our town. Why did we believe this? Many groups of Soviet partisans were hiding in the nearby forest (some of them were once publicly hanged in the main square), who blew up bridges, set fire to warehouses, damaged telephone lines, and inflicted lots of other damage, enjoying the support of the local peasantry. Well, we thought that pogroms against the Jews were organised in all the villages, because the Germans suspected them of supporting the partisans. “But we cannot be suspected of doing that” – we reasoned logically – “we are above suspicion, after all, it is difficult to imagine that residents of such a sizeable town would have the opportunity to establish relations with Bolsheviks in the forest. There will be no pogrom”, we would conclude with conviction.
Another thing about the Słonim pogrom. As soon as the second day after the arrival of the Germans, a decree was issued that all Jewish men aged 14–60 must report to work on the road. a/212
[7] It was arranged so that every man worked every other day – thusevery day a different half came to work. The work itself was not hard, if notfor the fact that it was done under the supervision of Poles from the “Todt’organisation”, who bullied their Jewish subordinates terribly. Three weeksbefore the pogrom, about sixty Jews working there were captured while onthat road and taken to some field, where they were forced to dig trenches, which – according to common belief – were to be used to build fortifications. Those sixty men never returned to their homes: they were shot on the spot after they finished their work. b/213
On the evening of 14 October, the Jews who had contact with the Germans, because they were at work details, already knew about the pogrom. They knew that t he “expedition” had arrived, that Gestapo officers were mobilised, as were a ll military officers and gendarmes, that sixty Polish policemen hadbeen appointed especially for that occasion, and even that the workers of the “Todt” were invited to the festivities. (It was a labour organisation employing
