Sunday, December 7, 2025

Pinsk Ghetto - Wajserman - Wasserman there!

















Picture from Yad Vashem archives: My grandfather's name was Boruch Wasserman, his parents' names were Rivka and Moshe, and his place of birth was Kalaurowicze, 29 km east of Pinsk.

There were 73 names with the surname Wasserman or Wajserman on the Pinsk Ghetto list. Most of them are women and children. My grandfather Baruch, Boruch Wasserman, was not on that list. It means that he was murdered before the ghetto was established. His brother Josif was running a bakery, and is on the list as "funeral worker". My father's sister Rywa (Puba) is on the list, as well as the children of my grandfather (Izaak and Nisia) from his 2nd marriage and his wife Dasha. That means that they were murdered in Dobra Wola, or as it is also called, Dobrovolia.



The Pinsk Ghetto was a crowded, squalid slum confined by barbed-wire fences, consisting of 240 small, wooden houses on 23 streets in the poorest section of town.
 The ghetto area was a large rectangle surrounded by a 2,345-meter (1.5-mile) long barbed-wire fence with three guarded gates. Polish police were often tasked with guarding the perimeter day and night.
The inhabitants were forced to live in small, one-story wooden houses. The living space was drastically inadequate, with as many as ten people sharing a single room and an average of only 1.2 square meters (about 13 square feet) of space per person.
Sanitation and Health: The area was initially equipped with only two functioning water pumps for over 18,000 people, leading to "inadequate sanitation". Health conditions deteriorated rapidly, with rampant outbreaks of dysentery and typhus. The assigned area was deliberately chosen as the "poorest and most crowded part of town".

The primary characteristic of the Pinsk Ghetto was extreme deprivation and overcrowding, enforced by brutal German occupation policies. Residents were forced to wear yellow Stars of David, forbidden from using sidewalks, and subjected to forced labor, beatings, and random killings. Food was severely rationed.
The ghetto existed for only about six months, from its establishment in May 1942 until its liquidation in late October and early November 1942, when almost all of its inhabitants were murdered in mass shooting operations.