Murder Story of Raków Jews in Pomorszczyzna

On July 26, 1941 the Germans entered Raków and within a few days the first victims had already fallen. As a result of the incitement that was carried out by our non-Jewish neighbors SS-men came and took 49 young men from their homes, took them to Pomorszczyna, 3 kilometers away, and killed them there.… At first people had no idea where they had disappeared to and only a number of days later did some non-Jews come and say that they had seen them dead and thrown into a pit. As soon as this became known in the town, three members of the hevra kaddisha [burial society], Yisrael Yitzhak the blacksmith, Hirshke the Younger, and Yaakov Shulsky, volunteered to bury them according to Jewish law. They went to the place where they had been killed, uncovered the pit, removed some of the victims without paying any attention to whether they were seen or not, loaded them onto carts, and took them to the cemetery for burial. But then, unfortunately, the Germans learned of this. So what did they [the Germans] do? They found the three and shot them in a place where no traces of them were found. Only much later was permission given to bury the rest of the 49 victims….