On 26 September 1943, 232 Jewish slave laborers incarcerated in the Novogrudok (Nowogródek) ghetto in Belarus (Eastern Poland from 1921 until 1939), broke out of the ghetto through a 200-meter-long tunnel which they secretly dug from one of the barracks. The 124 participants who survived the escape joined partisan groups in the nearby forests.
However, during the almost half-century of Soviet power in the area, nothing was known about Jewish resistance in Novogrudok or the surrounding Naliboki forest, where the famous Bielski family camp existed until the liberation of the area in July 1944. This has changed dramatically in the past two decades, and in no small part due to the dedicated work of Tamara Vershitskaya.
Vershitskaya originally graduated from the Minsk Linguistic University, and began working as a teacher of English and German. However, in 1988 her life took a new turn, which would make an unforeseen and unprecedented impact on the teaching and commemoration of the Holocaust in Belarus.
Due to the health risks involved with living in Mazyr, so close the site of the nuclear reactor disaster in Chernobyl, Vershitskaya, her husband and daughter moved to Novogrudok, some 150 kilometers west of Minsk. There, she was offered the job of director of the Museum of History and Regional Studies. "This was right around the collapse of the Soviet Union," Vershitskaya recalls. "We were all fascinated to discover the area's history, yet in meeting survivors and listening to their stories I was confused by their attitude to Novogrudok. Their memories were painful, yet also full of love. They wanted to come and visit, but everything had changed and there was very little left to connect them to the town."
It was during a 1993 visit by Jack Kagan, a survivor of the escape from Novogrudok who lived in London, that Vershitskaya realized that something needed to be done. "Jack was shocked that there was no mention of the Jews of the area in the Museum, and I readily helped him work with the local authorities to place new monuments on the mass graves telling visitors exactly who the victims were. We also arranged a small permanent exhibition about the history of Novogrudok Jews and the Holocaust in the Museum, and carried out an archeological survey on the territory of the former slave labor camp there to confirm the existence of the tunnel through which Jack and the other inmates escaped. I wanted to share with other people what I had learned about the Holocaust, and how we could work together to preserve the memory about its tragic destruction."
In 2003, together with Jerry Gotel from the London Jewish Cultural Center, Vershitskaya organized the first-ever Holocaust education seminar in Novogrudok for forty teachers from across Belarus, with guest lecturers including Yad Vashem's Dr. Irit Abramski, and Dr. Ilya Altman of the Moscow Holocaust Center. Since then, Vershitskaya has helped organize seminars for over 250 teachers, making Novogrudok the center of Holocaust education in Belarus.
In 2005, Vershitskaya and three other Belarusian teachers joined a Russian-language educational seminar in Yad Vashem. "The seminar helped me acquaint myself with the unique Holocaust education methods of Yad Vashem, which on the one hand provides the background for understanding the universal relevance of the Holocaust, and on the other hand stresses the individual and local perspective." As a result of what she learned, Vershitskaya has since brought dozens of secondary school teachers and university lecturers to Jerusalem to attend educational seminars at Yad Vashem's International School for Holocaust Studies. With the support of international organizations and private donations, such as Jack Kagan himself, Vershitskaya has also created the Jewish Resistance Museum in a former barrack of ghetto, as well as memorials and an outdoor exhibition relating the story of the tunnel escape based on the testimonies of survivors.
Vershitskaya's current project is to help fully research, preserve and memorialize the famous Jewish partisan family camp led by the Bielski brothers, who hailed from Stankiewicze, a town near Novogrudok.
"I would like to identify and mark every dugout in the Bielski camp, reconstruct some of them, and then recommend young Israelis and other Jews who come to Poland on a traditional trip of discovery to also visit the Jewish Resistance Museum in Novogrudok and the Naliboki Forest to see the other side of the Holocaust," says Vershitskaya.
"I saw how the reunion of descendants of the Bielski partisans last July made such a difference to Holocaust memory and education. I want this story to live."
The theme of this year's Holocaust Remembrance Day (21 April 2020) is "Rescue by Jews during the Holocaust: Solidarity in a Disintegrating World."
