Lost in Siberia: The Forgotten Tragedy of Brisk's Jews

Two years after World War II and the Holocaust, in 1946, the Jews of Brisk and Vilnius found themselves in a dire situation. These two cities, once part of Poland, remained under Russian occupation after the war. Although their inhabitants saw themselves as Polish, the Russian authorities considered them Russian. In Communist Russia, asking to leave was tantamount to betrayal. Why would anyone ever want to leave the communist paradise? It could only mean they were involved in a far-reaching conspiracy, willing to give up the joys of life in Russia for it!

Then, one day, the Jews of these cities received an order: their application had been accepted, and the next day they were to report with all their belongings at the airport. However, the flight took far longer than expected. The journey from Brisk to Warsaw takes less than an hour, yet they had been in the air for hours!

It turned out to be a Russian deception. After hours, the planes landed in Krasnoyarsk, deep within Siberia. Although Vilnius residents knew winter, they were utterly unprepared for temperatures of minus 50 degrees. Upon descending from the planes, the KGB separated men from women, leaving no families intact. Children were sent to orphanages for re-education, and parents to detention cells.

At the Russian labor camps, the first stage was interrogation. Each person was placed in a solitary cell, where they were questioned endlessly about their alleged espionage plans. Ultimately, they faced a "Troika," a tribunal of three Communist party members with unlimited power, which found them guilty under Article 58 of "treason against the Motherland." Their sentence: eight years in the Kolyma camp.

From Krasnoyarsk, the condemned were loaded onto trains bound for the easternmost point, 9,000 kilometers from Moscow, near Vladivostok, where it is night nearly year-round, and temperatures plummet to 70 below zero. Here, on the banks of the Kolyma River, they erected a massive camp. The river, naturally frozen, was occasionally traversed by Russian ships after icebreakers cleared a path. Once the ship passed, the river refroze.

The Kolyma camp was worse than hell, known as the "Russian Auschwitz." There was no running water; people had to melt snow to drink. Prisoners built the camp themselves, felling trees, paving roads, and constructing buildings—all through backbreaking labor quotas well beyond human capacity.

Tragically, this brutal and nonsensical system of labor camps was engineered by a Jew, an engineer named Naftali Frenkel, who was himself a gulag prisoner. He devised a method to optimize labor and productivity, which he sent in a letter to Stalin. Pleased with the ideas, Stalin transformed him from prisoner to gulag commander. According to the method, meal portions were based on the work quotas completed by prisoners. Thus, the weak, unable to chop and carry enormous logs, received less food, worsening their condition. At the Kolyma camp, inmates sometimes worked until midnight to meet the quotas. The death toll at Kolyma is estimated at 150,000.

This story does not have a happy ending. Most Jews who arrived in that transport to Kolyma did not survive. Their story reaches us through others who were in the camps and heard their horrific descriptions. One of them was Yehuda Kogan, a greengrocer from Givatayim, who traveled to Russia to visit his brother. He was arrested on charges of "espionage" and, after a fabricated trial, sent to many years in the gulag. He wandered from camp to camp, listening to the stories of many Jews. Eventually, he was released in a swap for real Russian spies, and in his book, he documented some of the sufferings of Jews in these brutal Soviet labor camps.

The town of Atka, near the Kolyma camp, was once large and thriving. The camp contributed to the town's economy, hosting thousands of residents. The road passing through the town was called "the road of bones," named after the bodies of prisoners who did not survive the journey to the camp. Now, it serves as an interstate highway. Six retirees live in the town, with its wooden houses decaying, and a giant statue serves as a reminder of the Communist ambition to fix the world and educate humanity—an ambition that cost the lives of about twenty million Russian citizens.