Murder Story of Kobelyaki Jews at the Kobelyaki Orphanage

Some time after January 21, 1942 my wife came home from the market and brought with her a Jewish girl named Riva Farfel. We knew that the Jews in our town had been shot on January 21, 1942 and that all the children of the Jews who had been shot were placed in one house…. Several days later, together with Roza Gershfeld, Riva came to us. Riva told us they had been given injections, after which they all soon fell asleep and several children died by the following morning. Among them was Roza’s younger brother, age 3…. [Riva said]: ‘…he told us he would vaccinate us against typhoid and that then we would be sent to our parents…’.Roza Gershfeld said that after the vaccination her younger brother began to scream and that he was dead by the following morning.… If I am not mistaken the children were vaccinated under the shoulder blade….” Question: “according to what the children told – when, on what day and in what month were the injections given?” Answer: “The injections were given around the end of January 1942.” Question: “During what period did the annihilation of all the Jewish children take place? When did you stop seeing the Jewish children in the town?” Answer: “The Jewish children stopped coming to us at the end of February or the beginning of March 1942.”

... A local resident states: “Riva Farfel said that … when everyone was taken away, and there were only children up to the age of 14 and old women left in the barrack, during the night, assistant police chief…, doctor… from the local clinic, and some policemen came to their building. When they entered the building or, to be more precise, the room where they all, the children and the old women, were, … they began to explain to them that they had come to vaccinate then against some disease caused by the crowded conditions in the room. After this announcement, someone began to object to the vaccination, but no one paid [unclear] attention. …they gave a shot to everyone without exception and told them to go to bed, then they all left. Farfel told me that after the injection was given… everyone, including her, went to bed.… After a while all the children and the old women began to scream, then everyone fell silent. When they woke up in the morning, they learned that two of the children and one old woman had died. They had been taken away somewhere. They [the rest] continued living in the same house.… After some time she came to me again…. After her second visit I never saw Riva Farfel anymore. Rumors spread among the local population, I don’t know where they came from, that these children and old women had been poisoned and then taken to the forest beyond the Vorskla river, where they were buried.” Another local resident said: “During the German occupation of Kobelyaki together with my child, I lived in the same town [Kobelyaki] in house number 9 on Korolenko Street.… I wanted to know what was going on so I opened the door of my apartment a little. I saw a doctor… enter the apartment where Jewish children and old people were. He was carrying a small briefcase. I entered my apartment and closed the door. I did not know what… he was doing there or how long he stayed in the apartment…. Early in the morning my mother told me that at the dawn she saw the bodies of Jewish children’s and old women being taken out of the house from which... he had come and put onto a cart. The [body of the] old lady Pisarskaya was among them…. The same day… the residents were ordered not to give the Jewish children buckets nor to let them take water from the well and, in general, not to give them anything and not to approach them or let them approach because they had been recently vaccinated and were contagious…. The next morning Gelshveld told me that they would come in the evening but the next day the door of the house where these children used to live was locked. On the third day my mother wondered where the children had gone and who had unlocked the door. Later she told me that some carts had arrived and that the furniture and other things were taken from there but that at that time neither the children nor the adults were there any longer.… I myself saw a doctor… enter the house where the Jewish children lived, after his visits the children died....