Murder story of Chausy Jews in the Dranukha Ravine

… In August 1941 ... [the Jews of Chausy] were herded into a ghetto in the Kozinka District [quarter], a suburb of Chausy. A few days later, these unfortunate people were forced to load their belongings onto carts. The Germans said that they were taking the Jews to a former Jewish collective farm (five kilometers from Chausy). It was all a lie. The Hitlerites robbed them, then took all the inhabitants of the ghetto out of town to the bank of the Pronya River. Women, children, the elderly – they stood them on the edge of a ditch and prepared machine guns. A local resident named Larisa Grigorevna Gmenko, an unwilling witness to this appalling mass killing, told me how it all happened. As the unfortunates were standing on the edge of the ditch, one of the doomed, a schoolteacher named Dora Ruvimovna Kagan, turned to the butchers and cried: “We’re defenseless and can’t fight you. But you can’t kill us all. Millions of Soviet people are left, they'll avenge us. Our innocent blood will be on their banners.” A burst of automatic fire cut her speech short. Then the Hitlerites opened fire with their heavy machine guns. The dead and wounded fell into the ditch. People who were entirely unharmed fell in as well. The Germans filled in the ditch any which way. They posted sentries. This was August 16, 1941. The moans of people buried alive could be heard from under the earth until late that night….

…Not far from the village [Dranukha] there was a shooting range for soldiers. The Chausy Jews were brought there and all of them were murdered. After the war the bodies were exhumed and reburied in the Chausy Jewish cemetery… My literature teacher from the Chausy school, a woman named Dora Ruvimovna Kagan, was also killed. She was very young: it was her first year in her job. She said that the Soviet people would avenge their deaths....