This testimony was written by Irina Mikhailovna Sokolova between 1987 and 1989 , 2 years before her death. For 44 years she remained silent about what experienced in the pit of Minsk. These are her words. My name is Irina Mikhailovna Sokolova. I am 67 years old. And for most of my life I pretended the years between 1942 and 1944 never existed.
I pretended that the twenty-first-year-old girl I was in those days had died somewhere far away, in some battle that no one remembered. But she didn’t die, she survived. And now, with trembling hands and a heavy heart, I must tell you about what happened in that basement in Minsk.
Because if I do n’t do it now, will really die with me. And the other women who were there, those who did not survive to tell, will forever remain silent. I was a literature teacher. I taught Pushkin and Tolstoy to children in a small school on the outskirts of Minsk. My life was simple, predictable, full of books and the laughter of my students.
When the Germans arrived in June 1941 , everything changed in a matter of days. Classes stopped, families began to disappear, and I, like many others, began to do what I could to help. It wasn’t anything heroic. I simply hid food that was supposed to go to the German barracks and distributed it to families who were dying of hunger.
hid false documents for Jews trying to escape. Little things that in my naivety I believed could change something. They found me in November 1942. It was a frosty morning, and I was returning from home, where I had left bread and potatoes. Two Wehrmacht soldiers intercepted me on the street. They didn’t say anything, they just grabbed my hands and led me away.
I remember screaming, trying to explain to [the music] that I was just walking, that I wasn’t doing anything. But they didn’t care. They already knew who I was. Someone reported me. I was taken to a building that used to be a brewery on the outskirts of Minsk. The building was made of dark brick, stained with soot and dampness, with broken windows boarded up.
In the courtyard there were soldiers, smoking and laughing. As if it was just another ordinary day. I was terrified, but I didn’t yet understand the scale of what awaited me. I thought I would be interrogated, maybe beaten, then sent to a labor camp like many others. I didn’t know that something worse was waiting for me.
I spent the first three days in a shared cell with six other Soviet women. Everyone was accused of sabotage, resistance, or simply being suspicious. Conditions were already dire. We slept on damp straw scattered across the concrete floor. There was no heating, and the November cold penetrated to the bones.
The food was a thin soup served once a day, and the water tasted rusty. But still, in those first days, I had hope. I had other women around. We could talk, share our fears, keep each other warm at night. On the afternoon of the fourth day, two German soldiers entered the cell and called out my name: “Irina Sokolova!” My heart started pounding.
I stood up on trembling legs, and one of the women, Natasha, quickly squeezed my hand before I left. That was the last time I saw her. I was led across the courtyard under the curious glances of the other soldiers and taken to the main building. We went down a spiral staircase, narrow and stone, which smelled of mold and decay.
The light diminished with each step until we reached the basement. The basement was cold, much colder than the cell. The stone walls were covered in green silt, and the floor was wet. There were puddles of water everywhere, and the sound of falling drops echoed in the silence. In the center of this damp and In the dark space I saw something that made me stop breathing.
A round hole, about 2 meters wide, open in the floor. A heavy iron grate lay nearby, ready to be placed over the hole. I looked inside and saw only darkness and water. I heard the sound of water moving below and smelled a strong smell of decay rising from that hole. One of the soldiers, a young man with light eyes and a blank expression, ordered me in broken Russian to take off my coat and boots.
I started shaking, not from the cold, but from terror, which I had never felt before. I asked what they were going to do to me, but he didn’t answer. He just repeated the order. On this time with his hand on his pistol. I took off my thick wool coat and felt boots.
All I had left was a thin dress and torn stockings. I was freezing. Then they forced me down. There was a makeshift wooden ladder leaning against the wall of the pit. I went down step by step and with each movement I felt the temperature drop even more. When my feet touched the bottom, the icy water rose up to my ankles. It was so cold it hurt.
I looked up and saw two soldiers watching me. One of them smiled, the other lit a cigarette. Then they removed the ladder. I heard the metallic sound of a grate being placed over the hole and the click of a lock being locked, and then the sound of boots retreating. I was left alone.
alone in that narrow pit with water up to my ankles, surrounded by stone walls covered with Ooze. There was no light, only a faint a gap that came through the hole at the top, filtered by the grate. I tried to move, but the space was so cramped that my elbows hit the walls whenever I tried to raise my arms.
There was no way to sit, no way to lie down, only standing. standing in icy water in almost complete darkness alone. For the first 15 minutes, I tried to stay calm. I breathed deeply, closed my eyes, tried to convince myself that it was temporary, that they would come for me soon, that it would soon be over.
But the water was so cold that my legs started to hurt almost immediately. I tried to move my fingers, but they were already numb. I started rubbing my hands, trying to create warmth, but it didn’t help. The cold was everywhere. It came from the water, from the walls, from the moist air I breathed. After half an hour, the chills started.
Light at first , then strong. My teeth were chattering with such force that I was afraid I might break them. My legs began to hurt intensely from the forced position. I tried to sit down for a few seconds to relieve the pressure. But as I did, the water rose up to my waist, soaking my dress even more.
The wet fabric stuck to my body, sucking out the remaining warmth. I quickly stood up, but now I was completely wet and shivering even more. That’s when I started hearing sounds. Not just the constant digging of water falling from the ceiling of the pit, but other sounds. Small scratches, movements in the dark, rats.
I realized I wasn’t alone down here. They were on the walls, swirling in the water around me. I couldn’t see them, but I felt their presence. At one point, something touched my leg, and I screamed. My scream echoed throughout the pit. and climbed up through the hole. Up above, I heard laughter.
The soldiers were listening. They were waiting for this. I lost track of time. I don’t know if I was there for one hour, two or three. Everything was mixed up. Pain, cold, fear, darkness. I started having fragmented thoughts. I remembered my mother, how she used to sing to me when I was a child.
I remembered my students, their voices reading poetry. I remembered summer days, the hot sun, the feeling of warmth on my skin. But these memories seemed unreal, as if they belonged to another person, another life. The worst thing wasn’t the physical pain, it was the feeling of disappearing, that my personality, everything I was, was slowly dissolving with a combination of the cold, the darkness and utter loneliness.
I started talking to myself just to hear a human voice, even if it was my own. I I said my name out loud. Irina. Irina Mikhailovna Sokolova, a teacher, Mikhail’s daughter, Pavel’s sister. I tried to remember who I was because I felt like I was losing that information, as if the pit was swallowing me up not only physically, but also mentally.
I don’t know how much time passed before they finally came for me. It could have been hours, it could have been eternity. Time lost all meaning in that pit. I heard the sound of footsteps above, then the creak of metal as the grate was pulled back. The light, even the dim light of the basement, blinded me.
I couldn’t see, only felt the wooden ladder descending again into the pit. A voice from above ordered me to get up. I tried to move, but my legs wouldn’t obey. They were numb from the cold and from standing in one position for so long. I fell to my knees into the water, and a sharp pain shot through me as the blood tried to return to my limbs.
Somehow, I crawled to the stairs and began to climb. Each step was torture. My arms were shaking so badly that I could barely hold on. When I finally emerged from the pit, two soldiers were practically carrying me. I couldn’t stand on my own. My muscles were so clenched from the cold and tension that I was like a wooden doll.
My clothes were completely soaked, my lips had a bluish tint, and I was shaking so violently that I couldn’t speak. They threw me back into the common cell, where the other female prisoners wrapped me in thin blankets and tried to warm me with the heat of their own bodies. All that night, I had a fever and alternating attacks of chills.
Natasha held me in her arms, whispering prayers I could barely hear. Another woman, Olga, a nurse before the war, tried to rub my legs to restore circulation. I was delirious, seeing faces of people I knew, hearing voices from the past. For a moment, I was sure I was dying, and part of me welcomed the thought.
Death seemed better than returning to that pit, but I didn’t. In the morning I was still alive, though barely. My cellmates were afraid that I wouldn’t survive the next day, but my body was more stubborn than I thought. I survived, and 3 days later, when I could finally stand again, when the shaking had subsided a little, the soldiers came for me again.
When I heard my name screamed in the hallway, my stomach clenched in terror. I knew exactly where they were taking me. They’ll take me. The second time in the pit was worse than the first, because now I knew what awaited me. The fear of anticipation was almost as devastating as the experience itself.
This time they left me there for 8 hours, from noon until 8:00 PM. And this time the soldiers decided to add an extra element to the torment. Every hour, one of them would come down to the bars and dump a bucket of cold water over my head, completely drenching me and forcing me to start the process of trying to generate body heat all over again.
It was sadistic ingenuity. Every time I managed to stop shivering for even a few minutes, as my body tried to adapt to the cold, another wave of icy water would come from above. I couldn’t see where it was coming from, couldn’t prepare myself. Suddenly the water would crash down on me, and the cycle would start all over again.
Cold, shivering, animating, pain and all the time the sounds of laughter from above. They enjoyed it. It was entertainment for them . After the second time in the pit, something broke inside me. I couldn’t feel anger anymore, only deep weariness and a growing desire for it all to end in any way possible.
I began to understand what they were trying to do. They didn’t want to just punish me. They wanted to break me psychologically. They wanted to turn me into an example for other women. They wanted me to beg for mercy, to do whatever they ordered. Anything to avoid going back to that pit. Over the next months, I was put in the pit nine times.
Each time, when the officers thought I was showing an insubordinate attitude, or simply when they needed an example to intimidate the other prisoners. Once, I was thrown there because I didn’t stand up quickly enough when a German officer entered the cell. Another time, because they found the piece of bread I had hidden to share with the other women.
Each time was different in duration and detail, but the essence remained the same. The relentless cold, water that never stopped dripping, almost complete darkness. And above all, the feeling that there was no way out, that this could go on forever, that my life had been reduced to an endless cycle of suffering and short intervals of temporary relief.
There were other women who went through the same. Natasha, who held my hand that first day, was thrown into the pit a week after me. She spent 12 hours there. When she was pulled out, she no longer spoke, just stared into space. Her lips moved without a sound. Three days later she died of pneumonia.
The official cause of death in German documents was recorded as natural causes. There was Maria, a girl of only 19 from a village near Minsk. She was accused of passing information to the partisans. I don’t know if it was true. She was thrown into the pit four times. After the fourth time, she returned to the cell with deep wounds on her legs.
Rats attacked her in the dark. The infection spread quickly. We had no medicine, nothing to help her. We could only watch her slowly fade away. Her body was being consumed by fever and gangrene. There was Lidia, a teacher like me, from another part of Minsk. She was a strong woman, with a firm character and an unbending spirit.
She sang in the pit. I heard her voice echoing from the depths as she was thrown in. She sang old Russian songs, folk melodies her mother had taught her as a child. The soldiers yelled at her to shut up, but she kept singing until she couldn’t anymore. After the fifth time in the pit, her voice was gone.
Not from laryngitis, from something deeper. She just stopped making sounds, as if the pit had taken her voice forever. I learned the names of the guards. It was strange. How could you know the names of your tormentors, as if they were ordinary people? There was Oberscharführer Kurt Weber, the senior SS officer who oversaw operations in the building.
He rarely went down to the basement himself, but he was the one giving the orders about who was put in the pit and for how long . I only saw him twice, both times from a distance. He was a tall man with gray hair and wire-rimmed glasses . He looked like a school principal or a bank clerk, not as the man responsible for so much suffering.
There was Unterscharführer Hans Müller, a young soldier with pale blue eyes who often kept watch at the pit. He was the one who most often poured water on us. He did it mechanically, without expression, as if he were performing a routine task. One day I tried to talk to him as he was going down with a bucket.
I asked him in German, which I knew a little, if he had a sister, a mother, someone he loved. He looked at me for a moment, and I saw something in his eyes. Not pity, but maybe discomfort. Then he poured water on my head and left without saying a word. There was also Stefan. I never learned his last name.
He was older than the other soldiers, perhaps under 40. He had a rough face and a scar on his left cheek. He was the cruelest. He didn’t just pour water, he would sometimes throw stones into the pit, trying to hit us. He would spit through the bars. Once he urinated in the pit while I was down there. I remember standing in that water, feeling a humiliation deeper than physical pain.
He laughed, and the other soldiers who were with him laughed too. But what struck me most was not the individual cruelty of certain people. It was the systemic nature of it all. The pit was not the result of sudden anger or impulsive violence. There was a method, there was a schedule, there were records.
I learned later, many years later, when my granddaughter found documents, that the Germans kept detailed records of who was put in the pit, for how long and what There were results. They studied us, watched how long it took to break a woman psychologically. They recorded reactions, symptoms, the time until complete collapse.
It was worse than simple cruelty. It was cruelty disguised as science. Bureaucratic evil. The type of evil that allows people to do terrible things while convincing themselves that they are just doing a job, following orders, collecting data. This was the type of evil that allowed the Holocaust to happen.
And it was the type of evil that happened in that basement in Minsk, on a smaller scale, but with the same cold, calculating inhumanity. The winter of 1942-1943 was the hardest. Temperatures dropped to -20° Celsius outside, and even in the basement it was unbearably cold. The water in the pit began to freeze around the edges, forming a thin layer of ice.
When I was thrown there in January, I could feel the ice cutting into my ankles. The cold was so intense that I passed out several times. Every time I came to, I was surprised to still be alive. It was that winter that I met Sofia. She was a Jewish woman from Minsk who had been hiding with false documents, working as a cleaner at German headquarters.
Someone recognized her. She was thrown into our cell in February. She was a tiny woman, barely 5 feet tall, with huge dark eyes and hands that never stopped shaking. That first night, she told us that her husband and two children had been shot a year ago in the woods outside the city.
She only survived because she had been at work when they were taken. Sofia was abandoned into a pit the day after she arrived. They left her there for 16 hours. When they finally pulled her out, she was barely alive. Her lips were completely blue. Her eyes were rolled back in her head and she wasn’t breathing properly.
We thought she was going to die that night, but she didn’t. She clung to life with a tenacity that I’d never seen. And when she was finally able to speak on the third day, the first thing she said was, “I won’t let them win. I won’t let them take it. “And I have that too.” Sofia became my anchor in those last months.
We held on to each other literally and metaphorically. When one of us was thrown into a pit, the other was waiting, ready to warm, to comfort, to remind us that we were still human, that we were still alive. Sofia taught me something important in those dark days. She taught me that survival is not just about continuing to breathe. It is about resisting oblivion.
It is refusing to let them erase who you are. In the spring of 1943 something began to change. We heard the distant rumble of artillery. The German soldiers were becoming more nervous, more aggressive. There were rumors of defeats on the eastern front, that the Soviet troops were advancing. We didn’t dare hope.
Hope was a dangerous thing in that place, but it grew inside us. Despite everything, in July they threw me into the pit for the last time, the ninth time. They left me there for 24 hours, the longest period ever. I don’t know why they chose that duration. Maybe it was an experiment. Maybe it was punishment for something I didn’t even understand.
By that point reasons no longer mattered. Nothing made sense except the need to continue to exist from one moment to the next. That time, I almost died. After 18 hours in the pit, my body started to shut down. I didn’t feel the cold anymore. That was a bad sign. Hypothermia had reached a critical stage.
I started hallucinating. I saw my mother standing at the edge of the pit, reaching out her hands to me. I saw my students sitting in a circle around the hole, reading Pushkin. I saw the sun warm and golden, even though it was the dead of night. When they finally pulled me out, I didn’t react.
My eyes were open, but I couldn’t see anything. My heart was barely beating. They carried me back to the cell and threw me on the floor like a sack of grain. Sofia screamed, begging the guards for a blanket, hot water, anything. They ignored her, but the other women gathered around me. They took off my wet clothes, wrapped me in every piece of cloth they could find, lay down next to me, passing the warmth of their bodies to me.
I don’t remember the next three days. I was told later that I was severely delirious, that I spoke languages that didn’t exist, that I screamed the names of people that no one knew. Olga, the nurse, said she was sure I wouldn’t survive until morning, but I survived again. My body refused to give in, even when my mind was almost gone.
August brought the news. The Germans had begun the evacuation. The Red Army was approaching Minsk. We could hear explosions. Closer and closer. The guards were becoming panicked. Some ran, others became more brutal, as if they wanted to inflict as much pain as possible in the remaining time they had.
The pit was used more often in those last weeks. It was a place for swift punishments, a way to keep us at bay even as their world crumbled around them. On August 23, 1943, the building was suddenly abandoned. We woke up in the morning, and there were no guards. Only silence. At first we were afraid to move, thinking it was a trap, but hours passed and no one came.
Finally, Sofia got up and went to the cell door. It was unlocked. We were free. Freedom was a strange thing. We walked out buildings, staggering. A group of ghostly women in rags. Our bodies broken, our minds splintered. The city was in chaos. Buildings were burning. People were running in different directions.
We could hear the sound of Soviet tanks in the distance. I remember standing in the middle of the street, looking up at the sky, not believing that I could see sunlight again without bars over my head. Of the sixteen women who were in our cell during those months, only seven left the building that day.
The rest died of illness, exhaustion, infections, or simply because their bodies and souls could not take it anymore. Natasha, who held my hand that first day, died of pneumonia. Maria, with her rat wounds, died of gangrene. Lydia, who lost her voice, died quietly one night, simply stopped breathing.
Their bodies were left somewhere in that building. We have there was no strength to bear them. We didn’t even have the strength to mourn them properly. Sofia and I stayed together in the first weeks after the liberation. We found refuge in a ruined house on the outskirts of Minsk. Soviet troops arrived two days after our liberation, and the slow process of returning to something resembling normal life began.
But nothing was ever normal again. How could that be? I was given new documents, new clothes, sent back to my village, but I couldn’t go back to teaching. I couldn’t stand in front of a class of children and pretend that the world made sense, that literature mattered, that the future was worth believing in.
I worked in a factory. Simple work, repetitive. It was all I could do. I didn’t talk about the Pit, to anyone. Even when the Soviet authorities conducted a war crimes investigation, even when they asked witnesses to come forward, I kept silent, partly because I was afraid, partly because I was ashamed, but mostly because I didn’t believe anyone would understand, I didn’t believe words could convey what happened in that basement, and I didn’t believe anyone would care.
Sofia died in 1951 . Tuberculosis, aggravated by lung damage from prolonged exposure to cold and damp. I was with her when she died. Her last words were: “Tell them, Ira, don’t let them forget.” But I didn’t tell them, not yet. I buried her promise along with my memories deep inside, where they couldn’t hurt me anymore.
I got married in 1954. His name was Pyotr. He was an engineer, a good man who didn’t ask many questions about my past. We had two children: a son and a daughter. I I tried to be a good mother, a good wife, but there was a part of me that never left that pit. In the night, I would wake from nightmares, shaking and crying.
Pyotr would hold me and say nothing. He knew something terrible had happened to me during the war, but he never pressed for details. The sound of dripping water haunted me my whole life. The ordinary sound of the faucet in the bathroom could cause panic. I couldn’t bathe, couldn’t be in enclosed spaces. My children grew up knowing that their mother was strange, damaged in some way they didn’t understand.
I wanted to explain to them. Wanted them to know why I sometimes froze in the middle of an act, staring into space. But I couldn’t find the words. It wasn’t until 1977, when I was 66 years old and the Soviet Union began opening up under Gorbachev, I finally found the courage to write this testimony.
My daughter Anna gave me a notebook and a pen and said, “Mom, write this for us, for your grandchildren, so they will know.” So I began. I wrote slowly, painfully, reliving every moment. I wrote about the pit, about the cold, about the women who died. I wrote the names that Natasha remembered, Maria, Lydia, Sofia, Olga, Katerina, Anna, Vera.
I wrote the names of the guards too. Kurt Weber, Hans Müller, Stefan. They deserved to be named, their crimes deserved to be recorded. I don’t know what happened to these men after the war. I don’t know if they were ever brought to justice, if they were tried, if they died in prison or lived comfortable lives somewhere in Germany or South America.
This uncertainty hurts. The thought that they might never have paid for what they did, that they might have died as old men in their beds, surrounded by family, while the women they tortured died young and forgotten. But I don’t write this for revenge. I write because the truth has value in itself.
Because Sophia asked me to. Because those women who didn’t survive to tell their stories deserve to be heard through my voice. I write because I want my grandchildren to know that evil doesn’t always come with horns and a tail. Sometimes it comes in a uniform. Sometimes it keeps records. Sometimes it justifies itself as necessary, efficient, duty.
The pit in Minsk no longer exists. The building was torn down in the 1960s to make way for housing houses. No one has marked this place. No memorial, no plaque, nothing to indicate that women once suffered and died there. It’s as if it never happened. But it did. I am a witness.
And now that I have written this, you are witnesses too. I will soon be 68 years old. My health is poor. I have a chronic cough, that never goes away. The legacy of those hours in the icy water. My hands shake even when it’s not cold. I know I don’t have much time left, but before I go, I wanted to leave this.
My last act of resistance against oblivion. To those who read this after I die, I ask only one thing. Remember, remember that this happened? Remember that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary cruelty, when the system gives them permission. Remember that women suffer in wars in ways that often remain invisible, unrecorded, unrecognized.
Remember that silence is also a choice and that sometimes the bravest thing you can do is speak up, even when your voice trembles. My name is Irina Mikhailovna Sokolova. I was a literature teacher. I was a prisoner. I was a woman thrown into a pit to be broken. But I was not broken. I survived. And now, finally, after 44 years of silence, I have told my story: “This is my story.
This is the story of those who couldn’t tell theirs.” This is the truth that the world tried to bury, but it is not buried anymore. It is here, it is real, and it demands to be heard. Irina Mikhailovna Sokolova died in November 1991 at the age of 70. Of the estimated 43 women placed in the Minsk pit between 1942 and 1944 , only seven survived until liberation.
This is one of the last direct testimonies that remains of this forgotten place of torture. y
