A ruse by which Gestapo agents disguised as Yiddish-speaking Red Armymen succeeded in worming their way into the good graces of the Jewish population of a village in Nazi-occupied Byelorussia in order to discover whether any of the Jews had arms or were in contact with guerrilla bands, was related today by a guerrilla fighter who is recuperating from wounds in the “House of Partisans” here.
A small band of men dressed in Red Army uniforms came to the occupied village of Lapich one day, he said, and told the Jewish and non-Jewish population that they had been encircled by the Nazis and needed shelter. One of the soldiers, who spoke a strange dialect of Yiddish, told the local Jews that he came from Latvia. Circulating among Jews and non-Jews, the “Red Armymen” offered to help the guerrilla bands in the neighborhood and asked the population where the partisans were based and also whether there were any arms hidden in Lapich that could be taken to the guerrillas. They even offered to help raid the local German garrison.
After they had spent several weeks in the village, hidden in the homes of the local populace and sharing their meager food supplies, the “Red Armymen” suddenly disappeared. A few days later, all the Jews in the town who had not been molested heretofore, were summoned to the marketplace and mowed down by machineguns. When a few Jews who succeeded in fleeing the town compared notes with the local guerrilla bands, they realized that their “Red Army” visitors had been Gestapo agents.
This same partisan related details of the havoc that the Germans wrought among the Jewish populations of the villages and towns in Byelorussia and the Ukraine, which he observed during the year-and-a-half he spent behind the Nazi lines. He gave the names of thirteen towns in which the Jewish population was exterminated almost to the last man. The means of execution ranged from the usual Nazi method of forcing the Jews to dig pits and then machinegunning them as they stood before or in the ditches, to making them jump from bridges into the streams below. In one village they drove hundreds of naked women and children into an unheated barn in mid-winter and left them there to freeze. In another they locked the Jews in a barn and set it afire. The towns where these atrocities occurred were Chousi, Klimovich, Uliani, Bobroisk, Mikhailovsk, Cluckhov, Vinnitsa, Swisloch, Latich, Surazh, Yanovich, Lenina and Lapich.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
