In the history of Belarusian Jewry, there were many names that shone brightly but faded tragically quickly. One of them is Lazar Yakovlevich Siterman. His fate is not only the story of a talented physician and scholar, but also a symbol of an era.
Lazar Siterman was born in October 1894 in Mozyr, one of the most beautiful towns of Belarusian Polesia. At the end of the 19th century, this district center of the Minsk Governorate, spread along the high bank of the full-flowing Pripyat River, was a picturesque place where wooden houses clustered at the foot of Spasskaya Hill, while above the river rose the domes of an Orthodox cathedral and the spires of a Catholic church. The town, which contemporaries called “the ruler in a kingdom of marshes,” was an important transport hub: from here, steamships departed for Kyiv, and by railway one could travel to Brest and Gomel. At the end of the 19th century, Mozyr had more than twelve thousand inhabitants, among whom Jews made up a significant share—according to the 1897 census, nearly seventy percent of the population.
Lazar’s father was the well-known Mozyr pharmacist Yakov Siterman. His father’s profession undoubtedly influenced the son’s choice of life path. After completing his secondary education, in 1911 the seventeen-year-old Lazar enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine at Yuriev University (now the University of Tartu in Estonia), one of the oldest and most prestigious institutions of higher education in Eastern Europe.
The years of study were not easy. In 1915, Lazar saw his name on the list of those expelled for non-payment. But the persistent young man did not even think of giving up: earning five rubles a month by giving private lessons, he managed to save enough money to be reinstated at the university and continue his studies. Much later, already a professor, he told his students: “Study, acquire deep knowledge. You have everything for this. We did not have such conditions— I had to earn money for my own education.”
In 1916, Lazar Siterman successfully graduated from the university and was mobilized into the active army as a military physician. At first, he served in the Russian Imperial Army; then, after the October Revolution, he joined the Red Army and took part in the Civil War. These years hardened him: they gave him invaluable experience working in field conditions and taught him to make quick decisions on which human lives depended.
After the First World War and the Soviet–Polish War, hundreds of thousands of so-called “displaced persons” accumulated along the western borders of the former Russian Empire: refugees of the First World War and the Soviet–Polish War, prisoners of war, demobilized Red Army soldiers, repatriates, and internees. A true humanitarian catastrophe emerged. Epidemics of typhus, dysentery, and cholera raged, cutting down an already weakened population. This is how the newspaper Zvezda described the situation on August 5, 1920: “In Minsk, Bobruisk, and other cities, there is literally not a single house where one or several sick people cannot be found. In the Belarusian countryside, far from urban centers, the sick often find themselves in tragic conditions.”
To repatriate the enormous masses of displaced people and prevent further deterioration of an already extremely dangerous situation, the Belarusian Administration for the Evacuation of the Population (Belevak) was established. Belevak was engaged not only in transportation. People were provided with housing, food, and medical assistance.
It was during this difficult time that the demobilized military physician Lazar Siterman arrived in Minsk. He immediately became actively involved in the work of restoring the war-devastated healthcare system. Appointed head of the Minsk Medical and Sanitary Department within the Belevak structure, Siterman led the fight against epidemics. In conditions of total devastation and shortages of everything—from medicines to dressing materials—he proved himself to be an outstanding organizer. He was involved in mobilizing medical personnel and ensuring the sanitary condition of the city: distributing disinfectants, organizing bathhouses and sanitary checkpoints. Siterman also took part in the establishment of the Central Workers’ Polyclinic in Minsk and headed it for two years. For his dedicated work, in 1921 he was awarded a valuable gift from the People’s Commissariat of Health of the BSSR.
From 1922, a new stage began in Lazar Siterman’s career, connected with the Faculty of Medicine of Belarusian State University (now the Belarusian State Medical University). Here, he advanced from an assistant at the clinic of internal diseases to head of the Department of Propaedeutics of Internal Diseases and director of the 3rd Therapeutic Clinic of the Minsk Medical Institute.
At the beginning of his scientific career, Lazar Siterman worked under the supervision of S. M. Melkikh, Honored Scientist of the BSSR and Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the BSSR. The main focus of his research became cardiovascular pathology. In 1935, Lazar Siterman’s first monograph, Cardiac Arrhythmias: Etiogenesis, Clinical Presentation, and Therapy, was published and became one of the first fundamental works on cardiology in Belarus. In 1938, his second monograph followed—Myocardial Infarction. Two years earlier, Lazar Yakovlevich had defended his doctoral dissertation devoted to problems of cardiovascular diseases.
In 1939, Lazar Siterman was awarded the honorary title “Honored Scientist of the BSSR.” By that time, he was already a widely known physician who treated state and public figures of Belarus, as well as well-known writers, actors, and artists.
Colleagues and patients remembered Lazar Yakovlevich as a person of rare generosity of spirit and professional dedication. Journalist A. Stakhovich devoted a piece to Lazar Siterman titled “A Man of a Big Heart,” in which he warmly characterized the professor: “The correct and precise diagnosis, the successful application of the latest and his own treatment methods place Professor Siterman among the most popular medical figures of Belarus… Often, during lunch in the professor’s apartment, the telephone rings anxiously. Having learned what is wrong, fastening his coat on the move, Lazar Yakovlevich hurries to a seriously ill patient, regardless of the weather or the distance. One night, the telephone rang. A woman’s voice, breaking with tears, said that her son was dying… It was three o’clock in the morning. A cabman drove up to the house, and within a few minutes Lazar Yakovlevich was already sitting at the bedside of the sick boy. After the help provided, the child’s breathing became even, and he fell into a deep sleep, his exhausted arms thrown across the crumpled blanket. Lazar Yakovlevich checked the pulse once more and, shaking the hand of the mother radiant with joy at her child’s rescue, began to descend the narrow, steep staircase…”
These lines speak not only of professional mastery, but also of Professor Siterman’s humanity. He was one of those physicians for whom the concept of “off-hours” did not exist when it came to saving a life.
In the late 1930s—a dark time marked by Stalinist repressions—Lazar Yakovlevich was offered a move from Minsk to Leningrad to head a department at the S. M. Kirov Military Medical Academy of the Red Army. But he did not want to leave the city where he had established himself as a physician and a scholar, the city that had become his home. This decision, driven by his attachment to his native land and the scientific school he had built, would later turn into a tragedy.
On the eve of the war, the Siterman family was living at a dacha near Minsk. As soon as news arrived of Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, Lazar Yakovlevich immediately left for the city. For several days, he provided assistance to wounded soldiers and residents of Minsk, which on June 24 was subjected to a fierce bombardment.
On June 26, he returned to the dacha to bring his wife, Vera Solomonovna, and their son Yakov to the city. Perhaps the Sitermans might still have managed to evacuate eastward. But officers of the Red Army suddenly appeared in the settlement and began reassuring everyone: “Things are going well. Our forces have taken Warsaw and Königsberg. The Red Army will soon be in Berlin. There is no need for you to leave…”
As it later became clear, these were German paratrooper saboteurs in disguise, speaking flawless Russian. The Sitermans lost time that was truly invaluable under those circumstances. Just two days later, on June 28, Minsk was already occupied by German troops.
On July 20, 1941, an order was issued by the field commandant on the “creation of a Jewish residential district in the city of Minsk.” Lazar Yakovlevich, his wife, and their son found themselves behind barbed wire in the ghetto, where about one hundred thousand Jews from the city and its surroundings were forced to live.
The darkest role in the fate of Lazar Siterman was played by a man whom The Black Book by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman calls “the commandant of the camp and at the same time the master over the ghetto”—the White Guardist Gorodetsky, a traitor, rapist, and murderer. As soon as he learned that a well-known physician and scholar was in the ghetto, the abuse began. Lazar’s son Yakov—then a twelve-year-old boy—became a witness to countless humiliations. Gorodetsky would burst into the Sitermans’ home, take whatever he wanted, and beat the father… Gestapo men forced him to perform brutal, degrading labor—cleaning cesspits and latrines by hand. Lazar Siterman was photographed in an outhouse with a shovel in his hands, on all fours in the middle of the ghetto square, with a football on his back…
Throughout this time, the professor remained in a deeply depressed psychological state and was close to suicide. According to his son Yakov, he considered Stalin to be the main culprit of the catastrophe of the summer of 1941: “They shouted every day that the border was secure, that we would strike the enemy on his own territory—and what actually happened, we now see.”
At the same time, the professor’s views did not change with the beginning of the occupation. Lazar Siterman had never been a member of the Communist Party—despite the obvious career advantages such a decision would have brought. As his son Yakov later recalled, the professor secretly despised the Stalinist regime, with its total suppression of independent thought and its overt antisemitism.
On the afternoon of September 7, 1941, several Gestapo officers came to the Sitermans’ home. They ordered the head of the family to get dressed and take his medical instruments with him—supposedly his professional help was needed. It was a typical vile and deceitful tactic of the Nazi executioners—this was how they carried out the arrests of Jewish doctors in Prague, Vienna, and other occupied cities of Europe. But Lazar Yakovlevich, of course, understood everything… He took off his watch—later carefully preserved by his son—said goodbye to his loved ones. The professor was put into a car and taken in the direction of the prison. He was never seen again. A few days later, the Gestapo returned and told Vera Solomonovna: “We killed your husband.” According to some accounts, after torture and abuse, Lazar Siterman was hanged in prison.
At the end of July 1942, during another horrific pogrom, Lazar Yakovlevich’s wife—Vera Solomonovna Siterman—was killed… Shortly before that, their son Yakov had managed to escape from the ghetto with the help of his nanny, Maria Petrovna Kharetskaya. He hid at her place until the liberation of Minsk. For her act of courage, in 1997 Maria Kharetskaya was posthumously awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations and honored with a certificate and medal. Her name is engraved on the Wall of Honor in the Avenue of the Righteous at Yad Vashem—Israel’s National Holocaust and Heroism Memorial.
On July 3, 1944, Minsk was liberated from the Nazis. A few days later, a ceremonial parade of partisans and a rally of residents took place in the city, where the tragic death of the outstanding physician in the ghetto was also remembered.
At the Belarusian State Museum of the Great Patriotic War, a separate exhibit was later established, telling the story of the life and martyrdom of Lazar Yakovlevich Siterman. His son Yakov became a well-known historian and professor. In 2002, on the 110th anniversary of his father’s birth, he published in the journal Lechaim the deeply moving memoir “The Life and Death of Professor Siterman.”
Lazar Yakovlevich Siterman lived a life devoted to serving others—from a modest student who earned money for his education by giving private lessons to a professor whose monographs became essential reading for physicians. He helped build the Belarusian healthcare system in years of devastation, fought epidemics, treated hearts, and himself possessed a great heart—sensitive, compassionate, and ready to help at any hour of the day or night.
Alas, a man who saved hundreds of lives proved powerless before the monstrous machinery of Nazism. Yet his good name did not perish. It lives on in his monographs and articles, in the treatment methods he developed, and above all—in the hearts of those who honor the feat of physicians who gave their lives to their profession.
05.04.2026
Author: Mikhail Krivitsky
Translated by Lena Lores
Bibliography and Sources
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Lazar Siterman
1894 – 1941
