Lost in Siberia: Brisk’s Forgotten Jews

Two years after the Holocaust, in 1946, the Jews of Brisk (Brest) and Vilnius faced yet another tragedy. These cities, once part of Poland, remained under Russian control after the war. The Jews who lived there still thought of themselves as Polish, but the Soviet authorities insisted they were Russian. In Communist Russia, even the desire to leave was seen as treason. “Why would anyone want to leave our paradise?” the authorities reasoned. To them, asking to leave could only mean involvement in a plot against the Motherland.

One day, an announcement was made: the applications of Brisk and Vilnius Jews had been “approved.” They were told to pack up all their belongings and report to the airport the next morning for their flight to Poland. Excited and hopeful, families boarded the planes, believing they were on their way to freedom. But soon they realized something was terribly wrong. The flight to Warsaw should have taken less than an hour, yet hours passed, and they were still in the air.

It was a cruel Soviet deception. Instead of Poland, the planes landed in Krasnoyarsk, deep inside Siberia. The Vilnius Jews knew harsh winters, but nothing could prepare them for minus 50 degrees. As soon as they stepped off the planes, the KGB separated them, men from women, parents from children. Families were torn apart. Children were sent to orphanages to be “re-educated” in Communist ideals, while parents were thrown into prison cells.

The ordeal began with endless interrogations. Each Jew was placed in a solitary cell, accused of being a spy. Their cases were reviewed by a “Troika,” a tribunal of three Communist officials who had absolute power. Predictably, they declared the Jews guilty of “treason against the Motherland” under Article 58. Their punishment: eight years of forced labor in the dreaded Kolyma camp.

From Krasnoyarsk, the condemned were placed on trains heading 9,000 kilometers east, toward Vladivostok. This was a place of darkness, where nights lasted most of the year and winter temperatures could plunge to 70 below zero. On the banks of the frozen Kolyma River stood one of the deadliest camps in all of Soviet Russia. Ships occasionally broke through the ice to bring supplies, but as soon as they passed, the river froze again.

Kolyma was called the “Russian Auschwitz.” There was no running water; prisoners had to melt snow just to drink. They built the camp with their own hands by cutting trees, paving roads, and constructing buildings, driven by impossible labor quotas.

The tragedy deepened when it became known that this system of quotas was designed by a Jew, Naftali Frenkel. Once a prisoner himself, Frenkel wrote to Stalin with “improvements” for camp efficiency. His idea was simple and cruel: food rations should depend on the amount of work a prisoner completed. The strong grew stronger with more food, while the weak, who could barely lift heavy logs, starved further. Stalin was so impressed that Frenkel was promoted from prisoner to commander of the gulag system. At Kolyma, prisoners often worked until midnight in the bitter cold, trying to meet the quotas. It is estimated that 150,000 people died in Kolyma alone.

For the Jews of Brisk and Vilnius who were sent there, the story did not end well. Most did not survive. We know their fate only through the testimony of others who shared their suffering. One such witness was Yehuda Kogan, a greengrocer from Givatayim in Israel. He had traveled to Russia to visit his brother, only to be arrested on false charges of espionage. After a sham trial, he was sent to the gulag for many years. From camp to camp he wandered, collecting the stories of Jewish prisoners. Eventually, he was released as part of a prisoner exchange for Russian spies. In his book, he recorded the horrors endured by Jews in the Soviet labor camps.

Near Kolyma was the once-thriving town of Atka. The camp had fueled its economy, housing thousands of residents. The road leading to it became known as “the road of bones,” because the bodies of prisoners who perished during the journey were buried beneath it. Today, that same road serves as a modern interstate highway. The town itself has nearly disappeared, its wooden houses collapsing with time. Only six elderly people remain. A giant Soviet statue still stands, a silent monument to the Communist dream of “fixing the world” and “educating humanity”, a dream that cost some twenty million Soviet lives, including countless Jews whose suffering has nearly been forgotten.