Qualla: Brzesc Ghetto

Brzesc Ghetto: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0. On the eve of the Second World War, more than 21,000 Jews lived in Brzesc nad Bugiem. They ran four out of five private businesses in the city. Their children attended fifteen Jewish schools that taught in Yiddish and Hebrew. The future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin grew up here; his father Zeev and his older brother Herzl walked these streets. By the end of 1942, almost none of those 21,000 people were alive. The Brzesc Ghetto is the story of how a city lost nearly half of itself in roughly a year, and of the names and places that sit beneath the apartment blocks of present-day Brest, Belarus.

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Image: Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada | CC BY-SA 2.0

Brzesc Ghetto: A Jewish City on the Bug

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Brzesc nad Bugiem sat on the Bug River where Poland met the Soviet Union in the interwar years, capital of the Polesie Voivodeship. By the 1936 census Jews made up 41.3 percent of the population, 21,518 people in a city of roughly 52,000. Eighty percent of private enterprises wer...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Brzesc Ghetto: Two Occupations

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heinz Boesig, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. The Germans took Brzesc in September 1939, then handed it to the Soviets in a joint military parade on September 22. The provinces around it were swallowed by the USSR after rigged elections supervised by the NKVD. Mass deportations of Poles and Jews to Siberia followed; some Jew...

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Image: Heinz Boesig | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Brzesc Ghetto: Liquidation

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Christian Ganzer, Hamburg, CC BY-SA 2.5. In August 1941 the Germans extorted a ransom of 26 million rubles in cash and valuables from the Jews of Brzesc, a familiar pattern: collect what could be collected before murdering the people who had paid. The ghetto was sealed in December. Less than a year later, between Octobe...

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Image: Christian Ganzer, Hamburg | CC BY-SA 2.5

Brzesc Ghetto: The Mass Grave on Karbysheva Street

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vadim Akopyan, CC0. In February 2019, construction workers digging the foundation for a luxury apartment complex on Karbysheva Street in present-day Brest uncovered human remains. The trench they had opened ran 40 meters long and two meters deep. By March, more than 1,214 bodies had been removed, al...

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Image: Vadim Akopyan | CC0

Brzesc Ghetto: What Was Lost

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heinz Boesig, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. Menachem Begin, the future prime minister of Israel, survived only because he was arrested by the NKVD in 1940 and deported east. His father Zeev and his brother Herzl, along with most of his extended family, were murdered in Brzesc. Their photograph, taken in their home in 1932,...

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Image: Heinz Boesig | CC BY-SA 3.0 de