On October 23 (17 or 19, according to other sources), 1941 more than 1,000 Jews of Odessa were taken from the city prison to the munitions depot on Lustdorf Road in the poor neighborhood of Dmitrievka on the northeastern outskirts of the city. There some of the Jews were shot and others locked into empty warehouses, where they were burned alive. Among the victims were 700 Jewish refugees from Bessarabia and Bukovina. According to eyewitnesses, after the massacre Romanian soldiers searched the charred bodies for gold items. Soviet prisoners-of-war were forced to dig huge pits to bury the bodies.

Related Resources

Written Testimonies

ChGK Soviet Reports

From a letter from Mikhail Zaslavskiy to Yad Vashem, March 2009:

... On October 1941 at 5 a.m., to the accompaniment of the barking of dogs and with beatings and shooting, we were lined up in a column and led along Lustdorf Road toward the warehouses situated [there], "gunpowder storehouses," as they were called then. There the men and the teenagers were forced into the barracks (warehouses), while the women, children, and old people were separated from them and locked into other warehouses. Then all the warehouses were doused with fuel oil and set on fire. The machine-guns started their work and any one who had not been shut into one of the warehouses was shot by Romanian soldiers. I landed in a barrack with several POWs from the Red Navy. They broke the window opening and whoever could escaped through it. The bullets whistled after us. I witnessed the shooting of the civilians in the "gunpowder storehouses" area. There all my family perished....

YVA O.33 / 7784

Odessa

ammunition warehouse

Murder Site

Ukraine (USSR)

46.460;30.750

Videos

Boris Blushtein was born in 1930 in Odessa and lived there during the war years

USC SHOAH FOUNDATION, 49324 copy YVA O.93 / 49324

Dora Karant was born in 1930 in Odessa and lived there during the war years

USC SHOAH FOUNDATION, 2252 copy YVA O.93 / 2252