Grodno - Hrodna in Belarusian, Grodno in Polish - sits on the Neman River in what is now western Belarus. For five centuries before 1941 it had been a major center of Jewish life in the lands that passed through Polish-Lithuanian, Russian, Soviet, and again Polish hands. Jewish artisans, merchants, scholars, doctors, teachers, and laborers made up roughly half the city's pre-war population. There were synagogues, yeshivas, Yiddish theaters, sports clubs, charities, two political parties on the left and at least three on the right, and the ordinary daily life of any old European Jewish community: bakeries that opened before dawn, cheders where small children learned the alphabet, marketplaces, weddings, funerals. The German army arrived in late June 1941 as part of Operation Barbarossa. The murder began almost immediately.

Twelve days after the German occupation began, the new administration ordered every Jew in Grodno to register. The word Jude was stamped onto identity cards. Sidewalks were forbidden; Jewish residents were ordered to walk in single file on the road. On June 30, 1941, the yellow badge became mandatory. The two ghettos were established that November. Ghetto One, in the historic city center near the New Hrodna Castle, surrounded the old synagogue (the Shulhoif). Fifteen thousand people were forced into a space of less than half a square kilometer - a density that made sanitation, water, and electricity impossible to maintain. Ghetto Two, in the suburb of Slobodka, was geographically larger but in worse physical condition. Two meters of fence enclosed Ghetto One. The entrance was a single opening on Zamkowa Street, between the sidewalk and the road. Some houses on that street were demolished to clear the line of the fence.

The systematic murder of the Grodno ghettos took roughly four months, from early November 1942 to mid-March 1943. The SS, the Gestapo, the Sicherheitspolizei, the Kriminalpolizei, the Schutzpolizei, the Order Police battalions, and units of the Belarusian Auxiliary Police all participated. Jewish residents were taken in waves to the transit camp at Kiełbasin, on the outskirts of the city, and from there loaded onto trains. The first deportation train from Kiełbasin reached Auschwitz-Birkenau on November 18, 1942. Other transports went directly to Treblinka, where the gas chambers and burial pits had been operating since the summer. Before being sent to their deaths, some prisoners were ordered to sign postcards in German that read 'Being treated well, we are working and everything is fine.' The cards were mailed back to relatives in occupied Poland to delay the news of what was actually happening.

There were attempts to escape. There were attempts to hide. A Jewish underground organized in both ghettos and managed to smuggle some prisoners into the forests, where they joined Soviet and Jewish partisan units operating out of the Naliboki and Lipiczany woods. Local Polish gentile families risked their own lives to help. Yad Vashem has recognized several of them as Righteous Among the Nations: the Krzywicki family, the Cywińscy family, and the Docha family, among others. They hid people in attics and cellars, smuggled bread into the ghetto, forged documents, drove children out of the city in farm carts. The risk was death - immediate, on the spot, without trial - for the rescuer and their entire family. They did it anyway. The number of people they saved was tiny against the scale of the killing. It is also the reason any Grodno Jews survived at all to return after July 1944.

The Red Army liberated Grodno on July 14, 1944. About 2,000 Jewish survivors returned over the following years - those who had hidden, those who had fought with the partisans, those who had been deported east into the Soviet interior in 1941 and somehow lived through that as well. They came back to a city where their entire community - parents, children, neighbors, congregations, schools - no longer existed. According to the Encyclopedia Judaica, in the mid-1950s the Soviet authorities plowed up the Jewish cemetery in Grodno. The tombstones were carted away and incorporated into the foundations of a monument to Lenin. Memorials were eventually built at four mass graves in the area. The names of the dead - the children, the bakers, the teachers, the doctors, the rabbis - run beyond what any list can hold. To stand at any of those four sites today is to stand on the floor of a city that used to be.