Murder story of Daugavpils Jews in the Railroad Public Garden in Daugavpils

Wednesday, July 9, 1941 Around ten o’clock I could hear people being ordered out from the cells of the first half of our hallway, and shortly afterward they were in our half. And then a German rushed into our cell, shouting, “Everyone out, take everything you have!” We were marched down to the basement. As we passed through the corridor in single file, we were ordered to empty our pockets and throw everything we had on the piled-up heaps of personal belongings of the people who had just passed before us. We walked between two long, knee-deep rows of wallets, documents, pictures, watches and trinkets worthless to anyone else ... I kept my handkerchief and threw away everything else, including my bar mitzvah watch. We were then marched out into the yard, formed into groups of twenty, and ordered to stand at the end of a long column of men. We were guarded by many Germans pointing their rifles at us. Every few minutes the people in front of us moved ahead, and then we did also ... ‘We are waiting in line to be executed,’ went through my mind again and again. I could not yet see it, but I knew there was an iron gate on the other side of the building, opening into the small Railroad Park where ditches were dug yesterday. The column of men – thousands of them – wound itself around the prison like a vast, coiling serpent, going first north to the corner, then west lengthwise, then back again south around the wall of the building. Eventually it had to enter the park through that gate. Since our group had been housed at the end of the third floor, we were toward the tail end of the serpent, with only a few hundred men behind us ... The only sounds we heard were the sharp reports of rifle shots and the occasional threatening bark of a guard. When we got to the corner and started to move west, I could see above us, on the embankment, German soldiers and their sweethearts looking down at the scene below as if in an amphitheater ... The people standing in line to be killed didn’t look very different from those waiting to buy bread. Their faces, their eyes, betrayed nothing of what was going through their minds ... One of our group muttered, “If we all jump a few of the guards, we might kill at least one before they kill us.” But another man retorted, “Just think what the Germans would do to the women and children in town.” It was noon by then and getting very hot. After standing in the sun for hours, we were all sweating profusely. I was glad I had not thrown away my handkerchief. At least I could wipe the sweat from my face and eyes. From the moment we turned the corner and started advancing southward, I could see the iron gate ahead. I gazed at it – the entrance to death ... the end ... I could see that, when the gate opened, a group of twenty passed through it, and the whole line moved ahead; then there would be rifle shots, clear and sharp, and a few minutes later, another group [was] swallowed up ... I was struck by how quiet everyone was. There was no crying or wailing or hysteria. Just stillness. Stillness, shots and groups moving ahead ... Finally there were only a few groups ahead of us. I could see now that some people were given shovels as they were about to pass through the gate of death. Tension increased even more. I was intensely aware that I would be dead in a matter of minutes ... Then at last the gate opened. A German and a Latvian came through, but instead of ordering us to enter, there were some discussions among our executioners ... We were ordered to turn around and march back into the prison, followed by the rest of the serpent’s tail. All told, a couple of hundred of us were still alive. I was not surprised when, at about five in the afternoon, we were ordered out, marched across the yard, and taken through the dreaded iron gate. So this was the killing ground. A fence surrounding the small park, and ahead of us ditches, freshly covered with yellowish ground. Obviously the pit graves. At one corner stood a cart full of still unburied bodies. We were divided into two groups. One group ... was ordered to shovel more earth over the filled ditches and then run over them, stamping and packing down the bodies with their feet; our group was given shovels and ordered to dig fresh pits nearby.