Mikhail Gorelik: A Story of Survival
From the testimony of Mikhail Gorelik, shared by his family
A boy lies in the dark under a wood-burning stove. It is the space where the family keeps its chickens. Outside the house, about twenty people are being led away. His mother is among them. So are his two sisters and his brother. A policeman jabs into the dark with a sharp rake. The boy does not move. The policeman decides the lump under the stove is a bag of clothes. He will come back for it after dark. The boy is Mikhail Gorelik. He is thirteen years old.
Mikhail grew up in Lelchitsy, a small town in the marshy Polesia country of southern Belarus, in what is now the Gomel region. In those years it was part of the Soviet Union. His papers said he was born in 1926. He later explained that he was really born in 1928. The two extra years were his own doing. He added them so he would be old enough to fight.
In the summer of 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. When the Germans reached Lelchitsy, Mikhail was thirteen. He lived with his mother, Liza Gorelik, his two sisters, and his brother. The occupiers announced a “New Order.” The killing of Jews began almost at once. Across occupied Belarus, mobile killing squads and local police shot Jews near their own homes, in fields, ravines, and forests.
German soldiers advance past a burning village in the occupied Soviet Union. This archival photograph is shown for context and was not taken in Lelchitsy.
The family could hear the shooting. Mikhail’s mother and her sister gathered their families and ran in the opposite direction. They reached Usovo, a village about twenty kilometers away. There they learned that the Germans had killed Mikhail’s grandfather, Shmuel Gorelik, along with a friend of Mikhail’s and many others.
Then the Germans came to Usovo too, with local police. They handed every Jew a shovel and ordered them to dig deep pits. Mikhail understood what the pits were for. He ran into the forest. The Germans made his mother search for him. When he heard her screaming, he came back. That day, no one was shot. The Germans took everything the families owned and sent them back to Lelchitsy. It was the fall of 1941.
In Lelchitsy, the Jews had to wear a yellow Star of David sewn to their clothes. They were forced to cover the graves of murdered Jews, clean the quarters where the Germans lived, and load wood. They were whipped, beaten with fists, and kicked with boots. Some local men joined the German police and were especially cruel, as if to show off for their new masters.
One morning the family woke to find the house surrounded by Germans and local police. Mikhail ran into the yard and hid in the well, in the frozen water. Someone saw him and told the Germans. They pulled him out, beat him badly, and shoved him back inside. Everyone in the house was already lined up, about twenty people, filing out the door. In that moment, Mikhail slipped under the stove.
The others were taken to a separate house. A few weeks later they were shot on the outskirts of town, at a place the townspeople came to call Collective Farm Hill. Mikhail believed nearly five hundred Jews died there. His mother, his two sisters, and his brother were among them. Records show that the Jews of Lelchitsy were murdered in several mass shootings in 1941 and 1942.
Mikhail never knew exactly how long he stayed under the stove. At last he broke a window and climbed out. “What to do? Where to go?” he remembered asking himself. He went to friends. They fed him and begged him to leave. The German order was clear: anyone caught hiding a Jew would be shot. Once, while he was at the house of a woman named Gapa, local policemen knocked on the door looking for Jews. The family pushed him under the bed and said there were none. Mikhail never forgot the policemen’s names.
He wandered alone in the woods for a long time. At last he came to the house of Ivan Belotsky. Ivan lived with his wife, Gapa, and her eleven-year-old daughter, Maria. They hid Mikhail and a Jewish woman named Riva in an old, run-down house on their land. Maria carried food to them, though the family barely had enough for themselves. Some days there was no food or water at all. It was bitterly cold. Mikhail hid in the attic, in the cellar, under the stove, not moving for hours. Sometimes he fled to the woods and crept back again. “Belotsky’s family gave me my second life,” he said.
In 1942 staying became too dangerous, and he left. About thirty Jewish craftsmen were still alive in Lelchitsy, kept on because the Germans needed their skills. When they learned they would be shot too, they planned an escape, and Mikhail joined them. The Germans discovered the plan and chased them. The group was trapped on a small island in the marsh. Many were killed. Mikhail survived by sinking into the water up to his head. Whenever Germans crossed the bridge above, he took a deep breath and went under.
For months he lived like a hunted animal. He hid in piles of dried wheat and in deserted houses. He was covered in lice and starving. He grew so weak he could not pull his boots out of the mud, so he left them behind and walked barefoot, even in winter.
In 1943 Soviet partisans began moving through the forests of Polesia. These were the bands led by Alexander Saburov and Sydir Kovpak, and later Ivan Shitov. Weak, cold, and hungry, Mikhail found Saburov’s men. Once again he added two years to his age. He joined Shitov’s group, part of a partisan formation named for Nikita Khrushchev. The boy who had hidden from the Germans was now hunting them.
In 1944 he went back to Lelchitsy. That same year he was sent to the front with the Red Army. He took part in the liberation of Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. He was wounded twice and earned many medals. He stayed in the army until 1950. After the war he asked Minsk for a certificate confirming his service as a partisan. It was denied, because his father’s name appeared one way in the war records and another way in his passport, Solomonovich in one and Semyonovich in the other.
Mikhail Gorelik in a Soviet Army uniform with sergeant’s stripes and decorations, probably in the years after the war. The exact date is unknown.
He never lost touch with the Belotskys. When Mikhail married, Ivan Belotsky stood with him as his second father. In 1960 Mikhail went back to Lelchitsy and took pictures. Later he came to the United States. He kept writing letters to the Belotsky family and their children. His story was preserved at Yad Vashem in Israel.
Mikhail Gorelik in later life, wearing his wartime medals. The date is unknown.
Mikhail Gorelik died on July 12, 2008. He rests at Mount Hebron under a flat gray stone. It reads Beloved husband, father, grandfather. Forever in our hearts. The birth year on it is 1926, the year he gave himself so he could fight. Visitors have left small white stones along its edge. Above it, a green shrub holds bright flowers.
Mikhail Gorelik’s grave at Mount Hebron Cemetery, Flushing, Queens, with flowers and stones left by visitors.
May his memory be a blessing.
We wish to thank the family of Mikhail Gorelik for sharing his legacy of survival and bravery in the face of terror.
Works Cited
“Alexander Saburov.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Saburov. Accessed 13 Nov. 2026.
“Ghettos in the Gomel Region.” JewishGen Belarus SIG, www.jewishgen.org/belarus/newsletters/gomel/GomelGhettos/index.html. Accessed 13 Nov. 2026.
Gogun, Alexander. Stalin’s Commandos: Ukrainian Partisan Forces on the Eastern Front. I.B. Tauris.
Gorelik, Mikhail. Testimony. Shared by the Gorelik family with the Mount Hebron Legacy Foundation.
Gravestone of Mikhail Gorelik. Mount Hebron Cemetery, Flushing, Queens, New York. Photograph, Mount Hebron Legacy Foundation.
“The Invasion of the Soviet Union and the Beginnings of Mass Murder.” Yad Vashem, www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/about/final-solution-beginning/mass-murder-in-ussr.html. Accessed 13 Nov. 2026.
“Lyelchytsy.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyelchytsy. Accessed 13 Nov. 2026.
“Mikhail Gorelick: WWII Veteran & Holocaust Survivor.” Mount Hebron Cemetery Legacy Stories, www.mounthebroncemetery.com/legacy/stories/view/?id=86. Accessed 13 Nov. 2026.
“Operational Groups of the NKGB and a Reconstruction of the Soviet Security Apparatus in Axis Occupied Ukraine, 1943–44.” East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 2023, ewjus.com/index.php/ewjus/en/article/download/665/396/1707. Accessed 13 Nov. 2026.
“Sydir Kovpak.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydir_Kovpak. Accessed 13 Nov. 2026.
