Murder Story of Pochep Jews at the Canning Factory in Pochep

... Then came March 17, 1942. Everyone in town noted that on that day, the prisoners were not led through the streets to work as usual. There was a rumor that some gendarmes had arrived from the neighboring town of Mglin, and the people expected something terrible to happen. Maria Rasuvalova went to the outskirts of the city [town] where she met an inmate of the camp [ghetto], a barber whom she knew from before. He was on his way to town, accompanied by a guard. The latter stopped at a well to drink some water, and Rasuvalova took the opportunity to exchange a few words with the barber. “Where are they taking you?” she asked. “To the governor’s wife, to give her a permanent,” he answered. “What is new in [the] camp?” “Today we did not go to work, and the Germans took away all our warm things.” “What are they up to?” The barber shrugged his shoulders: “I don’t know, but it looks to me as if they have decided to finish us off…” Here the guard hit him in the back with his rifle butt and the conversation was over. Maria Pavlovna [Rasuvalova] ran in the direction of the camp, and before getting within half a kilometer from it, a first shot, followed by three more, rang out from the direction of the camp. Rasuvalova halted 300 meters from the camp, from where she had good view of it. The woman continued her story: Four men, wearing nothing but their underwear, emerged from one of the barracks. The German who followed them took them beyond the barbed wire fence in the direction of an anti-tank ditch that had been dug by the prisoners in January. I saw one of the men turn around and say something to his comrades. The German ran up to him and kicked him with his boot. The man sank to his knees, then fell over, and the German kicked him once more. Then, when the man got up, he led the four of them to the edge of the ditch and made them stand with their backs to him. Then I noticed that the men had their arms tied behind their backs. The German made the four men kneel, took out his pistol, and shot them in the back of the neck. The bodies of the four fell into the ditch. The German fired a few more shots into the ditch, and returned to the barracks, reloading his pistol on the way. On the morning of March 1942 the Germans shot every single one of the Jewish inhabitants of Pochep whom they were holding in the camp. At that time there were 1,800 of them, men, women and children, who had survived the severe trials of camp life. The deep anti-tank ditch was full of corpses up to the very top. The Germans covered it with snow and left. When the snow thawed, with spades the German soldiers leveled covered the ditch to ground level. In the spring it became overgrown with grass and the people were forbidden to come near it under threat of being shot....