I know that next to the castle [the fortress of Brest] there was a prisoner-of-war camp at the time [1941]. I resided not far from the camp. Each night I heard gunfire: executions. People hungered for food, tried to flee, and --at times-- in the mornings, bodies of prisoners of war were hanging on the barbed-wire fences. People were weakened considerably from starvation. Camp guards murdered the weak. People were so hungry the guards used to beat prisoners down as they crowded around food distribution points. Germans used to bring food to the camp in tanks. They used to throw fish to the hungry crowd from the tanks. The crowd pushed many people under the tracks of the tanks. Next to the camp there are graves of many thousand people. I heard that in the castle on the other side of the river [the Muchavetz] many people from the civilian population were executed, shot. I can not point out the exact location and I do not know the number murdered.
Dov Bar: I have no information about the prisonor-of-war camp near Brest from any other source. The testimony is quite detailed. Timofievitch testifies about the executions inside the walls of the Krepush (the fortress of Brest) -- from hearsay. The people from the civilian population executed almost certainly included Jews from Brest. According to testimony of many others, the Nazis executed communist Gentiles of the regime and political leaders (politruks).
When we were in Belarus on the 22nd of June 1997, the date of the commemoration of the Nazi invasion of the USSR, a memorial ceremony took place in the fortress of Brest. Our two missions were present . While touring the fortress, Gershon Lev pointed out a bronze plaque above a blocked entrance to a bunker. The inscription stated that 6000 citizens were executed by the Nazis. In all probability the bodies of the people who were killed lay buried adjacent to the plaque -- it was the custom of the Soviets to put memorial plaques adjacent to burials. The fortress was an ideal place for carrying out the executions without being exposed to foreign eyes. Concerning the burial: There were numerous bunkers in the fortress and in all probability the victims were dumped into them and then the entrances were sealed.
