Brzesc nad Bugiem sat on the Bug River where Poland met the Soviet Union in the interwar years, capital of the Polesie Voivodeship. By the 1936 census Jews made up 41.3 percent of the population, 21,518 people in a city of roughly 52,000. Eighty percent of private enterprises were Jewish-owned; the bazaars, the timber yards, the small workshops, the bakeries belonged largely to Jewish families. Ten Jewish public schools and five private ones had opened in the twenty years since Polish independence, the first of them in 1920. The city had been many things in its long history. The Russian Empire had ruled it for a century after the partitions of Poland under the name Brest-Litovsk. Poland reclaimed it in 1918 and renamed it Brzesc nad Bugiem in 1923. None of those changes had moved the Jewish community, which had lived there for centuries.

The Germans took Brzesc in September 1939, then handed it to the Soviets in a joint military parade on September 22. The provinces around it were swallowed by the USSR after rigged elections supervised by the NKVD. Mass deportations of Poles and Jews to Siberia followed; some Jewish families lost members to those Soviet trains and never saw them again. Then on June 22, 1941, Operation Barbarossa swept eastward, and Brzesc fell to the Wehrmacht the same day. Within three weeks the killing began. On the night of July 10 to 12, 1941, an Einsatzgruppe under SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Karl Eberhard Schongarth shot roughly 5,000 Jewish men in the city, including thirteen-year-old boys and seventy-year-old grandfathers. The ghetto itself was not formally created until December 1941. By that point the killing had already had six months to run.

In August 1941 the Germans extorted a ransom of 26 million rubles in cash and valuables from the Jews of Brzesc, a familiar pattern: collect what could be collected before murdering the people who had paid. The ghetto was sealed in December. Less than a year later, between October 15 and 18, 1942, German police, with assistance from local Polish, Belarusian, and Ukrainian auxiliary forces, liquidated it. Roughly 17,000 people were rounded up, marched or transported to Bronnaya Gora in the forest northeast of the city, and shot at the edge of pits dug for them. Some were shot at the Brest Fortress itself. A number tried to hide. The local police hunted them street by street. Father Jan Urbanowicz, dean of the Holy Cross Parish, hid Jewish neighbors and was executed by the Germans in June 1943 for his help. By the end of 1942, the Jewish community of Brzesc, half the city's population in 1936, had been almost entirely erased.

In February 2019, construction workers digging the foundation for a luxury apartment complex on Karbysheva Street in present-day Brest uncovered human remains. The trench they had opened ran 40 meters long and two meters deep. By March, more than 1,214 bodies had been removed, along with shoes still tied, fragments of clothing, eyeglasses, the small private effects that people carry. Investigators determined the site sat inside the boundary of the former ghetto. The Jewish community of Brest and the Simon Wiesenthal Center asked Belarusian authorities to halt construction and dedicate the site as a Holocaust memorial. The construction continued. The remains were reburied in a military cemetery with limited public ceremony. The dead of the Brzesc Ghetto have very few markers in the city where they lived. Most of what remains of them is in the soil under apartment foundations, and in the names recorded in the Brest Ghetto Passport Archive, which lists the residents one by one.

Menachem Begin, the future prime minister of Israel, survived only because he was arrested by the NKVD in 1940 and deported east. His father Zeev and his brother Herzl, along with most of his extended family, were murdered in Brzesc. Their photograph, taken in their home in 1932, sits today in the Yad Vashem archive: a family at a table, the kind of ordinary moment that ended in 1941. The Brest Ghetto Passport Archive contains thousands of similar lives, each a person with a trade, a synagogue, a mother tongue, an address. The Choral Synagogue still stands in central Brest, converted to a cinema during Soviet times and later a concert hall. The Jewish cemetery on what was once Karaimska Street was built over with a stadium. To fly over Brest today is to fly over a city whose absent population is largely invisible. The mass grave at Karbysheva, briefly opened in 2019, is one of the few places where the buried past briefly returned to the surface.