Murder story of Gnivan Jews in the Gnivan Forest

…In July 1941, as soon as the Germans entered our county, including the town of Gnivan, only Jews were gathered at the rural administration, locked into the building and forced to dance, [and] after the dancing to beat one another. Whoever refused to beat his friend, brother, or father was beaten with rifle butts by the Germans. Those who took part in the beatings [of the Jews] were: 1. K. Berezovskiy, who was chief of the gendarmerie and the son of an Orthodox priest; 2. Gorobets, whose family is living in the village of Vitava; 3. Shimanskiy, whose mother is living in the village of Vitava… On June 6, 1942 the town of Gnivan was surrounded, [and] all of the Jews, numbering 89, were assembled. In addition [Jews] were brought from other rural councils areas, i.e., from Sutiski, Mikhailovka, and Brailovka, a total of about 200 people. [All of them], including my mother Brana Fayman, were taken to a forest where there is now a construction site and shot. They were shot by Gestapo men assembled by the same Berezovskiy....

… During the first days of the occupation German gendarmes gathered a group of innocent Soviet civilians of the town of Gnivan - women, children, and elderly people - and took them to the local administration building, where they were beaten and afterwards taken to the forest. All of them were shot with submachine-guns and their bodies were buried not far from the town of Gnivan, on the territory of a construction site. In July 15 (16?), 1942, after surrounding the town of Gnivan, German gendarmes arrested about 200 innocent civilians of the town of Gnivan-elderly people, women and children, and then took all of them to the forest, to the area of a construction site, and shot all of them after abusing them. After the liberation of the town of Gnivan from the German troops, a forensic commission discovered 276 bodies of Soviet civilians shot by the German-Fascist gendarmerie in that forest….

… The innocent residents of the town of Gnivan Ivan Madyuk [and] Stepan Gulko, who witnessed examples of German-Fascist atrocities, relate: "We saw the Hitlerite occupiers shooting and murdering innocent Soviet civilians - women, children, and elderly people. The German-Fascist executions brought the doomed ones, guarded by gendarmes, to the site of the massacre, forced them to dig a grave, to strip naked and to enter the grave they had dug. As soon as a doomed person entered the grave, a German executioner shot [him] with a submachine-gun. The women and elderly were shot first, [while] the children were thrown in alive and, along with [those of their] mothers who had [not been killed but only] seriously wounded, were buried alive"…. The conclusions of the forensic expertise: … From June 30 to July 3, 1944 the commission carried out an examination of the bodies of the innocent Soviet residents who were annihilated by the Germans and of prisoners of war, [all of whom were] exhumed from the burial sites and it determined that: …276 people were buried in the town of Gnivan on the territory of construction site in a forest.… The mass shootings and burial alive of the children were carried out in the summer of 1942….