In 1944, about 13 thousand people died in the Ozarichi concentration camp for several weeks. Yanina Portalimova from Belarus shared her memories of this time.
In the summer of 1943, the Germans were already losing ground. On the right bank of the Dnieper, they then built a fortified line of defense. All the men were herded to the construction site, and they had to get rid of the disabled - extra mouths.
The woman said that when she was 14 years old, one night she was awakened by a knock on the door that did not bring anything good. Then she lived with her mother in one of the villages of the Mogilev region.
“Two knocked on us. One of them spoke Russian. He said he would be taken to a safe area. But either intentionally, or accidentally, he said: dress warmly. Mom wrapped us up and tied two more small pads on the back and on the stomach. On the road, a car was already waiting for us, full of our fellow villagers - old people, children, women,”she recalls.
As a result, she ended up in that very Ozarichi camp - the "death camp". About 50 thousand people from the surrounding area were quickly taken there. The camp consisted of several complexes (near the town of Dert, near the village of Podosinnik, near the Ozarichi).
The latter was a swamp surrounded by a barbed wire fence.
“There were no buildings and premises, except for the guardhouse. Once they brought bread - people thought it was white, rushed, began to fight for it - and it crumbled in their hands, because it was made of sawdust. For more than a week, the people in the Ozarichsky camp could not stand it - they died. Corpses were everywhere,”recalled another former prisoner, Pyotr Bedritsky.
There was nowhere to hide, and when frost fell, people undressed the corpses to escape the cold.
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“Those who were driven there on foot, who were exhausted, died very quickly. Three or four days - that's all. There was no food in the camp, there was no clean water. We ate snow. The camp itself is a territory fenced with barbed wire, where of the buildings there were only guard houses. People slept on the ground in the open air,”said Yanina Portalimova.
In addition, there were no latrines on the territory of the camps. The snow cover was a mess of sewage. They flowed into the thawed patches, and from there the prisoners had to drink. Also, dirty water was squeezed out of the moss, or snow was drowned, on which the corpses lay around. Of course, such conditions of detention provoked an outbreak of disease.
When, a few weeks later, the Red Army soldiers came to free the prisoners, only 33 out of 50,000 of them were left. Cold, hunger and typhus took a huge number of lives in a short time.
“It got quiet one morning. And two appeared in white camouflage coats. They told us that they were their own, that we were released, but you can't leave the camp - everything around is mined. At dawn, cars and carts arrived, and after sanitizing we were taken to the villages. So we lived until June - until our area was liberated. When we came to our village, there was nothing at all - the Germans were dismantling and burning houses to heat them,”the former prisoner recalls.
However, the worst was already left behind.
Author: Sophy Salldon