the first deportations, the hospital building remained outside the new ghetto).
17 patients were shot.
At 2 p.m. on Monday 30 March, 4 Germans from the SD and 15 Gestapo
men came to the kehilla and each of them took away a member of the Judenrat;
the member’s family also went with him. Their homes were sealed off. They
were all taken to the Maharshal Synagogue. Those taken away included
the chairman of the kehilla, Engineer Bekker, and two board members,
Dr Siegfried (a German Jew) and Shloyme Halbersztat (a Hasid). From the
Maharshal Synagogue they were all taken out of town and shot.
After that, the Germans seized the J-books⁵⁴⁹ of the kehilla employees
(approximately 400 people), allowing only 12 people – later reduced to 6 –
and 8 members of the Judenrat to keep theirs. To date, about 2,500 people,
including the Jewish police, still possess such J-books, but their number too
is decreasing from day to day.⁵⁵⁰
Hancewicze (near Baranowicze)⁵⁵¹
Hancewicze, a small town on the Baranowicze–Lida⁵⁵² railway line, had
never been a sizeable Jewish settlement but, as a result of the rapid advance of
the German forces right at the beginning of the war with the Soviet Union, it
contained some 6,000 Jewish refugees from various places who had not managed
to flee further east together with the retreating Russian army.
In the first days of July 1941, the Germans ordered all the Jews in
Hancewicze to assemble in the town square with their baggage (up to 25 kg).
The official reason was that the German authorities supposedly intended to
send them back to the General Government.
549 Identity card and work records for Jews, with a capital J on the first page, with stamps confirming their being employed.
550 The note on the Aktion in Lublin is based on the testimony of a Lublin refugee, Kronenberg. The interview was conducted by Hersh Wasser in the Warsaw ghetto on 5 or 6 April 1942. See Wasser’s notes in ARG I 850 (Ring. I/1172). To be printed in: The Ringelblum Archive. Accounts from the General Government.
551 Hancewicze was the capital of Gebietskommissariat Ganzewitchi, while Baranowicze was the capital of Gebietskommissariat Baranowitsche of Reichskommissariat Ostland. Now in Brest Oblast (Belarus).
552 Lida – capital of a Gebietskommissariat in Reichskommissariat Ostland. Now in Hrodna Oblast (Belarus).
