A six-year-old Jewish girl in the Minsk Ghetto was murdered in 1942, buried alive during Nazi mass execution.
Roza Libenson was born in 1936 in Minsk, then part of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, into a Jewish family led by her parents Mona and Lyuba. Her early childhood began in a city that would soon become one of the epicenters of Nazi occupation violence in Eastern Europe.
In June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and quickly captured Minsk. What followed was a rapid and brutal transformation of the city. Mass killings began almost immediately, and the remaining Jewish population was confined to the Minsk Ghetto, where more than 80,000 Jews were forced to live under extreme overcrowding, starvation, disease, and constant fear of executions.
Roza was only a child during this period, growing up inside an environment defined by hunger and terror rather than safety or normal childhood experiences. The ghetto system was not designed for survival but for control and gradual destruction through forced conditions and systematic violence.
On 2 March 1942, the children’s home in the Minsk Ghetto was liquidated. The children were removed from the building and taken to a mass killing site outside the ghetto. There, they were thrown into a pit and murdered, with witnesses later describing the extreme brutality of the event, including psychological cruelty inflicted on the victims in their final moments.
Roza Libenson was six years old when she was killed. Her death represents the systematic targeting of children during the Holocaust, particularly in occupied Soviet territories where mass shootings and executions were widely used.
Today, Roza is remembered as one of the countless children whose lives were destroyed in the Holocaust. Her story stands as a reminder of the human scale of genocide—each name representing a real child, a family, and a future that was deliberately taken away.💔🙏