Robert and Barbara Budnitz
October 12, 1997 Dear Relatives: Early this summer (July) and again early this fall (September) we had two very interesting visits to "Vilna Gobernya" and "Minsk Gobernya", in Belarus, where all of our grandparents started their treks to America. Attached are some notes that Bobby has written about our visits to the towns of some of his Budnitz, Bassewitz, and Dubin grandparents; and that Barbara has written for visits to the towns of her maternal (Rudnick and Shapiro) grandparents. Barbara is still trying to gather information about her grandparents on her father's Paresky side. However, for the most part neither of us has any careful, specific genealogical information, although we have started seeking it. If any of you has information about the family from those old times, please forward it even if it seems merely anecdotal. The most salient feature that we derived from these trips was that we saw villages and towns that had been ravaged by wars and by communism, that nevertheless seemed quite close in lifestyle to the way we envision that our grandparents must have lived. They now have electricity and television, but we saw hardly any instances of running-water plumbing anywhere, and the pace and style of the small rural towns we visited in Belarus was still moving like the horse carts that we saw everywhere ... slow and steady. Despite the fact that the Germans killed essentially all of the Jews in those parts in 1942, we detected almost universal warmth and acceptance of us when we met the townspeople in these small places. Among those old enough to have experienced the war, there seemed to us to be a sense of numbness about what the Germans had done --- remember that the Germans killed perhaps a million non-Jewish Byelorussians also --- but this was colored by its having been so long ago. Thus the stories that were told to us, even by those few surviving Jews whom we met, were more matter-of-fact than we might have expected from afar. Also, we heard essentially nothing about any collaborators. We offer our best wishes for a happy and healthy New Year for 5758. Here's hoping that we can gather together soon for a happy occasion. Keep in touch! Love,
Barbara and Bobby I. BACKGROUND
How and why we went to Belarus: Barbara and Bobby will write different sections of this report to describe our experiences recently in the old Russian province of Byelorussia, now the independent country known as Belarus. One of us (Bobby) has been working for the past three years on a major international project, funded by western government money, to upgrade the safety of the two large nuclear-power reactors in Lithuania that provide essentially all of the electricity to that country. This work has brought both of us to Lithuania twice this year, in July and again in September --- Bobby for work and Barbara tagging along thanks to frequent-flier miles. (Bobby was actually in Lithuania also in April and will return again in December. He currently sits on the international committee of experts appointed by the President of Lithuania to advise him and the Parliament about the safety of the reactors.) The Lithuanian work is in Vilnius (the Lithuanian name for Vilna), which is about 150 miles west of Minsk, the capital of Belarus and our headquarters when we were exploring the Belarus towns. Anyway, in July 1997 we spent three days, and in September 1997 another three days, in Belarus visiting the towns and villages of our grandparents. We had visited two of these towns (Starobin and Volozhin) six years earlier, in 1991. The towns and the Families from Each: For reference below, the towns and villages and the families from each are as follows. All of these places are in Belarus: Traby (Traub) Rudnick family (Barbara's maternal grand-
54.2o N, 25.9o E father Morris Rudnick) Volozhin Shapiro family (Barbara's maternal grand-
54.1o N, 26.6o E mother, Pesha Shapiro Rudnick) Horodetz Dubin family (Bobby's maternal grandfather,
52.3o N, 24.7o E Nathan Dubin) David-Gorodok Bassewitz or Bashevitz family (Bobby's
52.0o N, 27.1o E paternal grandmother, Naomi Bassewitz Budnitz) Starobin, Anancyc Budnitz family (Bobby's paternal grand-
52.7o N, 27.5o E father, Alexander Budnitz) Lenin Budnitz family (Bobby's paternal-paternal
52.3o N, 27.5o E great-grandparents The above list represents 5 of our 8 grandparents. We have not visited, or have not yet figured out how to visit, the original towns for the other three grandparents, whose names and origins are: Vilna, Lithuania Paresky family (Barbara's paternal
province? grandfather, David Paresky) Vilna, Lithuania Collier or Kaller family (Barbara's paternal
province? grandmother, Ida Collier Paresky) Kobrin, Belarus Rubinsky family (Bobby's maternal grandmother,
Ida Rubinsky Dubin) [We drove right through the city of Kobrin in September, but had no time to visit it. Next time??] The logistics of our visits: Visiting Belarus from Lithuania isn't trivially easy, but it isn't difficult either. Going there directly by air from the west would be easier. American citizens need a visa that can be obtained from the Belarus embassy in Washington. To get such a visa, one needs to have a confirmed hotel reservation for each night to be spent in the country, and this can only be obtained by prior arrangements with the Belarussian Intourist agency. One needs to decide on the dates, and the city(ies) for the hotel(s), and then to pay in advance by check or wire. Then the Intourist agency notifies the Belarus embassy and they will issue you a visa. This is a clumsy bit of rigmarole. We both visited Minsk, Volozhin, and Starobin in 1991 when the whole area was still the USSR. At that time we obtained USSR visas, and we visited Moscow and St. Petersburg as well as Minsk and Vilnius without the need for more than the single USSR visa. No more. Belarus is independent and requires a visa. Lithuania, also independent, now lets Americans in without a visa. In July 1997, we arranged to drive from Vilnius (Lithuania) to Minsk (Belarus), about 150 miles. We originally asked a professional Lithuanian colleague of Bobby's, Professor Jurgis Vilemas of the University in Kaunas ("Kovno" in Yiddish) to arrange for a student to accompany us in our rented car and to help as a translator, but at the last minute Prof. Vilemas volunteered to accompany us himself -- he had always wanted to visit rural Belarus, to see what had happened to the Jews there, and this was his chance. It was lucky for us that he accompanied us, because when we approached the Lithuania/Belarus border in his car, there was a long queue which we learned would take six hours to pass through. But Vilemas drove right to the front, waved his Lithuanian diplomatic passport at the guards, and we drove right through. [Vilemas is also a sub-cabinet minister.] Ditto on the return trip 3 days later. Had we rented a car in Vilnius to drive across and back, we would have been stuck, losing most of a day each way. In July, we stayed each night in a modern though oldish-style hotel in Minsk, and went out to the villages during the days. During our second trip, we spent two nights in Minsk and drove out and back from there, and one night in a hotel in Brest, in southwestern Belarus on the Polish border. In September, on our second trip, we hired an interpreter/tour-guide in Vilnius and the three of us crossed the border by train (going) and bus (returning), and then rented an Avis car in Minsk to drive around in (about $100/day for the car, and Regina's fee was also $100/day). This avoided the border-crossing mess. Our interpreter, Regina Kopelevich, is a young 30s-ish woman with a Jewish father and Christian mother, and with an Israeli Jewish husband and an 8-year-old son in the Vilnius Jewish day school. She identifies as a Jew though she is not. She reads and talks fluent Hebrew and good Yiddish, and knows the history of the Jews in Belarus and Lithuania well. She was invaluable in helping us. It would have been literally impossible to do anything useful in any of the villages that we visited without a Russian-speaking interpreter (Professor Vilemas on our first trip, Regina Kopelevich on our second trip.)
II. BARBARA'S FAMILY'S VILLAGES Visit to Traby and Volozhin, July 1997: Volozhin is a large town of perhaps 10,000, about 75 miles west of Minsk and about half-way between Vilna and Minsk. Its principal economic activity seems to be as a food-processing center for the surrounding region. We had visited there in 1991, had gone to the cemetery there (looking for the Shapiro family: Barbara's maternal grandmother Pesha Shapiro Rudnick after whom Barbara is named), had found one older Jewish man Moshe Sklut, had visited him and his wife and son and grandchildren, and had been shown the Shapiro barn/garage and the site of the Shapiro house. We had learned from Sklut that there were two Jewish cemeteries, and that the Shapiros were buried in the one that had been destroyed when the Communists had built a football stadium over it. We visited the other cemetery and found no Shapiro stones but did find two stones with "Paresky" on them ---Barbara's father's name, although his family came from near Vilna, not from there! We still cannot account for that. The cemetery was all topsy-turvy, with maybe a couple of hundred stones, but not overgrown with trees and bushes like in Starobin: it was about one acre, located right in the town surrounded by houses, and goats were grazing which kept down the growth. Volozhin was the site of a famous yeshiva, perhaps the most famous yeshiva outside of Vilna in all of czarist Russia. (For some, this yeshiva conjures up Chaim of Volozhin and Rabbi Naftali Berlin and the large Soloveitchik rabbinic family, which is all true, but for me this yeshiva is also and importantly associated with Bialik, who studied there.) We identified the building, which at that time was being used to store farm produce (today it is a bakery). It was in good shape and had a Jewish star in the stucco on the south side. We returned to Volozhin in July 1997 but it was thunderstorming cats-and-dogs and so we stayed only briefly, travelling instead to Traby (30 miles to the west of Volozhin). By the time we got to Traby (via a good paved two-lane secondary road, through a farming area with wheat and hay) the rain had cleared. Traby has about 4000 population. [We re-visited Traby in September and learned more then -- see below.] We inquired through Professor Vilemas, and learned "no Jews, no synagogue, an abandoned Jewish cemetery in the woods 1 mile north of town." We went to the abandoned cemetery, spent about a half hour there (the woods were dense with wetness and the stones were mostly overgrown with moss and stuff) but it was getting dark so we left. We vowed to return (which we did, 10 weeks later.) We saw that there were about a hundred stones, scattered over a couple of wooded acres. We were searching for the Rudnick family (Barbara's maternal grandfather, Morris Rudnick) -- and in September our search was successful (see below). Visit to Traub (now called Traby), September 1997: This time, we planned for an entire day in Traby, and drove there with our interpreter Regina. Traby is about 90 minutes' drive from Minsk on a superhighway part of the way, then an excellent road most of the rest of the way. Barbara's maternal grandfather, Moshe (Morris) Rudnick, emigrated from Traby shortly after 1880, leaving his wife Pesha, a baby who died in Europe, and another son Joseph. She emigrated a few years later. As we rode down the road to Traby, we passed a horse and cart carrying a farmer's load. The road looked like any country road in rural southern New England, without the rounder hills of the Berkshires. We imagined Moshe riding from Traby to Volozhin to see Pesha. We had always heard that this had been a "love match", not an arranged marriage. (The distance is about 30 miles. How long does that take by horse cart?) Traby has a short main street, with no more than three stores that sold simple goods: a bakery, a food store, a farm store with a few utensils for the house (brushes, pails, wastebaskets.) All were in non-commercial, house-like buildings of brick. Off on the side streets, unpaved and probably muddy in wet weather, were the usual wooden houses, each with a four-foot fence, a pump or well in the front yard, a cow, and a vegetable garden in the rear. Very few if any had indoor plumbing: outhouses were "de rigueur." Many homes were painted a cheery yellow or sometimes a bright light blue, but most were brown (wood) on the outside. Flowers were blooming in many front yards. Most homes had dogs of dubious disposition, so we never entered a yard without yelling for the owner. Our modus operandi was the same everywhere: We would see an older man or woman and we would stop. (The woman's age was somewhat indicated by her wearing a scarf or "babushka".) Our interpreter would start by saying something about how our grandparent came from this town, and then slowly, after questions about where we came from and so on, she would explain how the grandparent had emigrated before World War I. Then the Jewish information was added: "Are there any Jews in town?" (usually none.) "Is there somebody old enough to have known the Jews?" We would then get a referral to "Babushka this" or "Babushka that" ("Babushka literally means "grandmother" but is also a title of respect for all older women) or to the tailor, or directions to the house around the corner, and we would be off. In Traby, an older man named Leon came up to us and offered to bring us to a really old woman. We squeezed him into our small car -- he had a distinct farm essence on his person and a hint of vodka intake as well. He took us to a lovely, very ancient woman who looked like a dried apple doll. Although it was warm (temperature in the 70s), she was wearing layers of shabby sweaters and tights, rubber shoes, and the usual scarf. She was quite alert and friendly. She told us that Traby had had a population of 4000 before World War II, of whom 2000 were Jews. They all lived in peace. In fact, she and her family had shared a house with Jews when she was younger. In 1942, the Germans murdered 600 young Jewish men in the woods near Traby, but the Germans moved the women and children to a ghetto in another town where they were all subsequently killed. She sent us out into a potato field, down a twisted bumpy farm road with Leon as our navigator, to find her daughters. We found them after a ride that we feared would leave the underside of the car with the potatoes. The two grown daughters, and the husband of one of them, took a lunch break and brought us back to the house. With smiles and gracious hospitality, they and their mother showed us their modest home and put out a huge lunch: bread, cucumbers, cheese, tomatoes, pickles, sausage. All appeared from out of nowhere. The food was fresh and delicious and we couldn't refuse trying some. They also offered us a red alcoholic drink made out of mountain ash berries. We realized as we sat there why the folks all looked not too crisp and clean: they have livestock, chickens, and a cow or two to tend in their yards, and no indoor running water. (Wash day or bath day must be quite an adventure.) Barbara remembers her mother talking about a cow at the Williamstown house on Cole Avenue, and the family "farm" outside of town. "The farm" must have meant so much nostalgia for our grandparents, but these folks in Traby were living that way today. Anyway, no remembrance of the Rudnick family came from our elderly friend or her daughters. They did, however, confirm that there was only one Jewish cemetery and where it was. [We had visited it briefly in July, two months earlier.] We also learned from them that the wealthier Jews of Traby had lived in the brick houses that we saw along the main street. After about an hour, we left reluctantly, but needed the time to explore the cemetery in detail. At the cemetery, which was a mile north of town in dense woods, we used a tough bristle brush to clear moss and dirt from the stones that were legible. Of the hundred or so stones, only half were legible and only a handful were still standing up. For some, we used a small shovel or trowel that we had brought from home to clear away the weeds and dirt, and for some of the stones our guide Regina sprayed shaving cream on and scraped the cream away with a squeegee to get better definition of the letters (all in Hebrew.) We found buried, broken, tipped over stones, and even open empty graves that had apparently been robbed. After recording more than three dozen readable stones, we started tiring and almost quit with about a dozen readable stones to go, but we persevered, which was fortunate, because among the last three stones closest to the road we found Abraham Abba son of Yitzchak Rudnick, died 1861. What a thrill. We are not sure how he fits into the Rudnick family tree but he may be a cousin or even brother of Barbara's great-grandfather. The stone was relatively modern compared to others that we saw of that vintage, and we have concluded that it was a replacement stone put there later (perhaps after the original stone was damaged). Our evidence is two-fold: first, the stone itself is extremely easy to read, hardly weathered at all; and second, the use of the last name (Rudnick in this case) did not appear on any other stones before about 1910. We surmise that perhaps other relatives from the U.S. or elsewhere had visited sometime between about 1910 and the War. It seemed to us at the time, and in retrospect, that finding that stone made the whole trip worthwhile. We left a pebble on the gravestone, as is our custom here when we visit family cemeteries. We also took a rubbing with paper and charcoal, as well as photographs. After this it was off to Volozhin, on the 30-mile route that Morris Rudnick probably took to see his future wife, Pesha Shapiro. En route we saw a bus unloading lots of students and women with sacks and pails, who were heading for the fields to help harvest the potato crop. Visit to Volozhin, September 1997: Driving back from Traby to Minsk late in the day, we stopped in Volozhin just at sunset. In Volozhin, we again found paved main streets and dirt side streets: bumpy, rutted, dirt streets. We first went directly to the old Jewish cemetery where goats had grazed in 1991. They were still there, but now there was a big, modern stone/cement fence around the place and a padlocked gate. We climbed the fence easily. In the middle was a large, newly built impressive stone structure on the grave of the famous rabbi, "Chaim of Volozhin", obviously just recently built! We walked around for perhaps half an hour, but then it became too dark. We checked again and found the Paresky stones we'd seen before in 1991, but no Shapiros. We decided that the cemetery keeper might have more information, so we went to his home. At the caretaker's home, where we spent an hour after nightfall, we met him and his wife and, by coincidence, an older (70's) Jewish couple who had lived in Volozhin but had emigrated to Israel less than ten years ago. They were back for a visit. These people, named Meltzer, perked right up when we said "Shapiro." They had known Shapiros in Volozhin who were now living in Israel! They gave us names and telephone numbers for a woman in her 80's who lived there with three daughters. Barbara remembers her mother saying that Grandma had a sister she had urged to come to America, but the sister felt that she had more status or "yichess" in Volozhin. How and if they survived the War and if they are related to us would be interesting to find out. The Israelis may be descendants of Pesha's family. When we were in Volozhin in 1991, we had visited a family, the Moshe Sklut family, whom we were told was almost the only Jewish family left in the town. The Skluts, who we learned have since emigrated to New York City, told us that there were two cemeteries in Volozhin and that the Shapiro family was buried in the "other one" -- the one long since destroyed by the Communists, who built the local football stadium over it. But on this visit we learned a contradictory story from the Meltzers: that the one cemetery we saw was in fact the only one. We do not know what to make of this contradictory information. Mr. Meltzer (Eliezer) told us that he was the only survivor when the Germans massacred the Volozhin Jews. They had been forced into the synagogue and it was set on fire. Meltzer, then a teenager, told us that he jumped out a window when the Germans were collecting people and ran to the forest to escape. He told us that he spent the rest of the war fighting with the Belarus partisans.
III. BOBBY'S FAMILY'S VILLAGES Visit to Starobin, Anancyc, and Milkevicz, July 1997: Starobin is where the Budnitz family had come from. It has a population today of about 4000. It is about two hours' drive or 100 miles south of Minsk on a very good highway. The Budnitz family had been "headquartered" in Starobin although several ancestors of Bobby's came from or lived in nearby villages (see below). Alexander Budnitz, Bobby's grandfather, born in about 1872, had lived in Starobin until he married in about 1898, after which he moved to David-Gorodok where his wife's Bassewitz family lived. He came to America in 1905. He left a brother Arron and both parents there, who never came to America. A sister married a Wesherebin (see below) and emigrated to Argentina in 1905. A brother Moshe (Morris) Bodnitz emigrated to London in 1906. We had both visited Starobin in 1991: we found the remains of the Jewish cemetery there (with maybe a dozen stones all topsy-turvy in a deep wooded area on the town's outskirts), learned that there were only 1 or 2 Jews left but whom we could not locate at that time, and learned that the synagogues had been burned. Upon our return home, we learned from Harry Budnitz (Bobby's father's cousin, who left Starobin for the US in the late 1930s and died a couple of years ago) that in fact Bobby's great-grandparents the Budnitzes (who were also Harry's grandparents) had lived in their productive years not in Starobin but in a nearby village, Anancyc (10 miles south). According to Harry, Bobby's grandfather Alexander Budnitz and Harry's father Arron Budnitz, who were Budnitz brothers, had been born in Anancyc but lived in Starobin as young men. So this time, July 1997, we went to Anancyc [pronounced "Ananchich"], a town of maybe 50 to 100 houses in the middle of large hay fields. We reached it from Starobin by a good graded dirt road, and while driving down that dirt road we saw a sign pointing west 1 kilometer to a tiny village (two dozen houses?) called "Milkevicz", which we made a small detour to visit briefly. This was exciting because Bobby's paternal grandfather Alexander Budnitz' mother was named Milkewitz, and this tiny village, half-way between Starobin and Anancyc, is probably the origin of that name! There is a big Milkewitz clan in and around Hartford, Connecticut some of whom are still in close touch with Bobby's dad. Bobby's grandfather Alexander Budnitz had, in fact, lived with the Milkewitz family in New Britain, Connecticut when he first came to America in 1905, and they helped him find his first work here. Anyway, when we got to Anancyc there was exactly one modern (brick) building in town besides the various old wooden houses: it was the headquarters of the local cooperative farm. We went in, found a young lady in an office, and she dropped everything to become our temporary tour guide. She told us that there were no Jews left in town; that there was no Jewish cemetery nor had there ever been one; and that we should talk to a couple of old ladies to learn more. With her in tow, we did that. We learned from them that the Germans had killed all of the Jews there in 1942. After the War (World War Two, for those of you who don't know which "war" was "The War" in those parts), one Jew remained. He had returned from the Red Army to town, had become the head of the cooperative and was therefore a big-shot, and everybody knew him. His name was Lazar Konik and he now, in retirement, lived in Starobin. So we took a few photos and drove back to Starobin. In the main square, we asked the first people we met where Konik lived and they directed us to his house, which was wooden, maybe 50-feet-on-a-side, and quite identical in style to every other house in those parts. We knocked and he stumbled out: 84 years old, and although Jewish he spoke no Yiddish (surprising!) He had survived the War by being in the Red Army; when he returned his entire family had been wiped out, as had nearly every other Jew in the area. He settled down in Anancyc (in 1945 he would have been age 32) and married a Christian. His wife had recently died, but he had three daughters now around 50 years old; we met one of them who lived nearby and cared for him. There were grandchildren but we learned nothing about them. We stayed in his house for about an hour, talking through our interpreter, Professor Vilemas. His health seemed OK for his age but he was frail. He told us that his pension was $55 per month, larger than the usual $35/month pension because of his War service and his status as head of the cooperative. [How those old folks live on $35/month escapes us! Buying food would be more than that!] He affirmed that he alone from the Jewish community in Anancyc had survived; that he had lost his entire family; etc. He told us that the Jewish cemetery we had found in Starobin in 1991 was indeed the only old Jewish cemetery, though it was in an abandoned woods and had maybe only a dozen stones left. He did not remember the name "Budnitz" in either Anancyc or Starobin, but did specifically remember the name "Chinitz" and specifically remembered a "Yankel Chinitz", younger than he, who had gone to America before the War with his family. Could this be Rabbi Jacob Chinitz now in Jerusalem, who of all the Chinitz clan is the one that Barbara and I know best? I will inquire! [An aside: The "Budnitz" name arose three generations before our generation, when one of the Chinitz family changed his name to Budnitz to avoid the Czar's draft. We have numerous Chinitz cousins whom we know, and they all came from Starobin and environs.] Before leaving Starobin, we drove around the town, and revisited the cemetery we had seen in 1991: no change there -- as we had seen in 1991, among the dozen or so stones, there are three stones with "Chinitz" on them and one with "Wesherebin", a family who are Budnitz in-laws: Bobby's grandfather Alexander Budnitz had a brother who married a Wesherebin and died in Belarus, and a sister who also married a Wesherebin and moved to Buenos Aires and produced a big family there. One final Starobin story may be on interest. Lazar Konik told us that the only post-war survivor of his immediately family was a brother two years older, Mottel Konik, who had served in the Red Army and had been captured by the British. At war's end, Lazar received one letter from his brother informing him that as a prisoner Mottel was being transported to England. Lazar wrote to England more than once, but never received any other letters nor any other acknowledgment of his brother's fate. Now, fifty-plus years later, he told us this sad story and asked if we could do anything. We said that we would try, through our Bodnitz relatives in London. End of Starobin story. Visit to Lenin, September 1997: The town of Lenin is about 30 miles south of Starobin, or about 130 miles south of Minsk, on the due-north-south highway running from Minsk through Slusk and Starobin and toward the Pripyat swampland. Lenin today has about 1000 population; we learned that before the war it had about 2000, of whom several hundred were Jews (all were killed!). The economic base is a collective farm. We went there because Harry Budnitz told us that his grandfather and grandmother Budnitz, who would also be Bobby's great-grandparents, moved to Lenin late in life and were buried there: according to Harry, "on the right side of the cemetery, in the third row". Based on our earlier experiences, we expected that such directions would be hopelessly useless --- we had seen exactly zero cemeteries with orderly "rows". But we were in for a surprise. Lenin's town center has a small general store and a bakery. When we drove into town and inquired, we were told that the cemetery was about a mile east of the town center. We drove there and found to our surprise a cemetery that, although abandoned, was in relatively "great shape": it was about 1 1/2 acres in size, square, surrounded by a stone-stucco wall about six feet high, with a nice cast-iron locked gate in front. It had about 100 visible grave markers. We couldn't easily scale the wall so we inquired as to how to get in. We were directed to the house of Vladimir Vladimirovich Bayarin, a man of about 75 years old, Catholic, who keeps the key. He told us that his very ill wife was in a hospital 50 miles north, and visiting her often was a great burden for him. Bayarin seemed to us to be the most incredibly "righteous gentile" we met: he has single-handedly taken it upon himself to preserve and protect the old Jewish cemetery; he founded a small "history museum" to tell the story of the Jewish slaughter of 1942; and he supervised the construction, a few years ago, of a nicely tailored monument-statue-garden to the Jews, with contributions from Israel. He was brought to Israel a few years ago and was given a medal by Yad Vashem for his work! Anyway, he took us to the cemetery, unlocked the gate, took us around it, and told us about it. The wall around it was put up a few years ago with money that he raised from Israeli Jews. Many of the grave markers are not of stone but of wood, the only wooden markers we saw anywhere in Belarus. He told us that one hard winter, the local folks started to take some of these wooden markers to use for firewood but that he put a stop to it. The cemetery has about fifty legible grave markers, about half in stone or concrete, the other half in wood. They are, at least the stone ones in the front, mostly in reasonably good "rows". Toward the back, some of the markers were covered with deep brush. Many of the wooden markers had fallen down (or had been broken off at the ground-level) and were piled in a somewhat neat pile, vertically standing, against a fence near the cemetery's middle. But we did not find any markers with our family name on them. Through our interpreter, Bayarin asked us a curious favor: he said that he could not read any of the markers (which were all in Hebrew, of course); would we go around and read them for him and write down who was who? He very much wanted to know the names (he remarked that many of them were presumably family members of Jews whom he had known as a youth.) We did so: it took about an hour to read about fifty of them (the others were either illegible, as many of the wooden ones were, or upside-down with the writing on the bottom, or just weathered too much.) The markers dated mostly from about the 1890s to the 1920s. Many, perhaps half, of the markers had family surnames on them, and these dated from post-1910 (before then, the names were all just deceased-son-of-father like "Moshe Ben Chaim", or deceased-daughter-of-father like "Sarah Bat Yosef"). We wrote the list down with a small map, and we will soon mail this to Bayarin for his use. Bayarin then took us to the "history museum" that he has established, in a small wooden house in town. It had several photographic displays of Jewish people, the synagogue, Jewish houses, etc. It also had a map of the town with the Jewish houses all labelled with numbers and the family name for each indicated in the legend below the map! This was Bayarin's way of memorializing those who had perished. One of the names on this map was a Chinitz family! Bayarin told us that all of the several hundred Jews in Lenin when the Germans came were killed in 1942 at a spot on the north side of town. Presumably some Budnitz relatives were among those killed -- we will need to check with some cousins who may know. Bayarin also told us that the town's name preceded by centuries the time when V.I. Lenin became the tyrant ruler of Russia: he recounted a tale that V.I. Lenin's name came from that town, but he sounded as if he himself did not believe that tale. Almost adjacent to the small museum was the 30-foot-square area where the Jewish monument has been recently put up. Bayarin proudly took us there also. This was the spot where the first 160 Jewish townspeople, the Jewish young men, were slaughtered on the first day of the German occupation. Visit to David-Gorodok, September 1997: David-Gorodok was the town where the Bassewitz family lived (Bobby's paternal grandmother, Naomi Bassewitz Budnitz). After Naomi married Alexander Budnitz (who came from Starobin) in about 1898, they settled in David-Gorodok and their first three children, Isaac, Max, and Sadie, were born there. Alexander came to America in 1905 and his wife and three children one year later. (They had two other children, including Bobby's father, later in the U.S.) Many other Bassewitz family members came to America later, including one of Naomi's sisters and three of her brothers, as well as some Bass nephews and niece who settled in Claremont, New Hampshire. She left a sister and brother there who never emigrated. We have no idea as to their fate, or the fate of any offspring, when the Second World War came. David-Gorodok had about 16,000 population when the War came: we learned that about 6,000 were Jews and essentially all were killed. Today it has about 8,000. It lies in the fertile Pripyat River plain but not right in the swamps, and has productive fields all around. Its principal economic activity is to support the surrounding farms as a trading center. The river runs right through the center of town and is quite scenic. The center of town has numerous businesses and buildings, some very old. There is a statue of Lenin right in the town square, painted gold, and the big sign announcing the town as you enter from the east has a large hammer-and-sickle logo still on it. This is unusual: we saw no other large displays hailing either Lenin or the old Communist regime elsewhere. The town has lots of older wooden houses, some very charmingly decorated with artistic wooden carvings around the windows and roof-lines, a feature that we hadn't seen very often elsewhere. We got the general impression from this and other features, such as several nice flower gardens in the yards of ordinary houses, that David-Gorodok was slightly more prosperous than any of the towns (Starobin, Volozhin, Traby, Lenin) that we had seen further north. (But still, it has no running water for the houses, just like everywhere else we visited.) We found an old lady, asked her where the Jewish section was, and she agreed to show us -- but first she needed to go home for something. When we took her home, she backed out. We do not know why (she was probably just shy, or maybe she was too busy, but perhaps also afraid). This was the only instance in our extensive travels of somebody not cooperating fully with us -- indeed, not dropping everything else to cooperate fully with us! So we asked again, and found another older fellow. He showed us the Jewish "neighborhood", and when we mentioned the family name "Bashevitz" he perked up and clearly recognized the name! He showed us the site of the Bashevitz house, telling us that it had been burned down and a new house erected on the site. The house site was on a prominent street corner on a quasi-main drag, diagonal from a large Catholic church. The site of the main synagogue was nearby. He told us that the Bashevitz family had been shopkeepers of some kind. He also told us that most of the Jews in town had been either shopkeepers or tradesmen or craftsmen. We found another old fellow who independently confirmed that the specific site was indeed the site of the Bashevitz house. He also told us more about how the Jews were killed: many of the young men were taken to the outskirts of town and shot, and then others were killed either right in town or transported elsewhere where they were killed. [There were 6,000 Jews!] We were told that all of the Jewish buildings were destroyed during the war: the two wooden synagogues were burned and the third, of brick, was disassembled. We learned that the entire large Jewish community used a single large Jewish cemetery on the southwest side of town, but all of the stones had been destroyed or taken. We went to the site. The area, perhaps five acres, was a sandy spot near the river, and we were told that the burials all were deep in sandy soil. The site was actually a slight low hill above the flood plain. We learned that in the 1960s there was a large flood and the local authorities needed sand for flood control. They surface-mined the sandy area of the Jewish cemetery, and we were told by some old folks that they specifically remembered seeing bones among the sand that was used for flood control during that time. When we went to the cemetery site we saw that on one end a previously small hill had been cut away, evidence of the sand-surface-mining operation that we had been told about. We then met an old fellow who told us that there was a monument, 5 kilometers north of town, at the spot where the Germans had killed several hundred Jewish young men after marching them out there, at the beginning of their slaughter campaign in 1942. He would take us there if we would go with him to find a friend -- taking the friend was essential because the fellow walked with crutches and neither leg seemed to work. So we did his bidding, and we and the two older men drove out of town, through an open field, across a sandy area, and finally into some woods to the monument. We learned that it had been erected only a few years before by some Israelis. The spot was on a small hill in the woods. Very moving and spooky. In the car the crippled old man told us some specific stories about the German occupation. He then directed us to another man, a retired tailor named Tzarik, not Jewish, who he was sure could tell us more. We went there, knocked on Tzarik's door, and spoke to him and his wife. We learned a little more about the Jewish community, including that all of the synagogues had been burned. The Riemer family: Naomi Bassewitz' mother's maiden name was Riemer, but as far as we know none of them ever came to America. When we inquired of that family, we learned that the Riemer family was very prosperous before the war: they owned a flour mill, a sawmill, and several shops in David-Gorodok. Visit to Horodetz, September 1997: The Dubin family (Bobby's maternal grandfather Nathan Dubin) came from Horodetz. His Dubin grandparents lived there from their marriage in 1889 until emigration: Nathan emigrated in 1895, leaving his wife Ida and two sons (Jacob, born 1890) and Sam (born 1894) who emigrated in 1901. The town name is spelled something like Gorodec if its Russian letters are transliterated and is often spelled this way on maps, but Horodetz is a reasonable pronunciation. There are two towns with this same name in Belarus, the other lying north of Slusk. We visited that other Horodetz in 1991 but learned that it was the wrong one: no Jews ever lived there. We now know (see below) that this Horodetz is the correct Dubin town. Horodetz has about 1000 people today, is located about 10 miles east of Kobrin (a small city of perhaps 50,000 where Bobby's maternal grandmother, Ida Rubinsky Dubin came from), and is a farm village with a paved main street but dirt side streets. We learned that when the War came it had about 40 Jewish families, which seems to imply that the town was perhaps 20% to 25% Jewish. We learned that today no Jews live there; presumably, none or almost none survived the War. Before the war, the Jews were said to have been merchants and craftspeople. When we entered the village from the west, we immediately crossed a small river and came to the town center where two stores and a village office building are located. The town center seemed to us too large for a village of only a thousand. We stopped there to ask questions and were promptly surrounded by about a dozen people, mostly older (in their 60s or 70s), who listened to our questions and talked to us for perhaps a half hour. Everyone was very friendly in a way that is typical of small villages everywhere in Belarus. When we inquired of the Dubin family everyone old enough clearly remembered the family. All that we know is that when Bobby's grandparents and young uncles left, Nathan Dubin had several brothers and sisters in Horodetz who did not emigrate, as well as three or four who did emigrate later. Prior to this trip, we knew essentially nothing about the Dubin family who remained there. What we learned was that the Dubins operated a flour mill at the start of the War and were apparently relatively prosperous. One older man explicitly remembered a Moshe Dubin born in 1900, who at the time the war started was the principal Dubin family member. From his age, we think that he was very likely Bobby's mother's first cousin. We were told that he and his family were killed by the Germans; that their house and mills were burned down; and that the two synagogues were also destroyed: the wooden one burned and the brick one disassembled. We also learned that the site where the main Jewish massacre occurred in 1942 is right in town, which we asked to see. An older man on his bicycle took us there, maybe 200 yards south of the village center down a short residential street. What we saw was an open field perhaps half the size of a football field, with a horse grazing. We were told that at the north end some of the massacres took place, and that this was the site of the mass grave. We also learned that the south end of the open field was the site of the Jewish cemetery, now completely obliterated (no stones, no sign of anything -- the stones had been taken for paving). As we were walking back to town, the older man told us, almost as an afterthought, that the red brick building we were passing was the Jewish "bathhouse". He explained that there was a communal bathhouse in the village but that the Jews had their own bathhouse, which was the brick building. He did not know the word "mikvah" but of course that is what we were looking at. It is a smallish building, maybe 60 feet by 35, one storey, shaped on top like a barn. It was later used as a mill, but today it has farm machinery stored inside. This is, most likely, Bobby's grandmother's mikvah when she was married and for a decade thereafter! This brick building was, in retrospect, the only Jewish building that we saw in all of Belarus still standing. [There are, of course, synagogues today in most of the larger cities. We prayed in one in Vilna on shabbat. Barbara, on a side trip to northeastern Poland from Vilna while Bobby was working, saw one old synagogue that is now used as an art gallery. It is a large, impressive building.] The man on the bicycle who took us to the site of the cemetery told us that he recalled a specific horrible event from 1942: some Jews were slaughtered in the town center near the well that his particular family used, and left there to bleed and die. Then they were taken away and buried somewhere. That evening he, a teenager, was sent to draw water from the nearby well but it was contaminated with blood. He had to go to another place to get water, and then his own father promptly drilled their own well to get clean water. His description of this memory was vivid and convincing. We noticed that the town's houses seemed relatively more prosperous than those in the towns further north --- it seemed more like David-Gorodok in this regard than like Volozhin or Starobin further north.
IV. THE HISTORICAL ARCHIVES IN MINSK, VILNA, and GRODNO The Minsk Archive: There is a National Historical Archive in Minsk that has voluminous census, birth, marriage, death, army-draft, and tax records from the era of the czar, from about 1810 to the 1917 revolution. While the archive is by no means complete, it has records for many of the small towns in Minsk Province. It recently became "open" after having been "sealed" for many decades under the Communists. We went there in July, 1997 to inquire about searching the archive for family information. What we learned is that we could not search the archive ourselves, but that we could have a search done for us by paying a fee. We paid the fee ($50.00), and gave the archivist all of the information that we had about the names of the villages and towns and the family names we were looking for (Starobin/Budnitz, Anancyc/Budnitz, David-Gorodok/Bashevitz, Horodetz/Dubin, Volozhin/Shapiro, Traby/Rudnick). The archive information is classified by village/town/city, and for each such location the archivist can search through large old dusty books for the relevant family name(s). The search is easy for small villages, but more-or-less impossible for cities like Minsk, Pinsk, and Brest, which had hundreds of thousands of population. Anyway, we received a letter back from the archive is early September, just before our return trip. A copy of that letter is attached, in both the original Russian version and in a translation that we had done here in Berkeley. The letter tells us that nothing can be found in the archive for the Budnitz family in Starobin and Anancyc, and that Volozhin and Traby are in the archive in "Vilenskii Gobernya" which is Vilna Province. [We went there also and they are searching that archive for the Traby and Volozhin family records.] But for Bashevitz in David-Gorodok there is information in the letter that is very interesting, and that for us at least is totally new. Bobby's father, Chick, tells us that his mother's (Naomi's) Bashevitz parents were named Meyer and Gittel, which is confirmed by the archive letter. But there is much more there also. We learn from the letter that: o Meyer Bashevitz was age 23 in 1874 (therefore, born in 1851); o Meyer's father's name was Isaac (the archive shows Meyer's middle name as "Aizikov" or "son of Isaac"); o Meyer's mother was Sarah ("Sora"), age 55 in 1874, or born in 1819; o Meyer's maternal grandfather, Sora's father, was Samuel (Sora is called "Shmuilova" or "daughter of Shmuel"); o Meyer's wife's name was Gittel ("Gitlya"), age 22 in 1874 or born in 1852; o Gittel's father's name was Ivan (she is called "Yevnova" or "daughter of Ivan"). We know from Chick that Gittel's family name was Riemer. It now occurs to us to ask the archive to search for the name Riemer in David-Gorodok, especially after having been told when we visited that town that the Riemer family was well-known and prosperous. We will try to do that soon. The Vilna and Grodno Archives: Incidentally, for family searches in the Vilna Archive, we have the address and contact there, because we visited there in both July and September. If any of you out there has family from Lithuania or the sections of today's Belarus that are in the former Vilna Gobernya, we can tell you how to make that search. We also have the address for the archive in Grodno (now a city in Belarus), for searches in Grodno Gobernya, but we have not contacted them ourselves.
BOBBY & BARBARA BUDNITZ' TRIPS TO BELARUSSIAN VILLAGES