Obj. ID: 58397  Holocaust Memorial in the Jewish Cemetery in Vileika, Belarus, after 1991

"Wilejka was occupied by the German army on June 26, 1941, four days after the German invasion of the USSR. Anti-Jewish decrees and orders followed: Jews were prohibited from using the sidewalks and leaving the town; they had to wear an identification mark in the form of a Star of David, and were mobilized for forced labor.

The Germans found only 1,000 Jews in Wilejka in June 1941. However, during the occupation period they would occasionally deport the Jewish inhabitants of other localities to the town. Jews from Kurzeniec, Kobylnik, and some other nearby localities – and from as far away as the town of Baranowicze (in late August 1941) – were incarcerated in several small ghettos and labor camps established in Wilejka in July 1941 and later. For this reason, the total number of Jews killed in Wilejka far exceeded 1,000.

On July 12, 1941, Sonderkommando 7a of the SS conducted the first murder operation in Wilejka: 140 people, most of them Jews, were killed in the Maluny Stawskie Forest near the settlement of Stawek.

On July 30, 1941, Einsatzkommando 9 carried out a second mass murder, this time in the Lipniki Forest west of Wilejka. [...].

Sporadic killings of individual Jews went on in the town throughout the fall and winter of 1941-1942.

On March 2, 1942 (the eve of Purim), the Nazis carried out their third massacre of Jews. During this murder operation, the Wilejka SD rounded up about 300 Jews on the pretext of transferring them to another ghetto, took them to the town prison, subjected them to a selection, and shot most of them in the prison courtyard. According to certain accounts, the Germans transported some victims in trucks to the southwestern exit from the town (along the Osipowicze road), shot them, and cremated the bodies in an abandoned wooden structure. That was the usual modus operandi of the Wilejka SD.

After these three operations, there were still some Jewish workers left in the town, most of them non-natives who had been brought to Wilejka from elsewhere. The majority of them were exterminated in two additional murder operations: on November 7, 1942, when 70-80 "useless" Jews, including the members of the Wilejka Jewish council, were killed; and on March 28, 1943, when the Germans massacred 40-60 Jewish craftsmen deemed "no longer fit for work". The last Jewish workers imprisoned in Wilejka, mainly deportees from Mołodeczno and other localities, were killed either in late 1943 (according to some accounts) or in June 1944, mere days before the German retreat from the area (according to others)" [Yad Vashem: Untold Stories].

The commemoration activity began in 1974 when two virtually identical monuments were erected on Stavki Street in Vileika. "One of them commemorates the 140 victims of the first Nazi massacre (on July 12, 1941), while the other is dedicated to the [...] Jews murdered on July 30, 1941." [...] The two steles stand 100 meters apart [Yad Vashem: Untold Stories]. 

After 1991, the monument under discussion was erected "at the former Jewish cemetery on Partizanskaia Street [formerly known as the Osipovichi Road], on the southwestern edge of Vileika" [Yad Vashem: Untold Stories].