It was the first day of spring in Minsk.  I was the American Charge d’affaires in Belarus, accompanying a visiting American citizen to meet two elderly Belarusian women who had sheltered his father during the Holocaust. The visitor had flown in from New York for this purpose.

We drove north for two hours, arriving at the family’s ancestral village. After meeting the mayor, we proceeded to a modest house on the edge of town where the American’s father had been sheltered as a young Jew in Nazi occupied Byelorussia, hiding in the barn of a local family for almost a year before escaping to the partisans. The whole neighborhood was waiting in the road as we arrived, a crowd of about thirty people, shaking our hands as we emerged from the van.

The two sisters who had risked their lives to shelter the Jewish boy were now in their eighties, small and frail, but still looking healthy. They emerged from the house wearing scarves and plain white cotton dresses, hugging the visitor from America, and taking him on a private tour of the barn to show him where his father had been hidden in the rafters.  Afterwards, in the kitchen, we all sat around for tea. They told how scared they had been at the time. Discovery would have meant death for the whole family. The Germans made numerous sweeps through the town, asking if anyone knew of Jews being sheltered.

Some of the neighbors in the street described the day the Holocaust came to their town in 1942, when a local forest ranger rode up on his horse and warned those who were Jewish to leave immediately since the Germans were coming the following morning to kill them. This news was so shocking to be unbelievable, since nothing like this had happened before.  Half of the Jewish inhabitants left their homes to hide in the forests. The next morning, the remainder were rounded up.

After a couple hours, we loaded back into the van, saying goodbye to the sisters, and driving very slowly down a narrow road going back towards town.  At one point we stopped the van and got out, and the American visitor told me his father was one of about fifty Jews who had been marched under guard along this road after the roundup. He pointed to a culvert beside the road, where his father, a boy of fourteen, had jumped unnoticed and hidden as the rest of the group was being marched away.  We then walked along the road which the Jewish column, minus his father, had followed for another 300 yards, to an abandoned cement factory on the right enclosed by high cement walls.  As we walked into the factory grounds, our guide told us that this was the spot where the Jewish column had been stopped, lined up, in the center of the courtyard, and shot. The guide said the Jews knew what was going to happen beforehand, but I wasn’t so sure. The visitor’s father, hiding in the culvert, must have heard the shots.

Getting back into the van, the mayor’s assistant took us on a driving tour to three other villages along a narrow asphalt road which curved through the region. We stopped at three clearings in the forest, sites where local Jewish inhabitants had also been marched behind their rabbis, and shot.  At each site, metal markers listed the names of the 50-100 Jews who had been killed, young and old, women and children.

On the way back to Minsk, I remained quiet, and I could see our visitor was lost in thought at the emotional revisiting of his father ‘s childhood.  We stopped along the way in a former Jewish shetl, the hometown of Israeli President, Shimon Peres, walking through the Jewish cemetery which was overgrown and surrounded by a low, black wrought iron fence.  Many of the 500 or so headstones had fallen over.  I thought of the young Shimon Peres joining the partisans and later emigrating to Israel and joining the Hagannah.  I had met him on my first tour in Israel.

The visitor flew home the next day, and I was left searching for answers, my mind stuck in the cement factory courtyard.