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Murder Story of Bykhov Jews in Voronino
Murder Site
Voronino
Belorussia (USSR)
The rest of the Bykhov’s Jews – women, elderly men and children – were shot by the SS in November 1941. The murders were carried out near the village of Voronino, on the eastern side of the Dnieper, six kilometers east of Bykhov. The killing site was close to a wood-processing plant.
According to many accounts, the Jews from Bykhov who had survived the murder operation in September 1941 were taken to a “castle” – a two-storey, yellow building on a hilltop in the town – where they spent approximately one week without food or water. Those who survived were then brought by truck to the village of Voronino on the eastern side of the Dnieper and shot in an anti-tank ditch. Witnesses relate that dead bodies were scattered along the entire length of the path from Bykhov to the killing site – Jews who had attempted to flee this road of death. Before the murders, the victims were ordered to undress. The Nazis did not shoot the children under the age of ten; instead they broke their spinal cord and tossed them to the ditch. Many were buried alive.
The number of the Jews killed in November 1941 is believed to be about 2,000 people; this includes five Jews brought to the site from Novyi Bykhov and probably some other individual Jews from the vicinity. The Soviet Extraordinary Commission put the number of victims at 4,679; this number most likely includes non-Jews executed at the same spot by the Nazis.
In November-December 1943, the Nazis exhumed the bodies of the Jews killed near the village of Voronino and burned them.
Related Resources
ChGK Soviet Reports
Zakhar Timashchenko testified during examination by the Bykhov chapter of the NKVD:
... In November 1941, the German-Fascist rogues and their accomplices assembled all the Soviet citizens of Jewish nationality in the castle building. They held them there for several days in hunger, and later brought them in a column beyond the Dnieper River [to the site], where ditches had been dug. They then made them undress and told them to run along the rampart over the ditch; while they were running they shot them from a distance with automatic rifles. The scoundrels usually did not shoot the young children, but broke their spinal cord over their thighs and tossed them alive into the ditch and buried them.
While the German scoundrels were bringing the column of Soviet citizens over the Dnieper River, the entire path from the town of Bykhov to the shooting site was covered with dead bodies of those Soviet citizens who refused to go or tried to run away. [They were] shot on the spot. Later they collected these bodies and transported them to the site of the common shooting that is to say, beyond the Dnieper River, where, after six kilometers to the right of the road next to a wood-processing plant, the mass shooting of the Jews and the peaceful population was perpetrated in an anti-tank ditch ....
GARF, MOSCOW R-7021-88-35 copy YVA M.33 / JM/20012
Voronino
Murder Site
Belorussia (USSR)
53.521;30.246