Children in the Holocaust Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes'
Remembrance Day 2009 Shimon (Sjema) Greenhouse was born in 1932
in Krasna, Belarus, to a traditional Jewish Zionist family. His
older siblings, Henya and Mendel, were active in Zionist
federations and planned to emigrate to Mandatory Palestine. At
the end of 1941, after the Germans invaded the USSR, Shimon and
his family were interned in the Krasna ghetto. Shimon and his
mother managed to sneak out of the ghetto and reach a Polish
acquaintance who gave them food and convinced an SS officer not
to kill them. One day, after a German horse fell into a pit, the
Germans gathered Jews in the ghetto’s central square and shot
them one by one. Shimon and his father, Yekutiel, stood there,
their hands clasped. When Yekutiel was shot, he dragged his
young son down with him. Shimon remained beneath his dead
father, dazed and covered with blood, for a full day until
family members pulled him out. On Purim (March) 1943, the
Germans liquidated the ghetto and murdered