of Nicholas II. Israel, together with Abram and Gesl, immediately ran to the place of the find, but other children were already swarming there, and the Rubenchiks found nothing more. Still, even this handful of coins was a real fortune: they managed to buy several buckets of potatoes, butter, salt, and a sack of flour. The family gained a supply of food, and Gesl walked around proud—he had managed to help his relatives so much.
At the beginning of December 1941, Abram’s older sister Ekha suddenly disappeared. Everyone in the house was in tears: Ekha was deeply loved for her cheerful, resilient nature, for her courage and resourcefulness. A few days later, everyone breathed a sigh of relief—she returned. It turned out that she and her friend Fanya had tried to reach Radoshkovichi in order to find partisans. Along the way, they saw trucks carrying Jews to their deaths, heard cries in Yiddish; they spent nights in haystacks and barns. Having failed to find the partisans, tired and disappointed, the girls returned to the ghetto. This experience, though unsuccessful, taught Ekha a great deal. She realized that a successful escape from the ghetto required organization, knowledge of the terrain, and help from outside.