Bjarosa
| Bjarosa | Berjosa | |||
| Бяроза | Берёза | |||
| ( Belarus. ) | ( Russian ) | |||
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| State : |
 Belarus
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| Woblasz : |
 Brest
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| Coordinates : | 52 ° 32 ' N , 24 ° 59' E | ||
| Area : | 150 km² | ||
| Residents : | 29,500 (January 1, 2015) | ||
| Population density : | 197 inhabitants per km² | ||
| Time zone : | Moscow time ( UTC + 3 ) | ||
| Telephone code : | (+375) 1643 | ||
| Postal code : | BY - 225210 | ||
| License plate : | 1 | ||
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Bjarosa or Berjosa ( Belarusian Бяроза , scientific translit: Bjaroza , Russian Берёза, scientific translit .: Berëza, Polish Bereza Kartuska - this was also the official name of the place until 1940) is a town in the Bjarosa Rajon of the Breszkaja Woblasz in the west Belarus with 29,500 inhabitants (as of January 1, 2015). Bjarosa is the center of the Berezovsky Raion. The old name Bjarosa-Kartusskaja remained for a railway station and a settlement a little west of the city.
history
coat of arms
Description: In blue a silver monastery with an open passage over a silver corrugated shield base under a narrow silver corrugated beam .
Lithuanian and Polish time
Bjarosa village (from the Slavic word for birch) was first mentioned as a private property in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1477. In the course of time it belonged to different noble families, since the end of the 16th century the place belonged to the Sapieha , who built a palace and 1648–1689 a Carthusian monastery (hence the second part of the name). Between 1538 and 1600 it was an important center of Calvinism . The monastery soon became one of the largest buildings of its kind in the entire Polish-Lithuanian Rzeczpospolita and the core of the city's formation. The monastery had significant land holdings and 800 farms. During the Great Northern War 1700–1721, a meeting between King August II of Poland and Tsar Peter I of Russia took place in the monastery . Shortly afterwards, Swedish troops devastated the place twice during the war. In the course of this, the monastery was also partially destroyed.
Russian time
After the partition of Poland , the city and monastery became part of Russia. After the November uprising in Poland in 1830/1831, the Russian authorities closed the monastery in 1831 because monks from the monastery had participated in the uprising. When bricks were needed to build barracks in 1866, the monastery was partially demolished. Some of its buildings disappeared completely, including the baroque church.
Bjaroza became part of the so-called Pale of Settlement , in which Jews expelled from other parts of the Russian Empire were settled. At the beginning of the 20th century, these made up almost 70% of the local population.
At the beginning of the 1870s, there was an economic boom, triggered by the railway line opened in 1871 for traffic between Brest and Smolensk . This was also reflected in rapid population growth: while 1200 people lived in Bjarosa in 1833, there were 6226 in 1897. The economy was dominated by smaller handicrafts, but there was also a leather factory and two wood processing companies.
First World War
During the First World War , the city was occupied by German troops from 1915, then from 1919 to July 1920 and again from August 1920 by Polish troops . Soviet power was briefly established in July 1920. During the Polish-Soviet War , the first Polish attack on Soviet troops took place there on February 14, 1919.
Between the wars and the Second World War
After the Peace of Riga , Bjarosa belonged to Poland. After the murder of the Polish interior minister, Bronisław Pieracki , the government established a prison on June 16, 1934 in the building of a former barracks . Mainly communists and Ukrainian nationalists were interned here. The camp remained in operation until it was liberated by the Red Army in September 1939, when Soviet troops occupied the city in accordance with the secret additional protocol to the German-Soviet non-aggression pact .
On January 15, 1940, Bereza-Kartuska was renamed Bjarosa, received city status and became the center of the newly formed Berezovsky Rajons. Two days after the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, it was occupied by the German Wehrmacht . Of the approximately 5,000 inhabitants of the city, around 4,500 were Jews. These were now forced to live in two newly established ghettos . From then on, Jews who were classified as fit for work and whose labor was exploited for the German economy and the Wehrmacht lived in the so-called Ghetto “A”. The Jews who had to live in ghetto "B" were considered unable to work. In the course of the murder of European Jews , Ghetto "B" was first dissolved in June 1942 and its residents shot in the extermination site near Bronnaya Gora . In mid-October 1942 the residents of Ghetto "A" were also killed. About 1000 meters north of the village of Smoljarka, about five kilometers east of Bjarosa, five pits, each 7 × 10 meters and 2.5 meters deep, had been prepared. The pits were about 70 meters from the Warsaw-Moscow road, and people were brought there on trucks. On the spot, they were forced to undress and shot in the pits. The clothes were loaded back onto the trucks and driven away.
The shootings lasted for three days. The number of Jews murdered here is unclear. The report of the investigative commission mentions more than 1,000 Jews. The witness Schidlowskij worked for the German auxiliary police made up of locals and, according to his own statements, took part in cordon measures during the shooting of the Jews from Beresa. He speaks of around 3,000 people shot. Only a few Jews from Bjarosa survived the war; the Bjarosa shtetl had ceased to exist.
On July 15, 1944 Bjarosa was retaken by Soviet troops.
Since 1945
After the end of the war, Bjarosa, like almost all of western Belarus, remained part of the Belarusian Socialist Soviet Republic . The remaining Polish residents were forcibly "repatriated" to Poland. In 1974 a new general plan for the city of Bjarosa was drawn up in Minsk, which was put into practice in the following years. The image of the city changed fundamentally. New streets and squares were laid out, and the traditional single-storey wooden construction that dominated the city center was replaced by modern buildings with several floors. In the southern part of the city, a park that was laid out in the 19th century remained. The city's industry developed, particularly in the food and construction sectors.
Bjarosa has been part of the newly founded Republic of Belarus since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 . Today 13 larger industrial companies are located in the city, which manufacture windows, industrial plants and food, among other things.
Attractions
Monuments
Bjarosa has a multitude of monuments and plaques, the majority of which are dedicated to communist activists during the interwar period or to Soviet fighters and victims in World War II .
Probably the most important of them is on Komsomol Square opposite the House of Culture. 368 soldiers and partisans who died during the war are buried here. A Red Army soldier stands on a pedestal with a submachine gun and helmet in hand. Around the pedestal there are 22 plaques with the names of those buried in the floor. In front of the monument, in the middle of a large five-pointed star, an eternal flame burns. The complex was laid out in 1953 and renovated and expanded in 1987 and 1988.
On the south-eastern outskirts of the city, on the Brest - Baranowitschi road , a jet fighter was erected on a pedestal in 1974 as a memorial in honor of the Soviet military aviators . The memorial is intended in particular to remember that Soviet airmen succeeded in shooting down some German planes in the first days of the war in June 1941. However, there is no mention of the destruction of many Soviet planes at the airports on the first day of the war.
Carthusian monastery
The Carthusian monastery, which was built from 1648 to 1689 and which Italian architects were involved in building, comprised a number of buildings, including a. a church , residential and farm buildings, a hospital , and a library . The complex was surrounded by a fortress wall with towers. Today only fragments of this architectural monument on the north-western outskirts of Bjarosa are preserved: the main gate, parts of a bell tower and the fortress wall with a corner tower and the hospital building. In the former monastery cemetery there is a memorial for people who were murdered here by the Germans during the Second World War in the course of a mass shooting.
Peter and Paul Church
The brick church in the Russian-Byzantine style was built in the second half of the 19th century. The two towers of the complex building on Sovetskaya Street are unusual: a stone bell tower rises above the main entrance, while another, but in the typical onion shape, stands at the rear of the building.
Former prison
Two buildings belonged to the Bereza-Kartuska prison camp: a police barracks to house the guards and a building that housed the prisoners' cells. Both buildings still exist, although the former police barracks are now only in ruins. Most of the roof has collapsed, as have the false ceilings and part of the walls. In the former cell building, cultural facilities as well as various shops and cafeterias are set up today. The obelisk erected in 1962 in front of the buildings on the street (uliza Lenina) was renewed after 1990. A plaque is attached to it, which reminds in Russian that "Thousands of revolutionaries from Western Belarus, Western Ukraine and Poland, fighters for the social and national liberation of the working people" were interned there.
Population development
- 1833: 1200 inhabitants
- 1897: 6226 inhabitants
- 1939: 5000 inhabitants
- 1959: 5600 inhabitants
- 2007: 29,400 inhabitants
- 2015: 29,500 inhabitants.
Sources and Notes
- ↑ Численность населения на 1 января 2015 г. Численность населения на 1 января 2015 г. и среднегодовая численность населения за 2014 год по Республике Беларусь в разрезе областей, районов, городов, поселков городского типа ( Memento of the original December 24, 2015 Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link is automatically inserted and not yet tested. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Harada i VESKI Belarusi. Breszkaja woblasc. Kniha I. Minsk 2006 (Harada i vëski Belarusi. Enzyklapedija. Vol. 3). P. 166 f.
- ↑ a b c d e f E.M. Sawizkij, ND Sikorin, AA Mitjanin: "Beresa." In: Swod pamjatnikow ..., p. 112.
- ↑ WS Posse, AA Faktorovich: "Mesto Beresa-Kartusskogo konzentrazionnogo lagerja." In: Svod pamjatnikov ..., p.114.
- ↑ Harada i vëski Belarusi, p. 165. Also: testimony of Iosif Pawlowitsch Schidlowskij, b. 1920, from the town of Bjarosa on October 3, 1944. Schidlowskij worked for the Germans with the local police and, according to his own statements, took part in cordon measures during the shooting of the Jews from Bjarosa. However, he states that this action took place in May 1942. A senior member of the SD , Pitschmann, organized and carried it out together with the chief of the gendarmerie in Beresa, Lieutenant Gerdes and the chief of the local police, Nikolaj Stepanowitsch Otlschewskij (spelling mistake in the name in the source?). State Archives of the Brest Oblast, f. 514, op. 1, d. 289, pp. 14-15. See also: Testimony from Roman Stanislawowitsch Nowis, b. 1891 in Warsaw, residing in 1944 in Bronnaja Gora, from September 12, 1944. State Archives of the Brest Oblast, f. 514, op. 1, d. 273, sheet 8 (reverse). According to his information , the Jews from Bjarosa arrived in Bronnaya Gora in June 1942 in 16 wagons , each completely overcrowded with around 200 people. This was the first train to the shooting site. In his memoirs, Moshe Tuchman states July 15, 1942 as the day of the murder of the Jews from "Ghetto B": [1] .
- ↑ Act o swerstwach, isdewatelstwach, grabeshach i rasruschenijach pritschinennych nemezko-fascistskimi sachwatschikami w rajone Bronnaja Gora, Beresovskogo rajona, Brestskoj Oblasti BSSR of September 15, 1944. State Archives of the Brest Oblast, f. 514, op. 1, d. 273, p. 4f. The act represents the final report of the special commission to investigate the crimes of the German-fascist conquerors in the Brest area . The following witnesses interviewed by the investigative commission provide detailed descriptions of the events: Iwan Stepanowitsch Gejz, b. 1908, from the village of Smoljarka from September 15, 1944. State Archives of the Brest Oblast, f. 514, op. 1, d. 289, p. 8 (and reverse). Iwan Iwanowitsch Gejz, b. 1900, from the village of Smoljarka from September 15, 1944. State Archives of the Brest Oblast, f. 514, op. 1, d. 289, sheet 7 (and reverse). Andrej Iwanowitsch Dewkowitsch, b. 1892, from the town of Bjarosa from September 15, 1944. State Archives of the Brest Oblast, f. 514, op. 1, d. 273, pp. 21–22 (and reverse). Iosif Jakowlewitsch Kutnik, b. 1902, from the town of Bjarosa from September 16, 1944. State Archives of the Brest Oblast, f. 514, op. 1, d. 273, p. 23 (and reverse).
- ↑ Testimony of Iosif Pawlowitsch Schidlowskij, b. 1920, from the town of Bjarosa on October 3, 1944. State Archives of the Brest Oblast, f. 514, op. 1, d. 289, pp. 14–15 (with back pages).
- ↑ A list of around 2,200 of the total of 4,500 names can be found under [2] .
- ↑ ND Sikorin "Pamjatnik sowetskim lettschikam". In: Swod pamjatnikow ..., p. 115 f.
- ↑ WA Tschanturia: "Monastyr Kartesianzev." In: Swod pamjatnikow ..., p. 115.
- ↑ Swod pamjatnikow ..., p. 114. The assumption is that those murdered here were Jews. However, there is no information about this in the source.
- ↑ AA Mityanin: "Petropawlowskaja Zerkow." In: Swod pamjatnikow ..., p. 116.
- ^ Translation: Christian Ganzer.
- ↑ Karta. Berezovsky rajon. 1: 100000. Minsk 2007.
- ↑ Численность населения на 1 января 2015 г. Численность населения на 1 января 2015 г. и среднегодовая численность населения за 2014 год по Республике Беларусь в разрезе областей, районов, городов, поселков городского типа ( Memento of the original December 24, 2015 Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link is automatically inserted and not yet tested. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
literature
- Swod Pamjatnikow istorii i kultury Belorussii. Brestskaya oblast. Minsk 1990 (Swod Pamjatnikow istorii i kultury narodow SSSR).
Web links
Baranavichy | Belaasjorsk | Bjarosa | Brest | Drahichyn | Hanzavichy | Ivanawa | Ivatsevichy | Kamenez | Kobrin | Lyachavichy | Luninez | Malaryta | Mikashevichy | Pinsk | Prushany | Shabinka | Stolin