Yama Related Communities
Minsk Related Murder Sites
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Murder Story of Minsk Jews in Yama
Murder Site
Yama
Belorussia (USSR)
According to numerous testimonies, in the course of the mass-murder operation carried out in early March 1942, some ghetto inmates were shot at a sand quarry on the ghetto's northern outskirts, near Ratomskaya (present-day Melnikayte) Street, known popularly as Yama (the pit). According to the inscription on the monument erected on the site after the war, the total number of victims murdered at Yama was 5,000, although this number certainly includes Jews who were shot elsewhere in the ghetto during the March 2 massacre and taken there to be buried.
Related Resources
Written Testimonies
Written Accounts
ChGK Soviet Reports
From "Five pogroms in Minsk. The Accounts of Perla Aginskaya, Malka Kofman, Darya Lyusik, and Raisa Gelfond":
…During the third pogrom, which took place on March 2, 1942, the Germans seized people not only from the ghetto, but also from those who worked outside the ghetto. This was how the sixteen-year-old Moisey Pekar fell into the Germans' hands. As the shootings were going on… he fell down and played dead. One or two hours later, trucks came along behind the columns and picked the bodies of those who had been shot. The bloodied body of Pekar was tossed out near the ditch in Zeleny Line along with the corpses….
Rubenstein, Joshua and Altman, Ilya. The unknown black book : the Holocaust in the German-occupied Soviet territories . Bloomington, Ind. : Indiana University Press, 2010, p. 245.
Yama
Murder Site
Belorussia (USSR)
53.902;27.559