Khomich Ivan Emelyanovich
Death camp. During the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945), many prisoners of war ended up in concentration camps. I want to tell you about my grandfather, who was involved in an underground partisan movement, because of that he was captured by the Germans. During the years of occupation, the Nazis carried out about 150 punitive operations, during which they completely destroyed 5,445 villages. There were about 250 Soviet prisoner of war camps on the territory of Belarus. This was due to the fact that Borisov was a railway junction on the way to Moscow. The Germans wanted to get there quickly from Brest, so a partisan movement was created to defend the country. The partisans blew up trains in the direction of Moscow and German echelons. My grandfather - Khomich Ivan Yemelyanovich - was born on April 28, 1902 in the village of Gora, Borisov district, Minsk region. During the hostilities, he disappeared (approximately in 1944-1945). After the end of the war, my grandmother requested information on her lost husband. The response from the German archives shocked everyone. At first, Ivan Emelyanovich was kept in a camp near Borisov, from which he twice tried to escape, but it did not work ... Later, the partisans tried to buy my grandfather from the Germans, but luck bypassed him twice. After a while, in a huge composition, he and the rest of the prisoners were taken in columns to Germany. Then he ended up in one of the largest and most terrible camps - Buchenwald (from August 15, 1944 to April 1945). As you know, about 250 thousand people were imprisoned in this camp, where most of them were barbarously killed. To this day, the camp documentation on medical experiments on prisoners has been preserved. Prisoners were infected with terrible diseases such as tuberculosis and typhus. After Buchenwald, Khomich Ivan ends up in the Dachau camp. As you know, this camp was also engaged in medical experiments, where the main goal was to study the possibility of controlling people's behavior. On May 9, 1945, my grandfather was released, but on May 10 (the next day) he dies at the walls of the Dachau camp. As we know from archival data, the death was associated with diarrhea, which he received in connection with the experiments. In the village of Glivina, Borisov district, a stele was installed for partisans who fought in the Borisov region during the war. Khomich Ivan Yemelyanovich is included in the list of “missing” (personal number of the prisoner 73582). I am immensely proud of my ancestry and endlessly grateful to my grandfather for the clear sky above my head. We have never seen him or will see each other, but I will forever preserve his history as a memory of a brave soldier.
