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Raisa Ryklina

MEMORIES LIVE WITH ME

My niece Lyuba.

My husband's parents.
Died in the ghetto in 1941.

Our family lived in Slutsk. There were three children in the family. My elder brother Yevsei studied at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute. I finished ten grades at high school. My younger brother Lev finished the seventh grade.

At dawn on June 23, our city was bombed. We, the school leavers, were returning after the prom and heard that the war began. The city authorities failed to organize timely evacuation of the population, the panic broke out...

The Germans occupied the city on June 25. They set up police units of local volunteers. The teacher of military schooling from our school, Shnek, was appointed chief of the police.

A month later they established a ghetto in the city. Jewish males unable to work were immediately killed. In June 1941, before the establishment of the ghetto, a punitive detachment of the SS organized a terrible pogrom with Latvians, Lithuanians and Croats taking an active part in. We survived the massacre only because the father had built a cellar in our house to keep on the safe side. My husband’s mother was killed in thas pogrom, while the following took his father’s and brother’s lives. The youth from the ghetto tried to escape into the woods surrounding the city.

Raisa Ryklina.

Our family, at the risk of being caught up, moved from Slutsk to the settlement of Urechie, to my father’s parents. In March 1942, the ghetto was also established in Urechie. And then we decided to go into the woods of the Lubańsky district where partisan units were operating. We passed many villages on our way. People gave us food and told us where to go. In some villages people asked us to leave immediately to avoid being shot for hiding Jews. But, thank God, no one betrayed us to the polizei. When we got to a partisan unit, we were rejected to join it because of age. Finally, we came to the unit that accepted families from the locals. From June 1942, we were in the partisan unit named after Alexander Nevsky of the Ponomarenko 25th Brigade, Lubańsky disctrict, Minsk region. I served as a medical attendant and took part in all military operations of the detachment.

The Germans fought fiercely against the partisan movement. During another blockade of the partisan base my mother was killed, just a month before the liberation of Belarus. My younger brother Leva, 17, was mobilized into the Red Army after the liberation of Belarus and died on May 8, 1945.

The Slutsk authorities didn’t approve of erecting a monument on the site of the former ghetto. It was only after many requests that a monument to the Jews killed by the Nazis was established with the donated money.

After the war, I graduated from the Moscow Pedagogical Institute and went to work in a Murmansk high school.

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