25 Sukhaya St., Minsk, Belarus
In Slobodskoy Lane, near the Jewish cemetery, 26 prisoners of the Minsk ghetto hid and continued to live in one of the basements of a half-ruined house. Half of them survived until liberation.
Among the survivors were husband and wife Eli and Hyena Goberman. The rapid advance of Hitler’s troops in ’41 prevented their family from leaving Minsk. In December ’42, their youngest daughter, 6 years old, fell ill and died. On August 28, 1942, the older daughters were arrested; their fate remains unknown. At the end of September, a good friend of the Gobermans, Pinkhus Dobin, suggested waiting for the “soon” arrival of the Red Army in an 80-meter basement. For concealment, he made the entrance to this underground shelter through a stove he built himself. Dobin had been preparing this basement all summer. It had a dirt floor, which allowed them to make a kind of toilet with a screen in one corner. Two men made several two-tier bunks from boards torn off fences of neighboring houses, dragged in two 300-liter barrels, and filled them with water. It was planned that 13 people would hide in the shelter, but they had to accommodate twice as many—mostly women and children. Of the entire group, only Dobin and Goberman were strong men.
At first, the lack of daylight was the hardest to bear, recalled Eli Goberman. “A candle was lit periodically. The rest of the time we stayed in darkness. At first, some women quietly sang sad songs, children told each other stories and played. Dobin and a young blonde Rachel brought food to the basement: they made trips for supplies every two weeks. Sometimes they couldn’t get food. So the accountant Berl told the children how to eat dry bread when there was very little: ‘You must not bite off the crust. You have to break it into small pieces, put it in your mouth, and not chew, but suck on it. That way it will seem longer that you are eating, and you will feel full.’ For concealment, so that no sound came from the underground, the inhabitants slept during the day and stayed awake at night.
Hunger, terrible unsanitary conditions, lack of water, air, and light began to take their toll after a month. The weakened residents of the basement began to die. Dobin’s mother was the first to die, followed by two old men, then a woman and her ten-year-old daughter... They were buried right there in the basement. The living were plagued by lice, lost their teeth, and all suffered from skin diseases.
In December, a relative of Dobin was caught by a policeman during another supply run. They barely managed to bribe him with gold earrings... And in January, disaster struck—the entrance shaft was blocked. Using the only shovel, knives, and forks, the basement inhabitants dug their way to the surface for two weeks. Water was running out in the basement, but they made it. The boy who climbed out first and returned with a bag of snow was greeted as a savior.
In March, water came into the basement by itself. The rapid melting of snow flooded the basement; survival was only possible on the upper tier of the bunks. Two girls begged to be let go—they were delirious with the dream of joining the partisans. One night they left and were never seen again. Dobin’s young relative and another woman were luckier—they reached the partisans after long ordeals on the surface. They left their children in the basement.
In the last days of June, after another trip to the surface, Dobin brought a partisan leaflet. From it, they learned that our troops were advancing and the day of Minsk’s liberation was near... On the second day after liberation, July 4, 1944, one of the women who got out saw a “Willys” jeep with Red Army officers on Sovetskaya Street. She told them everything, and the “Willys” rushed to the basement. The major who first descended there lost consciousness from the stench.
Soldiers carried out 12 half-alive skeletons from the crypt; only Dobin came out of the basement on his own. Some, after breathing fresh air, fainted. All were sent to the hospital. There, Goberman was weighed: a man who before the war lifted weights over 96 kg now weighed only 47. His wife weighed 36 kilos. 263 days of life in darkness did not improve the health of the others either. Nine-year-old Edi Fridman, due to dystrophy, began to grow a beard... For the rest of their lives, they were plagued by dizziness, leg swelling and joint pain, dental problems, and cardiovascular diseases.
Based on this story, the Belarusfilm studio made an animated film “263 Nights,” which became the best documentary short film at the 7th Moscow Jewish Film Festival.
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