When the ghetto in Brest Litovsk was liquidated on October 15, 1942, the inhabitants were sent by train to their deaths in a secluded wood in Bronna Gora, also known as Bronnaya Gora, which  today is in Belarus; this link describes the context, what happened and shows maps and photos of the site today.  Fifty-two thousand people, mostly Jews and some partisans, were murdered in what Father Patrick Desbois of Yahad-In Unum terms the “Holocaust by Bullets.”

Given that several members of our extended Goldstein family lived in Brest and can be found in the Nazi’s Brest Ghetto Passport Archive, and that the residents of Terespol who were not sent to Treblinka were in the Brest Ghetto, it is more than probable that those Goldstein’s were shot in the mass graves at Bronnaya Gora.  Indeed, on the Yad Vashem website, those family members who I have found are marked “presumably murdered.” Since 1999 I have said Kaddish for our family members on the fourth of Cheshvan, the Hebrew date for October 15, 1942.

It has been remarked that while there were those who survived the concentration camps, no one came back from the Holocaust by Bullets.  People were marched to their graves and shot, end of story.  Certainly there may have been a few who escaped the Nazi’s efficient killing machine in the woods of eastern Poland and the Pale of Settlement.  Just as certainly, there were not many who did.