The village of Kamenka is located in the suburbs of the city of Bobruisk. During the Great Patriotic War, this place became the final destination for several thousand Bobruisk residents who tragically reached the place of their death. On the night of November 6 to 7, 1941, a mass execution of prisoners from the ghetto, which was located on what is now Bakharova Street, began in the village of Kamenka, Bobruisk district.

Before this, 500 prisoners of war were brought here from a concentration camp located in the Bobruisk fortress. They were forced to dig two ten-meter-long trenches, and then were shot. These pits became mass graves for Jews and prisoners of war. In two days, the trenches were filled with the bodies of more than 10,000 people. They were driven in the rain for about 9 km to the village — exhausted women, children, elderly people; not everyone completed the "road of death." The weak and those who fell into the November mud were shot along the entire route.

Along the road, peaceful residents were lined up and watched this procession. Some managed to push children out of the column, saving their lives, but such lucky ones were few.

Today, Bakharova Street hardly resembles the "road of death"; it is paved and landscaped. Only at the city’s exit does the sidewalk turn into a narrow path running through a picturesque birch grove. During the war, there were no sidewalks here; people walked through sticky mud, many barefoot. It is hard to imagine this today, let alone feel the horror that people experienced.

There were six execution sites in Bobruisk in total. In 1970, a tire factory began construction on one of these blood-soaked plots of land. The builders dug a pit for the foundation of the central factory laboratory building and discovered a trench with shot people. Their remains were reburied in mass graves at the Russian and Jewish cemeteries. Part of the remains were transported by Meer Zeliger, a watchmaker from Bobruisk, who carried them in bags by bicycle to the mass grave at the site of the mass execution of Jewish ghetto prisoners, where the remains of his relatives rested. He considered it his duty to immortalize the memory of all these people. At first, no one helped him, and he collected bones in bags alone, transporting them several kilometers by bicycle to Kamenka.

At that time, the trenches had already been leveled with the ground, and pigs grazed there. The authorities did not like Meer Zeliger’s initiative, but they could do nothing. This memorial, established through donations from ordinary people, has its own story. During the construction of the BShK in Yeloviki, the remains of other executed Bobruisk residents were found (however, according to people professionally engaged in the topic of Stalinist repressions, before the war the Soviet authorities executed innocent people — the repressed — there). Meer Zeliger and his friends transported these remains by bicycle to Kamenka to bury them in a common grave.

In total, about 20 bags of bones were collected, and 126 skulls were found. But these are far from all the remains of people executed in Yeloviki.

Later, those who cared about the tragedy of the Holocaust rallied around the watchmaker. Together with helpers, Meer planted trees and procured building materials. He was already over 80 years old then. Meer Zeliger passed away in August 1978. The memorial was opened in 1979. It was a mound with a granite stone inscribed "Here lie the remains of Soviet citizens." Not a word about the Jews. That was the time...

Subsequently, a marble plaque was installed. A tiled path leads to the fence enclosing this place of mourning. To the left of the monument, two stars are installed. To the right of the monument, the number 10,000 rises above the ground in black — a reminder of how many people were destroyed here.

Years later, when the memorial was reconstructed, a clarification appeared on the monument about who exactly was buried in the Kamenka trenches.

The executions of prisoners of war were often carried out by the fascists in the same places where Jews were exterminated, differing only in time. For example, in the village of Kamenka, where Jews were shot in the fall of 1941, prisoners of war were executed during 1942–1943. In the Yeloviki village area, in the Lysaya Gora tract, and near the Jewish cemeteries, according to eyewitnesses, Jews were regularly exterminated, and then prisoners of war. In the summer of 1944, after the city was liberated from the fascists, more than 40 pits were found here — graves ranging from 4 to 30 meters long. Preliminary estimates suggest about 40,000 Belarusian and Polish Jews and roughly the same number of Soviet prisoners of war: the death machine in Kamenka, launched in November 1941, worked steadily for several years. Before retreating from the village in 1943, the occupiers tried to hide the traces of their crimes, dug up the trenches, poured remains with fuel oil, and set them on fire. The stones under glass sarcophagi on both sides of the monument are the charred bones of the executed. The initiators of the memorial decided to leave some of them unburied as silent evidence of the tragedy of the Second World War.

Sources:

http://aviv.by/history/po-doroge-smerti/

https://wiki.bobr.by/Kamenka,_memorial

http://mishpoha.org/pamyat/1218-pravednik-meir-po-prozvishchu-fajer