Murder Story of Uchastok 13 Jews at the Animal Burial Ground in the Uchastok 13 Area

On September 26, 1941 a mass killing of Jewish men, women, and children was organized. On September 26, early in the morning, on orders of the village elder Nikolai Sidorovich Serdyuk, the foreman Vasilii Ilyich Shvets drove out every one to work in the fields. They worked the fields until 10 a.m., [then] a passenger car with Germans arrived and all the Jews were ordered to go to the village. The foreman brought them to the village [where], they were forced into the club building and German guards were posted there. At that time foreman Vasilii Ilyich Shvets and the citizen Aleksei Beryuk went around the houses and collected the rest of the Jews – the elderly and the children. They [the Jews] were locked up in the club house until 3 p.m. At 3 p.m. the men and women were lined up and the elderly and the children were loaded onto a wagon guarded by Vasilii Ilyich Shvets, Aleksei Beryuk, Nikolai Sidorovich Serdyuk, Nikolai Ivanovich Krisin, and Polikarp Yemelyanovich Gram, and taken to an animal burial ground, to a pit. The wagon with children and elderly was driven by Mikhail Mikhailovich Artyukh. When they were been driven, they asked: "Where are we being driven to?" Vasilii Ilyich Shvets answered: "Enough talking, you are being taken to be killed." When the Germans shot them [the Jews], Vasilii Ilyich Shvets, Aleksei Beryuk, Nikolai Ivanovich Krisin, and Polikarp Yemelyanovich Gram threw them into the pit. [Afterwards] Mikhail Mikhailovich Artyukh covered the pit. After it was all over, they divided the clothes between them.

…On this date the Commission carried out an examination of the sites of atrocities committed by the German-Fascist occupiers. The examination established that before the war there was a 15-meter deep and 2.5-meter wide animal burial pit 1.5 kilometers south of the 13th Plot, near the forest. On September 26, 1941 this pit was used by the German-Fascist occupiers as a grave where they carried out the shooting of innocent Soviet residents. Certain surviving villagers informed us that the shooting was carried out by an SS murder squad that had arrived from Kalinindorf. The [following] local residents of the 13th Plot Vasilii Ilyich Shvets, Aleksei Beryuk, Nikolai Krisin, Mikhail Artyukh, Polikarp Gramm, [and] Nikolai Serdyuk participated in the shooting [and] together with the Germans, shot 119 Jews, men, women, and children…