Murder Story of Medzhibozh Jews in Rusanovtsy

… just before dawn we saw people arriving by car near the gate [of the ghetto]. We approached the gate to greet the murderers. They ordered us to stay where we were. Before dawn, it became darker, and luckily we were able to move away from the gate and return to our homes. The small children and the elderly were sound asleep. We didn’t wait for disaster to strike. I entered my house and cried: “Save your lives! Pogrom!” My legs gave way and I fell down. When I came to, we were in a shelter, head-to-head, 48 people in all. This was the hiding place we had prepared last year, for when we fell in the ghetto. Schutzmans [Schupo] opened the ghetto gates. Bandits seized the representative of the Jewish community, Moyshe Vayner, and forced him to go around the houses and round up the Jews of the ghetto. Moyshe went around and cried: “Jews say vidui (confession) and go to your slaughter!” Near Nochem Beker’s house, on Rakovaya Street, Moyshe fell down and died. The German murders and shutsmans rounded up people in the square. Sick people and small children were thrown into trucks. They hurled the children like rocks. My sister Rokhl was ill with typhoid. When everyone ran to hide, my father remained with his ill daughter. He didn’t want to leave her alone. During the thirteen days of her illness he hadn’t slept. By order of the bandits, the Jews carried sick people in sheets to the trucks, and father, bent and pale, ran off after the truck. On the square near the Yampolsky house and [former] Chaim Bereza wayside-inn, men, women, old people and children were gathered, in total about 1,000 people. They took away eighty young people for work, and forced the rest to kneel. They demanded that everyone hand over all their property: gold, silver, jewelry. The chief of the Medzhibozh police led the operation. After the robbery, they drove these people along the Rusanovtsy Road to the valley of the Bug River, where they killed them. It was Yom Kippur, a nice, autumnal day. After the destruction of the first group from the square, the rest [eighty people] were driven to the Roman-Catholic church. In the town, except for the places where the Jews had lived, life continued as usual. Fascist departments did their work. As usual, we could hear the hourly horns of the factories. It was like a dogcatcher catching dogs. A Jew was worth more than a dog. People went along the streets, but all the time new groups of unhappy Jews, with emaciated and frightened faces, seized from their shelters, were led by. A few individual Jews were driven to the Roman-Catholic church. From my sister Rokhl’s shelter, our hiding place, we often heard the murderers rushing into our house. They come to our house to search and pillage, but they couldn’t divide the loot. We heard the first fabric factory horn – it was 12 o’clock in the afternoon. At about 1 pm, when other murderers rushed into our house, a child in the shelter began to cry. The bandits heard the crying and started shooting at the walls, so we were forced out from our hiding place. All of us, 48 people, were driven along the street, where the Ashkenazer kloyz was situated. All the houses on that street were stripped bare, except for four: those of Chaim Ber Goldenberg, Moyshe Tsiner, Grinberg the watchmaker, and the [former] Liser guesthouse. A few days before the pogrom, the Ashkenazer kloyz was also looted, and pieces of parchment from a Sefer Torah were blown about over the ruined houses. We were all driven in by nightfall. I carried my sister’s orphaned son, who had lost his mother and grandfather only that morning. We were led into the Roman-Catholic church, and found ourselves in a large room. There we saw the clothes of people who had been shot that morning. Every one of us found the clothes of his relatives, and cried .... They caught the Jews one by one, and brought them to the church: if they brought a father of one family today, tomorrow they brought the mother, the day after the children. Whole families were also brought in together. In the church were 250 people, who sat on ground, crying. They had no hope of remaining alive. The old people prayed and said vidui, but the little children played and ran about ....