Berta Blume Jente Singer-Zinn, הי״ד

Berta married Emmanuel (Mendel) Zinn in Stanislawow, then part of the Austrian Empire, where their sons Willhem (Willi) and Leon were born. Sometime between 1918-1921 they settled in Vienna. By some unknown reasons Berta and Mendel separated and Berta remarried Friedl Singer, an "oberbaurat engineer" in Vienna. Sometime after the Anschluss of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, Mr. Singer and Berta's property was confiscated, and with other Viennese Jews were imprisoned by the Austrian Nazi Regime and sent to Dachau, a Nazi German concentration camp near Munich, in Bavaria, Southern Germany.

Records show that Berta was deported to a death camp outside Minsk in June 2, 1942. Berta was killed and cremated in the death camp.

After the first phase of the deportations from the »Reich« and the »Protectorate« to Minsk had come to an end in November 1941, between May and October 1942 a total of 16 trains with more than 15,000 people from Vienna, Königsberg, Theresienstadt and Cologne met in Minsk on. According to an order of the Chief of the Security Police and the SD Reinhard Heydrich, the victims of the deportation were murdered immediately after their arrival. A pine grove a few kilometers away from Gut Maly Trostinec, a former collective farm, was chosen as the execution site.

The course of the executions followed a consistent pattern, with usually 80 to 100 men deployed, including the Schutzpolizisten and Waffen-SS members. After the arrival of the trains at the freight yard in Minsk, which was mostly between 4:00 and 7:00 in the morning, a group of the KdS service provided for the unloading of the newly arrived people and their luggage. As a result, the arrivals were driven to a nearby assembly point where another group of the KdS office was busy taking away all the money and valuables from the Jews. At this meeting point, members of the service finally selected those few persons - per transport between 20 and 50 - who seemed fit for forced labor deployment at Maly Trostinec Estate. From a loading point located on the edge of the collection point, the deportees were finally driven by lorry to the mines located about 18 km away. This procedure remained unchanged for the first eight transports. From August 1942, the trains were passed over a branch track to the immediate vicinity of the property, where now unloading and selection took place.

The deportees of the first transports were shot dead at the pits. From about the beginning of June 1942, three "gas cars" were also used.

Of the total of about 9,000 Austrian Jews deported to Maly Trostinec, 17 survivors are known