Naum P. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3602) interviewed by Arkadiĭ Shulʹman

Videotape testimony of Naum P., who was born in Pogost-Zagorodskiy, Soviet Union (presently Belarus) in 1929, the oldest of four children. He recalls attending a Russian school after the Jewish school was dissolved; his grandfather holding Sabbath services in his home; cordial relations with non-Jews; German invasion in 1941; a mass shooting of Jewish men in July, including his father and grandfather; being stopped by the authorities while exhuming their bodies for reburial in the Jewish cemetery; his escape from a mass killing in August (his mother and siblings were killed); assistance from his mother's non-Jewish friend in Zalesʹye; joining his uncle's family in the Slutsk ghetto; slave labor doing construction; hiding during round-ups; an uncle in the partisans arranging their escape in August 1942; his uncle bribing the head of the Judenrat so they could escape; joining Soviet partisans in the forest; military actions against the Germans; support from locals; a German blockade in 1944; breaking out of the encirclement at Tësovo; entering liberated Slutsk; enlisting in the Soviet army; advancing to Berlin; discharge in 1951; and returning to Slutsk. Mr. P. notes there was no monument at the mass grave in Pogost; two Jews building one in the 1950s; and trying not to remember his war experiences.